Beyond the Board: Interview with Rimato13

The fact that you can only progress through each world one shine at a time means that doing anything in any world is a very real commitment, but that is part of what makes the game fun; hiding information about your route from your opponent is quite skill intensive whereas tracking your opponent is often fairly easy.

Floha: How have bingos and/or the bingo community evolved with Super Mario Sunshine?
Rimato: The biggest evolution in the bingo meta was when a clip to get to Sirena (editor’s note: Sirena Beach, one of the worlds in the game) whenever was discovered. Before you’d need to complete episode 4 of Pinna (editor’s note: The fourth mission of the world Pinna Park) so it was quite a late game world but now you could access it right away. Until recently nobody in the community was focusing heavily on bingos but now many people focus on it more than regular speedruns.

Floha: How does the Super Mario Sunshine community support bingos?
Rimato: Until 2019 there wasn’t many SMS bingo tournaments going on. Icedwindowsil had organized 2v2 lockout tournaments in 2014 and 2018 and that was about it. After joining the 2018 one myself I was craving for more bingo so eventually I decided to organize some myself. Since the start of 2019 we’ve done a total of 4 major tourneys and are just starting a new one. The tournaments focus on lockout bingo since that fits SMS better.

Floha: You are also much involved with creating and updating the goals for the Super Mario Sunshine bingo. What is the process of creating goals for a game like Super Mario Sunshine?
Rimato: I focus on balancing the 1v1 lockout goal set. We got the base goals for it from the regular line bingo variant Iced had made. That already featured all the basic goal ideas one would have for SMS bingo so we’ve had to get a bit more creative when coming up with new goals. Most recently we’ve added the concept of OR goals where you can pick between completing 1 of 2 objectives for the goal. Our main focus is making lockout bingo as balanced as possible and now new goals are usually to serve a purpose for that like giving more incentive to visit a world.

Floha: What is the most unusual/creative bingo you have ever done for Super Mario Sunshine?
Rimato: We combined 2 ideas in draft bingo and lockout bingo. So the bingo starts by each player drafting 5 goals off the board. Then you start the game as you would in regular lockout and you fight for the remaining goals on the board while still having to claim the drafted goals. If you fail to click your drafted goals before a time limit is up you’ll lose them permanently.

Floha: You’ve mentioned earlier that bingos “back then” were rather uncompetitive and and this was more of your side thing. What has changed since then that it’s so different now?
Rimato: Back then people mainly did single line bingo which at top level becomes more of a race of speed than a race of brain since the cutscenes give you the time to consider each option and come up with the optimal one.

Lockout bingo fixes this issue as you have to adapt to your opponents decisions mid game instead of being done with routing after cutscenes.

Floha: Was there a specific event that triggered these changes or were you simply just slowly moving over to lockout? How did you get people to convince to do lockout instead of single line?
Rimato: The 2018 2v2 lockout tourney got a lot of new people into lockout me included. Past that it was mainly a matter of organizing tournaments since the interest already existed. The lockout format fits SMS so well that at this point most people already preferred the idea over a regular line bingo tourney. We decided to focus more on doing 1v1 tourneys instead of 2v2 since that makes setting up matches a lot easier while still offering equally if not more complex routing.

Floha: How have you yourself improved at bingos over time?
Rimato: The main way to improve is by doing practice matches. I’ve probably done more than double the amount of practice matches than anyone else in the SMS bingo community. Outside of practice matches I sometimes route cards alone in preparation to a match where I can specifically consider what my opponent would want to do.

Nowadays the biggest aspect I could improve in bingo would be my speed so funnily enough doing regular speedruns has become the optimal way to improve at bingo for me.

Floha: How have you evolved from since you started doing bingos, to now?
Rimato: While doing regular line bingo I got a pretty good grasp at what goals synergized well with each other. During the 2018 2v2 tourney I learned a lot of the lockout specific stuff like adapting to your opponent clicks and predicting what initial route the opponent will take. After that I had to adapt to 1v1 meta where you naturally have to pick up more goals along the way so you need to setup for more instead of rushing for a few specific goals.

Floha: What type of bingo is your favourite? Why?
Rimato: We’ve done a lot of variations of lockout. Currently my favorite is row control lockout. In row control you gain control of a row by getting the majority of goals in it. And the person who gets the majority of rows (3) wins. The interesting thing with this variant is that sometimes losing 1 goal can change your whole game plan since it might kill your chances at a full row. So not all goals are equal in value.

Floha: How well do you think people who do just normal speedruns would benefit from doing bingos? What could they learn and appreciate from that?
Rimato: In SMS bingo you have to come up with a lot of custom movement instead of doing pre planned movement like in normal speedruns. This might help with coming up with backups in normal speedruns.

Floha: Do you feel that bingos (at least for Super Mario Sunshine) are accessible for a wider audience?
Rimato: I think at start bingo might seem confusing but I sometimes see people in chat who don’t even run the game or do bingos but still seem to understand routing pretty decently. You do kind of need to know the game to understand what is going so that would probably be the biggest limiter for gathering a wide audience.

Floha: Given that you are one of the best bingo runners for Super Mario Sunshine, which has a very big community, you have also been called “the god of Sunshine bingo”. How do you personally deal with this “nickname”?
Rimato: I appreciate the nickname even if it adds a bit more pressure to perform well.

Floha: How does it feel different to race a bingo compared to a normal race?
Rimato: In a normal any% race of SMS the winner is often decided quite early so playing the race out waiting for your opponent to slip up is quite annoying. In lockout bingo you interact with your opponent so there’s a lot you can do to comeback from a deficit.

Floha: Are there any other bingo-related projects that you are working on?
Rimato: I’m always trying to come up with new variations of lockout but at this point it’s getting pretty difficult.

Floha: You’ve mentioned draft bingos. For those that are only familiar with the “regular” bingo versions, like single/multiple lines, lockout etc. Would you maybe like to explain what draft bingo is?
Rimato: In draft bingo you take turns picking goals off the board for you to complete. Once the draft phase is done and both players have their goals picked you simply race to see who can complete their goals faster. You can tune the rules for your liking by picking either 1 or 2 goals every turn. Some also like having both players do the 25th goal while others leave it undone. A fun addition to draft I thought of is having a phase where you ban 5 goals in the middle of the draft. This allows balancing the strength of 1st and 2nd pick in draft by giving an extra ban to the one that’s at a disadvantage as well as gets rid of the awkward 25th goal.