Noah's Adventures and The Zoo Race

Noah's Adventures and The Zoo Race May God forgive this game, but we won't! "Yeah, I get what it is! A brand new casino!" "No, it's a mega sized liquor store!" *pause* "No, no, no. It's a coliseum, so we can practice our fighting!" Genre(s): Racing Adventure Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: Noah's Adventures: May 21, 2004 The Zoo Race:September 3, 2007 Developer(s): Cougar Interactive Publisher(s): Cougar Interactive Country: United States

The Zoo Race (also known as The Zoo Race: Noah's Adventures 2 on the title screen) and Noah's Adventures are a religious games developed and published by Cougar Interactive in 2004 and 2007. They are mostly based on Noah's Ark. While Noah's Adventures is a adventure game, The Zoo Race is a racing game.

The Zoo Race got a cult following after several reviewers such as Caddicarus, Brutalmoose, JonTron, CallMeKevin, Markiplier and others played the game on their channels, which bolstered the game's notoriety.

Plot

The Zoo Race

After the librarian makes fun of her friend, Reuben, for reading Noah's Ark, she starts to dream, and in that dream, her friends are turned into animals that are participates in the "Race Games of Celebration" after the world flooded.

Gameplay

The Zoo Race

The player can choose between 8 animals, and enter a race where they use the arrow keys to move while using to mouse to turn the camera, and in the courses, there are food to eat for a speed boost and obstacles the animals have to avoid, such as exploding barrels, rockets, barriers, glass walls etc.

Why They Intentionally Suck

The Zoo Race

1. Appalling graphics for a PC game released in 2007, the graphics look like a they Look a generation console PlayStation 2 or Nintendo GameCube more than a game released in 2007, with most of the textures looking poorly rendered and low-res, almost Wikipedia images levels of resolution, the amount of polygons on the models are absurdly high, and the human models look very bland and look like default models from the Unity Store, and compared to Noah's Adventures, there is almost no improvement whatsoever.
   • The visuals are also appalling and are bland, with the tress and other objects looking like low-res 2D images, the environments looking like barren wastelands, and the water in the stages looking like plain water from a shovelware Steam game.
2. Horrible controls that sometimes makes it hard to even run on a straight line, firstly, this game uses the arrow keys to control the character, which doesn't feel right compared to other games, which use WASD keys for movement, secondly, the left and right arrow keys turn your character, but the turning is so sensitive, you'll end up smacking yourself into the walls when trying to turn, and thirdly, you move the mouse to move the camera, standard stuff, but combined with the turning controls, you'll be constantly switching between the arrow keys and mouse, which is very disorienting.
3. Poor voice acting, with most of the actors not even trying with their roles and sounding more like robots or text to speech programs more than actual humans.
4. Awful MIDI music, with most of the soundtrack for this game sounding like off-key MIDI Christian rock music, and most of the instruments used for the songs feel like they have been poorly edited in a music editing program made in the late 90’s more than the late 2000s.
5. Hilariously awful animations, even for a game released in 2007.
   • The animals move like electronic toys more than actual animals running, and it gets worse by the time they speed boost, which looks hilariously awful, especially with the sound effect that plays when you’re swimming in the water, also, when they get hit, all they do is spas out for a few frames, then continue on like nothing just happened.
   • The humans in the opening cutscene have worse animation than the animals, with Reuben’s and Hannah’s animation looking so stilted, they feel like they have arthritis, and there are a few times where the models clip through each other, such as when Reuben's crossing his arms, his arms do the weirdest arm crossing ever, and the background characters in the same cutscenes do nothing other than walk back and forth as if they were trying to hold in a big pee.
   • The Creature Party mode is the most noticeable when it comes to bad animations, with most of the animals dancing in a strange way and sometimes randomly turning for a few times for no discernible reason, and Noah doesn’t move or do anything in the mode, all you get do with him is click them, then he spins, and goes back to being still and not move.
6. Heavy amounts of anachronism, despite this being said to take place after the flood, a lot of the obstacles like bomber planes, explosive barrels, rockets, and cannons are used in the races, but were never actually invented back in the day after the flood happened, which was a thousand years ago, also, some of the food the animals eat never actually existed in that time period, such as burgers, donuts, bananas and melons.
7. Horrendous sound effects, especially the glass shattering sound, which doesn’t like a glass smashing sound effect and instead sounds more like scraping a broken piece of glass on a metal surface, the other sound effects are also poor, like the generic animal sounds and the running sound effect, which sound like stock sound effects.
   • On top of that, the sound effects aren’t properly designed either, with most of them playing just whenever they feel like playing, with most of them playing one second after the thing that happened, like being shot out of a cannon.
8. The amount of glitches in this travesty is as much stars in the galaxy, with this game being so broken, that it feels like it was never play tested at all.
   • Sometimes, your character can jump it's way up to the top of the roof that closes off the out of bounds area, and your character can enter limbo if you discover this glitch.
   • There's an unintentionally funny glitch with the controls where if you hold down the right click in the mouse, you can constantly speedboost all the time, making the races much easier to win, and making the AI seem like a joke.
   • Sometimes, before starting the race, the sound effect for God saying "GO!" can come at a delayed time, such as around one to three seconds after the race has already started.
   • The animals can sometimes get snagged onto the top of the walls when going down, and sometimes get stuck on the floor when you are speed boosting, also when going down, you can look like you're being dragged down a Minecraft hill.
9. It can't decide what setting it wants to be. While the game takes place after the flood in Noah’s Ark, which is a story in the Bible. There are some instances where it feels like it's mocking the Bible, such as the uses of anachronism as mentioned above, but also portraying Reuben as a childish idiot to Hannah because he likes the Bible, and Hannah just mocks Reuben just because he reads the Bible.
10. For some reason, a lot of the courses have flags that say stuff like ‘God Cares’, ‘Praise’ and ‘Salmon’, with the flag designs looking so lazily put together to where it would make a MS Paint drawing made in a minute look like Mona Lisa.
11. While the game does quotes from the Bible, they sometimes use quotes that have zero relevance to what goes on the game, such as when the game uses a quote from John 3:16, but what goes on is during the ending ceremony for when one of the animals win a race.
12. For some reason, the game icon on the desktop is a blue circle with a yellow X on it, not only does it have nothing to with the main game, which is about zoo animals racing, but it also looks lazy and a random image one of the developers threw in.
    • But the reason why this game uses that icon is that the game uses the DirectX engine, used for platforms by Microsoft like Windows and Xbox, however, this doesn’t excuse the laziness to change the icon to something related to either the Bible or the animals racing.

Noah's Adventures

1. Atrocious graphics on par with Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and are more reminiscent of a Dreamcast game. To add salt on the wound, this game was released in 2004, the same year as games such as Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Pikmin 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Far Cry, all of which have been praised for their graphics.
   • Noah's three sons are the same model, with different clothes.
   • The horse's legs don't touch the ground, so the horse just floats.
   • Speaking of which, the horse is almost as big as the elephant, and Noah is larger than both of them.
   • The cutscenes are laughably bad. The opening is the worst offender, featuring birds that stay perfectly still in mid air, trees that clip through the ground, people that float, and Noah sometimes glitches and warps from the top to the bottom of a hill and vice versa.
2. Terrible MIDI soundtrack (what little is present, at least).
3. The game modes make no sense, even in the context of the game. The game modes are:
   • Hide and Seek: Find the animals inside the Ark.
   • Animal Adventure: Find a way to lure the animals in the Ark.
   • Creature Quiz: A standard quiz about animals.
4. The developer tried without success to hide loading screens, since at the beginning of the game a loading screen showing a picture of Noah on the Ark appears, but the game doesn't tell you that it's loading.
5. The controls are clustered around the keyboard. This turns the mere act of walking into a chore, as you need to hold down the left mouse button to move, while sprinting (which you'll use a lot, considering the game's horrible default movement speed) requires you to hold either the Up arrow, the Left Shift or the Right Shift keys.
6. The game has little to no animations, and what little there are end up being very cheap to boot. It's not hard to notice that the animals are missing several frames of animation, so they just begin walking, but they then suddenly transition into the new position.
7. What little educational value the game has is shot dead as early as the opening cutscene, which is a perfect show of the game's unintentional hilarity. The horrible writing, made even worse by the terrible dialogue (what little there is, at least), and the overall context make very hard for anyone to learn anything from this game.
   • The paintings you can find inside the Ark all have stereotypical Christian sentences written on them, which shows how bad the developer's understanding of Christianity and the Bible is.
   • The voice acting is Ride to Hell: Retribution levels of bad, and is just as unintentionally hilarious.
   • The requests you will receive from the animals in the Animal Adventure game make no sense: a panda asks you a cooking pot, a lion asking you a flower, and a sheep asking for a copy of the Bible.
   • In the Animal Adventure game, you can also find a football field with a ball and nets you can play with, though it serves no real purpose.
8. The audio is horribly mixed. In the main menu, whenever you highlight an option, an ear-bleeding, high-pitched voice will spell it out loud. In the "Sounds" section of the menu (a simple jukebox/sound test to listen the cries of different animals), the panda cry is horribly mixed and much louder than every other sound in the game, which can catch you off guard.
9. The same three horrible voices are recycled for the whole game, and it's not hard to notice that Noah shares his voice with God. Noah's friends also have the same voice as the announcers of the Creature Quiz.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. Both of those games can be considered as so bad it's good.

Trivia

• The Zoo Race started to get an ironic fanbase after popular YouTubers played the game back in the mid 2010s, mostly due to the absurdity of the game.

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