I'm the nail master

Years ago, Onfy expressed interest in seeing what happens when you complete Putt-Putt 5's infamously disliked nail minigame. Dataminers from TCRF had uncovered two voice clips congratulating the player on beating the game, but couldn't confirm if they were actually used, since nobody there was insane enough to try that.

I already knew back then that I was the kind of madwoman who had enough patience and dedication to potentially solve this mystery, so I said I'd give it a shot the next time I played the game. This has finally happened, now that I'm replaying the game in preparation for my review series. Unfortunately, I don't know if Onfy herself will ever see this, since she seems to have abandoned the forum. But I'll post my findings here anyway, just in case anyone else shows up here who cares.

So here's a video of me beating the game's last levels. (No, I have never uploaded something to YouTube and I have no intention of starting now. Anyone else is free to reupload it there if they want, as long as they give me credit.) I can't say I blame anyone for giving up on this, as the game is not only really boring and repetitive, but also becomes insanely hard towards the end. I managed to make it all the way to Level 91 with conventional strategies, but at that point it became clear that I was no longer physically capable of beating the levels quickly enough, even with the best conceivable RNG. So I had to resort to some rather desperate trickery to keep going, as seen in my video. Even then, I was cutting it close, as you can see by the fact that I still lost multiple times. I find it doubtful that even the Brian who created this game managed to beat it legitimately, as that seems to require inhuman speed.

At any rate, the two voice clips do indeed play once you beat Level 98. And they'll play again whenever you beat Level 99, which will endlessly repeat itself at this point.

But that's not all. The second voice clip mentions something about a reward. And there is indeed one. Every time you hear these voice clips, you receive 25 coins. There's no animations or extra dialog explaining how Putt-Putt got them. They just magically appear in his inventory. As such, it's actually possible to beat the game without recycling bottles or delivering groceries. But only insane people would ever pursue this strategy. As evidence, I uploaded a save file with Level 99 accessible. In order to insert it, first have the game create a save file, then replace it with this one, while changing its extension accordingly. Note that it's from the original 1998 Windows release of the game, so I wouldn't expect it to work with anything else. Also, I used the actual SPUTM interpreter. ScummVM shouldn't be able to read it because it uses its own save format, to my knowledge.

Hopefully, we can now finally put this terrible minigame to rest once and for all.

Edit: It seems I didn't check the game's TCRF page clearly enough. Someone already confirmed the usage of these two voice clips months ago. They make no mention of the 25 coins though. Plus, they didn't provide video footage. So there was still a point to the suffering I went through.

Wish I could find a way to disable adfly. Thanks for doing this! You are in fact the nail master.