Mr. Nutz Live! Week 1
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for joining me once again for the weekly update. It’s great to have you here.
We have entered the second phase of the Mr. Nutz era - the live speedrun attempts. My goal is to set a new world record in this game, which would mean beating the established time of 29:25, set 6 years ago by French speedrunner Le Hulk. If you’ve been floating around Super Nintendo speedrunning circles for a while, the name Le Hulk will indicate to you that this will not be an easy task. He is among the most prolific SNES speedrunners ever.
During week 1 of our new live runs era, I had one streaming day - June 28th for a little shy of three hours. Three hours is what I shoot for in a live stream. My best time in my first stream was a 32:03, which stands as my PB (personal best) time as of this writing. You can watch the video over on my Twitch page if you’re interested.
As shown above, this is already good enough to put me in 2nd place. Mr. Nutz is a very niche game - even by my usual standards. It doesn’t have many speedrunners. Le Hulk took it upon himself to set a really impressive world record time, and other than him, no one has really taken a crack at it.
This is very prototypical of the sort of game I get sucked into speedrunning. It’s not very well known, so there’s room to show up on the scene and make a splash. You’re much more likely to be able to custom-develop a strategy for this game than say, Super Mario Bros 3. At the same time though, you’re not totally out in the wild west on your own. The fact that Le Hulk has the world record indicates that due diligence was done. A solid set of strategies has already been found, and there’s a high-quality time to push yourself to beat. It’s a nice middle ground.
the happiness of going live
One thing I immediately noticed after live streaming Mr. Nutz for the first time: WOW it really elevates my mood. It was so nice to finally showcase all of this hard work I have been doing. Le Hulk tuned in for the first hour of my stream which was especially nice because I know that he knows how much I have already practiced this based on watching a few runs. While most will watch a red squirrel zooming through levels seamlessly, a fellow speedrunner of your game knows a lot more - the things you can only know once you’ve picked up the controller and learned this run yourself. And, one thing that is probably true of every speedrun ever done: there’s always a lot more complexity than meets the eye.
slowly repairing my relationship with analytics
Having worked in ‘big data’ and ‘analytics’ my entire professional career, I can’t help but cringe at a lot of it now. Big data is cringe.
Cringe as it may be, here are my stats from the one live stream this past week. My stream continues to slowly grow in viewership as time goes:
I make a conscious effort to not optimize to these numbers at all. I try to always put performance on the leaderboards first. I could definitely pull larger audiences with more regular streaming, but the less-regular streaming is what enables the streams that do happen to be high quality. Nonetheless, it is nice to see these numbers tending to grow larger as time goes on, especially while I am playing a game with as little recognition as Mr. Nutz.
mr. nutz roadmap
I mentioned getting a 32:03 in my first live streaming session. So, how do we move from that, down toward the 29:25 world record?
I have a pretty concrete vision of how this will go. Every speedrun is different, and in Mr. Nutz, one of the crucial moments comes in the second-to-last level. The trick is called “Spear Skip”. Here is Hulk hitting the trick in his world record run:
Hulk sets up the trick by taking damage from the enemy holding the spear walking into him. The idea is to line up the position of Mr. Nutz so that if you hold right after taking damage, your timing will be such that a jump off the end of the cliff will cause you to land on the front of the spear. Then, you have to hold B so you get a little bit of a bounce off the spear, but quickly let go of B, since too long of a hold will cause you to bump your head on the snow above you. This sets you up for a second bounce on the spear, which lets you reach the safety of the snowy ground, having skipped about half of the level in the process.
If you look at Hulk’s timer, you can glean one of the most important things about this trick - it’s at the end of the run. The trick starts with the timer at 28 minutes, and the total time of this run is 29:25.
There are some tricks in speedrunning that no matter how much you practice, the trick will never be completely consistent. With games of this era running at 60 frames per second, there are some strategies that simply cannot be perfected. Spear skip is one of these tricks.
What does this mean? With the spear skip both being very difficult and very late in the run, it means that I am not going to actually go for it until I am in the late stages of the Mr. Nutz grind. I see this upcoming grind as having two sections:
Section 1: Grinding until I get a run that has zero deaths in it
Section 2: Going for a run that has zero deaths and the spear skip
So, right now we’re in Section 1. My 32:03 had three or four deaths in it. Cutting those deaths out will get me close to the 30 minute mark. Once there, I will start pushing for a run that has no deaths and also includes the spear skip.
While I have talked about wanting to beat the world record, in my head that isn’t really what determines when this project is over. By the time I have done enough practice that I am playing a game live, I usually have a feeling for what my final run will look like. A run that has no deaths and has the spear skip will certainly have a chance at being a new world record. It’ll depend on exactly how clean all the rest of the execution throughout the run is. But, it’s also possible that I end up in a scenario where I get a deathless run with spear skip that does not break the world record.
In the event this happens, whether I continue playing Mr. Nutz in search of a better run will depend on how I feel at that time. Based on my past speedrunning experiences, I have a hunch. By the time I get a run that has no deaths and has spear skip, my guess is that I will probably be ready to walk away from Mr. Nutz. I can envision being happy with something like a 29:32. It would be a very hard second place time to beat. I will not truly know until I have walked this path though, so we will see.
random updates
The most exciting random update is that I have some newly completed bead art. Check this out:
This is Kirby using his cook ability in the 1996 classic Kirby Super Star for the Super Nintendo. It came out great! I am not sure if I will be incorporating this into my stream background; I might just hang it in my kitchen.
The most fun meal we had last week was a buttermilk-brine roasted chicken. Served with potatoes, asparagus and a few polenta cakes. Yummmm.
On the reading front, I finished the second book in the Zoey Ashe trilogy of books last week. It is called Zoey Ashe Punches the Future in the Dick. Amazing title, less than amazing book. I gave the first book a 5.5 / 10, and this entry is pretty similar. I did think it was funnier than the first book.
The story follows a woman in her early 20’s who inherits her father’s vast criminal empire in a new billionaire-created city in Utah. Most of the plot of the first book came from this dichotomy - we learn about this strange new city and the mysterious workings of the criminal empire alongside Zoey, since she’s also new to all of this.
The second book takes place just a few months after the first, and is very much just a runback of the exact same idea. Zoey actually has a heart, unlike your average billionaire in this world (or in our world), so she tries to run her money making machine with some amount of kindness. But, it’s hard to change the cogs of your operation to make it compassionate when the world itself doesn’t reward that. Conflict, humor, etc.
Zoey Ashe Punches the Future in the Dick gets a 5.5 / 10. It was fun to read, but didn’t think any more highly of it than that. I do think I am going to just round out this experience and read the third and final book. My guess is it will be more of the same, but I am in a groove so why not.
That’s all for me this week! I hope to see you next time - good luck this week!
