The bulk of the optimization in this run seems to be entirely based on a trick that exploits how god-awful the movement physics are. Figuring this out required a fair amount of outside-the-box thinking: The trick is rapid-firing left or right in order to reach max speed/turn around faster, which would in fact save a substantial amount of time over the course of the run. A full minute seems high to me, but I'm sure I'll be proven wrong about that whenever someone actually feels like improving this.
It sounds like something that could be easily stumbled upon, but really, it seems like multiple people missed it, starting with
Rolanmen1's old WIP,
continuing into the site-only Speed TAS Competition where only TASeditor picked up on it out of a crowd of entrants that included Tompa and MESHUGGAH, and up to today where DrD2k9 completed a full run without figuring it out and I completely missed it as well while knowing full well there was a improvement based on the movement physics. You could say that the speed TASing aspect was what caused them to miss it... But, well, it's a
very simplistic game and the 2 hour time limit was pretty generous in terms of giving time to research and TAS. One person still figured it out, yes, but that leaves 7 others in that competition alone.
As for there being a known faster record: To further expand on that, it's one game out of three. If it were being submitted by itself, that would warrant an easy rejection, but this is a different category altogether, where almost 90% of the run is two other games that are as fast as I can find. Sure, they can be improved, but the method of doing so is overly complicated and optimizing it would probably take weeks longer than this run took to make. "Rapid-fire L or R" sounds easy, yeah, but from my experimenting with it, it's horribly inconsistent, and it needs to be applied in a huge number of places, even at times when you're unable to move.
"But it would've been found with the proper research!" The research... That exists... In the
Sites category of the forums, from a thread that hasn't had a post in 2 years with a title that doesn't imply anything about the actual game itself. Even if you wrangled the forum's Search function into working, which I wouldn't expect someone brand new to the site to be able to do, you likely still wouldn't figure out that the Speed TAS thread contains the only real information on Bible Adventures TASing. I'm pretty sure the only reason anyone even remembered that thread existed in the first place was because it was brought up by Spikestuff, who participated in the competition.
Take this like my first Umihara Kawase Shun run, where there were indeed known improvements and faster times out there that were somewhere I and others had no logical way of finding. Even the person who brought it up said it was a OneDrive link that was only shared on Twitter to a small group of people primarily consisting of non-TASVideos members. Yes, this is different in that the information is on the site itself, but there's no logical way of knowing that the information is in fact there without doing some counter-intuitive digging.
So, honestly? I think I'll let my decision stand.
My low-effort test attempt:
I'll keep testing, but this doesn't bode well for the rest of the submission. Even just watching the encode, I can see numerous moments where things could be done a few frames faster.
