is a collection of three platformer games in one. Each game is (very loosely) based on a story from the Bible. Gameplay itself has very little biblical connection.
While watching recorded videos from SGDQ 2014, I saw Brossentia do a run of the David & Goliath portion of this game. I remembered playing through this as a child and finding it quite difficult at the time. Playing through it again in preparation for this TAS I realized that the game's difficulty lied in its control system.
Movement and actions are delayed multiple frames after button presses, so controller inputs must be performed further in advance of when it would seem to be intuitively necessary.
During Brossentia's run someone in the audience jokingly challenged him to run the Noah's Ark story. He laughed it off exclaiming
Never Noah's Ark!
That was challenge enough for me.
It did not take me long to realize that I'm probably not cut out for unassisted speedrunning of video games; my skills just aren't up to par. However the idea of tool-assistance intrigued me and I thought this game would be an ideal candidate. Seeing that there were no published videos of this I was ready to attack.
Prior submissions have only covered the Baby Moses story and have been rejected essentially due to the
Run Right for Justice gameplay of this segment; more on this later.
It is my hope that this submission will not only be more entertaining, but also be more apt to be published considering it contains all three stories in succession.
Samsara 4:20 -
"And they peered upon the Bible Game, and so it shall be judged."
Samsara 3:16 -
"Lo, for the Bible Game had too much information within its name and branch, and thus the Judge brought down the hammer."
Samsara 3:17 -
"And the Judge looked upon their words. And it was middling at best. And probably offensive in some way. The Judge wept."
Samsara: Yea, for I dropped this gimmick because I ran out of material before I'd even started it. Also, that gimmick would be ridiculously hard to keep up for the amount of information I have to dole out to explain my decision.
There are three issues with this submission, and I'll start with the most obvious one: There's a bit of issue with optimization, with Baby Moses being something like 2-3 seconds slower than an optimized version. Personally... It's three seconds over a movie of 1095 seconds, so I wouldn't consider the entire movie suboptimal by any stretch, especially since some of that time lost is a minor speed/entertainment tradeoff. "But Samsara," you ask, and immediately I regret ever asking to become a Judge, "This is a Vault movie, so shouldn't it be rejected for using speed/entertainment tradeoffs?" It's maybe a second or two, it's essentially meaningless in regards to rejection over it being done.
Overall, I think the level of optimization in the movie is just fine. There was a lot of thought put into the weird movement physics, routing, glitch/exploit usage, and for a first publication, that counts more for me than being a few frames late in reaching the end of the level.
That leaves two other weird issues, the first of which being: Is it worth having this run as a "100%" run alongside, potentially, 3 separate runs of the individual stories? If it's either this or the 3 individual runs, which option would fit in better? My gut's leaning toward all stories in one file, personally. It's not a long movie by any stretch, even with the bulk of it being taken up by Big Noah's Animal Sho-ah, and having the single movie also makes more sense for Vault purposes, giving 1 movie more overall meaning than 3 individual movies.
That just leaves the last issue: What do we do with the
Genesis run of Baby Moses? Well... I'm not entirely sure, myself. It feels a little strange to obsolete it, considering it's a purely Vault-oriented optimized run whereas this is a more entertainment-based (and slightly slower) run, but this run does have more overall content with the other stories included. Huh. Leave it to me to pick up a Bible game submission and have it turn into
two weird publication precedents.
I think overall it's safe to leave the Genesis run published for now. If an improvement to this run comes along, whether it be on the Nintendo Exodus System or the Sega Deuteronomy, then we can discuss the obsoletion of the standalone Baby Moses run further.
I admittedly feel a bit iffy about this decision, but I'm accepting it to Vault.
Samsara: Further thoughts explained in
this post in the submission thread.
feos: Pub.