Mr. Nutz Amiga Neon 1994

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Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad

Neon of Germany released Mr. Nutz Hoppin' Mad exclusively for the Amiga in 1994. Mr. Nutz is a generic platform game influenced by Nintendo's Super Mario World of 1990 on SNES and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog of 1991 on Genesis.

One problem with Mr. Nutz is that the foreground action is obscured by the parallax backgrounds because the color palette of the foreground and background are too similar.

In 1994 Mr. Nutz should have been coded for A1200 AGA not A500 ECS/OCS. Consider:

• A1200: 14 MHz 68020 CPU, 256-color graphics and 2 megs of ChipRAM.
• A500: 7 MHz 68000 CPU, 32-color graphics and 1 meg of ChipRAM.

In addition, Mr. Nutz employs a scrolling top-down overland map that was "inspired" by some of the Mario games. However, the map is too small, slows down the action and is annoying to navigate and interact with.

In terms of scrolling, sprite-shifting and sprite-scaling, Mr. Nutz is a technically advanced Amiga game. Mr. Nutz supplies a Sonic-like sense of speed and momentum, but the color palette and overland map ruin the game completely. Mr. Nutz tried to do too much instead of just focusing on being the perfect platform game. In addition, the art direction is soulless. As such, Mr. Nutz is just another mid-90s Amiga disappointment, instead of the Sonic/Mario-beater it set out to be -- and could have been.

Mr. Nutz Features

• 32-color 320x256 resolution (256 v-pixels)
• 320x176 scrolling active drawspace (platforming)
• 144x98 map active drawspace (overland "exploration")
• Explore the four continents of Peanut Planet
• 5x bases per continent
• 40x total levels (time-limited)
• 5,300 screens of graphics & Four-layer parallax scrolling
• Sprite-scaled 3rd-person warp zones
• Overland interactables: chests, rafts, rocks, transporters
• Collectables: 1-up, heart, red/green shield, bomb, star, hourglass (+/-), wings (+/-) 
• Joystick or joypad control
• Tailorable lives (1-3)
• Sound menu
• In-game language selection: English, German & French 

Mr. Nutz was programmed by Peter Thierolf, Jan Jöckel and Michael Büttner. Mr. Nutz was drawn by Antony Christoulakis and composed by Rudolf Stember.

Mr. Nutz requires an A500 with 1 meg of RAM and was distributed by Ocean on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive.

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