About the Game

Spiritual Warfare is a Christian game, although any good Christian will tell you about how Christianity is not about duality, as this game seems to imply. Spiritual Warfare is part of the Wisdom Tree series of games, which were basically a bunch of subpar NES games released in fancy black cartridges designed, I can only assume, to further the faith of children. Spiritual Warfare is by far superior to all of them.
In this game, you play the role of a strapping young lad striving to beat up a demon in order to "[free] the city from his evil influence!" (taken from the credit, no plural). You basically wander around the map, trying to find various items like a Jawbone (i.e. Boomerang), a cool Sword of the Spirit (i.e. Magical Sword), a breastplate (i.e. Blue Ring), a belt (i.e. Power Bracelet), a raft (i.e. Raft), and other items which help you on your quest, and come straight from The Legend of Zelda. I skip most of them, only getting the Belt of Truth (which allows me to leave the Park), the Breastplate of Righteousness (which allows me to enter the Airport), the Boots of Something Forgettable (which allow me to enter the Prison), and the Grapes of Love, which I use to free "the city from his evil influence!"
Despite its flaws and/or blatant plagiarism, in no other game can you kill people with fruit (or at least send them to eternal salvation). Well, Spanky's Quest for the SNES comes close, which allows to kill stuff with basketballs.
  • Movie plays back on FCEUX 2.2.0.
  • Originally recorded with FCEU 0.98.16
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Ignores semi-important goals in the game
  • Uses a restart sequence

Notable Stuff

Anytime you see me stop or walk too far, I'm trying to manipulate luck. Probably 1100 of the 1300 rerecords were due to me trying to manipulate luck. The rest were me shooting misguided pears and/or grapes.
The Helmet of Salvation (which I don't retrieve) allows you to suffer through explosions without getting hurt. Since there are several places where I have to suffer through an explosion, I needed a way to survive with only three hearts. At first I didn't think it was possible, and thought I would be forced to go out of my way to retrieve some heart containers, which would be quite lame. However, since the game gives you a way to restore your health (through prayer), I discovered that praying would be much faster than obtaining three more heart containers. This meant that I would have to kill more enemies to get "Spirit Points" (which didn't turn out to be as big a problem as I thought).
The explosion in question, right before I enter the Demon's Lair, is the place where I thought I might need more heart containers. Since there are five TNT bundles surrounding me, that means that five hits would register (five full hearts taken off). Since I only had three hearts, I needed a way around that. I found that if you shoot the TNT bundle to the right and immediately move to the right, it is possible to only be hit by three of the TNT bundles. Still not very acceptable considering I only have three hearts. However, a well timed (only a one frame window) prayer meeting solved everything, and I was able to make it to the Demon's Lair without getting any extra heart containers.
That's pretty much the only notable thing about the run; everything else worth saying can be learned from watching.
  • 337 savestates were harmed in the making of this movie.
Enjoy.

Truncated: Up for judging shortly.

Truncated: It seems this game does have its fans. It's well played and shorter than what you would expect if you know the game.
Still, I think we have enough good and outstanding movies to warrant excluding the mediocre ones. It's the game that kills this one, the stupid concept and the everlooping music in particular.
While I was torn, I have discussed it with another judge and the verdict is reject.

adelikat: Accepting for publication to the Vault

Brandon: Publication underway.

adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3599)
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Posts: 4739
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JXQ wrote:
tmont wrote:
I did a run of this game because I thought it would be fun to optimize. Also, I like making maps. I didn't even realize it was on the list of ideas until a couple weeks ago. It wouldn't particularly break my heart if the run got rejected, because I already got my satisfaction out of it. I just thought I'd give it a chance to see if it was worth publishing.
More people like you!
ditto :)
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Joined: 8/13/2005
Posts: 356
Location: Canada
I can't believe I watched the whole thing with the music playing. If it weren't for the music, this wouldn't have been that bad to watch. It looks fairly optimized, I liked how you weaseled your way through with three hearts. I vote yes on condition that viewers watch this with sound disabled and play tunes of their choice.
Player (51)
Joined: 10/6/2005
Posts: 138
Location: Oregon
REJECT'D wrote:
the stupid concept and the everlooping music in particular.
I knew the music would come back to bite me. Seriously, who programs a game that has one tune playing the entire time? I'll avoid the obvious religious pejorative. Also, I think the game is pretty clever, just poorly executed. Kind of like Kid Icarus: it had a lot of potential to be awesome, but it just seems unfinished, like the programmers gave up. In the case of Spiritual Warfare, the main problem is that it's just a lot of wandering around. The enemies are trivial until the very last portion of the game, and the bosses are only difficult when you can't figure out how the hell you're supposed to hurt them. That said, I admit I agree with the rejection slip. With no trace of modesty, I'm pretty proud of the clever strategy I came up with to finish the game in a fairly astounding time. Despite that, it's still just a bunch of wandering around. I was hoping that enough people had experienced the game when they were 11 years old to make it interesting enough to be worth publishing. Fun trivia: this is the only game in the Wisdom Tree series that I don't own for NES. That's part of the reason I wanted to make this. Also, someone should probably remove this from the List of Ideas.
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (969)
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>Also, someone should probably remove this from the List of Ideas. Fixed. I also cleaned up some other suggestions which have either been published or rejected.
TASVideosGrue
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om, nom, nom... blech, stale!
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2193] NES Spiritual Warfare by tmont in 16:47.54