The Desperate Tim Rogers Tries to Stay Afloat on Kotaku

You know, most intelligent people probably guess that with Tim's columns getting way less viewcounts than Lisa Foiles's, or hell, even Leigh Alexander's, we were going to see some pandering.  The column last month about MMOs might have been pandering, I'm not sure.  Tim doesn't really seem to know how to pander, considering that the central MMO of that column was Final Fantasy XI, an game that I think even All Points Bulletin players felt sorry for even as their experience imploded in hilarious mismanagement.  I didn't read the entire column, and what I don't read I don't really remember, except that Tim had a Strange Opinion about the MMO experience and tried to relate it to something else.  I'm sure Tim was physically pained writing a column about it all the same, considering his hatred of the masses and slow-paced loot grinding games in general (his review of Diablo II on one of his many unimportant sites was apoplectic at the whole slot-machine aspect of the game).

But whatever.  Tim had a month to recover, watch as Lisa Foiles' newest column (which was basically her stealing that women's heroine stereotype flowchart from Jezebel (which they stole from another blog, to be fair) and going "video game heroines are strange!") rise to EIGHTY THOUSAND HITS, and plan a new idea!  Then as he actually admits in so many words he realized his ideas are horrible (in his own words, his column this month wasn't psychedelic enough, which implies that the limits of Tim's mindscaping has been pressing his hands against his eyes real hard) and no one really pays attention to his columns except to say "oh so long."  A real change was needed  So this time, he was going to go Web 2.0, making mental air quotes while preparing his date his some japanese girl who mentioned liking Lucky Star.

Yes, he's taking questions from the audience using Twitter about video games.  No, his answers are not limited to 160 characters.

The first thing I noticed in the column was a pretty sad attempt to validate himself as an important gaming person:

• He mentions that he has 1600 twitter followers.  To this, I sort of want to pat Tim on the head, as I'm pretty sure that if I opened up a twitter account that was me posting tridaily hollywood actresses I wanted to play metal slug with, I could get 2000 followers within a month with a minimum of whoring.
• His first question is a wackily pedantic question from Bryan Lee O'Malley.  Who is that?  It's the guy who wrote the pretty good Volumes 1-3 of "Scott Pilgrim," then went on to write the absolutely miserable Volumes 4-6 of "Scott Pilgrim."  In Tim's defense, he claims that this was the first question he got FOR REAL, though whether he's lying or not, the only sure truth is that I feel alot better about not actually buying any of the Scott Pilgrim books.
• The whole "oh I'm such a bad writer in an ironic way" I talked about in blogs past is out in full force.

To be fair to Tim, none of the questions asked him are any good. I literally can't tell whether a good number of them are the most sycophantic queries ever, or pure sarcasm (not that this would have any effect on Tim's answer).  POUR EXAMPLUH:

 

 

Note that half of the questions and answers significantly involved the whole sticky friction thing.  That column was Tim's big break, and I'm not sure if Tim really understands that the whole of his Kotaku fanbase seems to be around the DISCOVERED CONCEPT that sometimes a game slows down in order to  heighten enjoyment.  It's something akin a writer who attempts to create great works of genius, and is primarily known by 90% of his fans for being the originator of a fairly clever fart limerick. 

Of course, it's not like Tim is pounding out works of genius.  Here's him talking about Vanquish, a 4-hour third person shooter that was noticed for like five minutes because some guys who worked on Resident Evil 4 or 5 left Capcom to work on it:

I'm talking about American football. Nearly no one outside of America knows what American football is, or, at least, they don't know enough about it to be able to spot its nuances in other works of media.

Gears of War is simultaneously a game of inches and a game about linebacker-sized dudes Going For It on fourth and sixty-five. The "stop and pop" cover-based game mechanic stresses defense over offense. The medium-term goal of Gears of War is to clear every enemy in the area. The short-term goal is usually to clear every enemy you can clear from your current position. Your current position is either the only place you can be without dying at this very moment or a place you've already been. Gears of War is about "painting" the battlefield with safety. You stop, you pop, you earn a better grasp on more strategic position, you move forward.

Vanquish, on the other hand, is more soccer than football. It's almost as though the game designers understood how integral football was to Gears of War, and decided that, in order to make a "Japanese" — or, well, "Not Completely American" — third person shooter, they could possibly start with soccer.

Soccer, like wearing skinny jeans, is a sport that is more or less about ball placement. A skilled player can put the ball anywhere on the field, from any time, from any position.

Well, the one place a typical player can't put the ball simply through a little application of will is, of course, the inside of the goal. That's the tricky part. Scoring a goal in soccer is a momentous occasion. In American football, you can score a goal by soldiering forward and not messing up. In soccer, you're going to end up face-to-face with a goalkeeper — essentially, a rival with a terrain advantage. You couldn't make it harder to score a goal in soccer if you put the goal on top of a hill.

 So, ball placement: soccer is about choosing where to put the ball at any given moment. When choosing where to put the ball, the player has to consider the position of his other teammates and their formation, and his rivals and their position. Soccer is about positioning the ball with a little preemptive thought about the path each play will take. As your rivals out-think and out-maneuver you, play after play and plan after plan fall abandoned by the wayside, scrapped in favor of new tactics.

Vanquish is like soccer in that the player controls both the athlete and the ball. At any time during any given firefight, the player can use a dash ability to sprint, near-invincible, to and from any position on the battlefield from or to any other position.

In short, from anywhere on the battlefield, you can put the hero anywhere.

I hope you didn't read that.  Here's what we can glean from this passage:

• Tim knows literally less about football than Klosterman.

• He is sort of right about Gears of Wars being a series of "plays," but holy shit I don't know where he's coming from with Vanquish.  I've only watched the game, but the main feature is an easy to use propulsion system on your hero's man-sized mecha suit that allows him to jet around the battlefield.  It's a neat little idea, but that has nothing to do with soccer, which is just as strictly play and team-based as American football.  The notion of a superstar being able to control a chaotic, closed-in field is closer to lacrosse or hockey, but of course, those aren't cool sports, right?

• Mario is like bowling because friction friction friction. 

Here's some other snippets, bolded for the "come on what man don't do this" parts:

It most certainly could be. In fact, the creator has even called it that in so many words.
When I talked to Gran Turismo director Kazunori Yamauchi in 2009, he said that the game is, in fact, a role-playing game. The player obtains licenses, earning access to new circuits and cars. He earns money by winning races. He spends money to purchase cars.

Cars are like weapons — they can only accentuate the player's innate abilities. Unlike in a standard role-playing game, where the character gains power and ability by simply playing ceaselessly and persistently, in Gran Turismo the up-leveling happens inside the player's brain as he unlocks new brain-places and connects gaps between previously existing patches of wisdom.

Surmounting a challenge in Gran Turismo requires knowledge of yourself, the challenge, and the tool — the car — you use. You have to learn each car's personality in about as much detail as you get familiar with the life and back-story of a character in an RPG.

In 2004, Yamauchi told me that, during his years as a young gamer, he much preferred Choplifter to Super Mario Bros., because he could imagine it was him inside that helicopter.  Maybe Choplifter is a role-playing game, too.

"Role-playing game" is a loose term. It doesn't just mean dungeons, dragons, menus, and monsters. It can mean a game where you have to invest a little bit of your own brain in the name of pretending what's happening in the world of the game is "real" or "important".

Sports games and role-playing games have more in common than you might ever think at first. Shingo "Sea Bass" Takatsuka, director of the Winning Eleven soccer series, told me that he considers the Winning Eleven series "role-playing games". He says that, outside basic knowledge of game controls, attack plans, and the basic rules of soccer, the key to playing the game well is understanding the personalities and playing styles of individual players. Players' abilities are represented by a few convenient integers, though outside of that, players with similar ability ratings might be capable of doing completely different things. Mastering the game requires understanding who can do what, and how.

I feel like I've hinted at this in a previous column: I want to make a game that makes someone feel the way they feel when they look at their chat client's buddy list and see a little pencil icon by your name. They sit there, wondering what you're about to say. And then, maybe, you never say anything. Maybe you went to bed after typing a letter — maybe "a", maybe "k" — into a chat message and then not pressing enter. That's cooler than "poking" someone on Facebook. 

(I WISH I COULD MAKE THIS EVEN BOLDER)

There are others questions with face-slapping moments, but you've got the idea at this point, right?   I've tried to exhaustively summarize Tim Roger's columns before, but it's just impossible.  Not because I'm mad or anything, but they're just so underwhelming to read, despite angry nerd views to the contrary.  It's like going to a restaurant that some friends worship, and others go on chowhound or eopinions to write nasty hateful reviews about and gleefully show them to you, and you just get a watery soup and a waiter out of a Tom Petty song.

I don't want to bring up icypalm (ho ho) again after all of his naifs pumped up my blog statistics, but while I hate his columns...actually, that's the thing.  His writing is pretty terrible, but at least there's a sort of adventurous, gleeful misanthropic vibe to them that makes it fun to hate them.  Tim Roger's writing, especially his stuff on Kotaku, is impenetrable dreck dumbed down for a site audience that really wants to know more about two feet tall ceramic sculptures of Tifa.  Now he's clearly given up any sort of rock-star gaming journalist aspect and pandering for subscribers on fucking Twitter.  What's next, a blog on 1up so he can compete with Jeremy Parish on who is the bigger early-2000s gamer has-been?  I can't care about this shit anymore, and neither should you (at least until he starts getting catty towards women or something).

NEXT TIME.   TALKING ABOUT PERSONA 2: INNOCENT SIN

BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART III: what

So, as you may last remember, I needed a boat for some ill-defined reason, but the DARK DRAGONS have blown it up, so I need to find their secret base with their own boat.  Meaning I have to backtrack yet fucking again to find the secret boat of the DARK DRAGONS. 

BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART II (THE STORY SO FAR)

I regret that I didn't take many pictures.

For reasons I don't know, when I started playing, the input for capturing a screen was the same for the fast forward button.  I didn't realize this until ten minutes into the game, whereupon I removed the capture button and found one hundred and thirty .pngs in my gba folder.  That's really the harshest thing I could say about this game, so if you really want to know more, follow me into a magical, ill-defined world.

BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART I

I am doing this review as a public service.  I want you to read this, and from that, realize you should never play this game regardless of any misguided retro charm, or bizarre desire to START FROM THE BEGINNING of some mediocre rpg series.

A few days ago, I started playing Breath of Fire for the Game Boy Advance.  Originally it was for the Super Nintendo.  This was its boxart, and WORRYING SIGN NUMBER ONE:

I decided not to play the snes version, not because of CHUNK MCHUGEPALM and his rapeface, but that doing some research revealed that the GBA version literally doubled the amount of EXP and gold gained per defeated enemy.  This was WORRYING SIGN NUMBER 2, as any game that so spectacularly botched its required grinding in the original iteration probably has other issues.

Oh boy. 

It's hard to pin down, halfway through this game, the worst part of things.  The "story" is probably the worst thing, and as I'm going to post more updates on what a mess this game is, I should probably start with all of the other problems.

I think the most obvious problem is the goddamned pace of this game.  I recently bought a new gamepad, and mapped the emulator's "fast forward" button to the right trigger button.  This was a response to Golden Sun, which has some really really languid cutscenes (I want to cut the person that thought that good storytelling was having character sprites have emoticon bubbles over their head while repeating a plot point for the umpteenth time).  But the worst thing is that, for all of Golden Sun's faults, it is a goddamned rollercoaster Bruckheimer fuckdaze compared to Breath of Fire.

Everything in Breath of Fire just has weird little delays going on.  Pushing start to go to a menu has a half-second of empty space.  Fights are an eternal back-up at a traffic light, each attack taking an infuriating space to clear.  Apparently in a bid to save the sanity of a new generation of gamers, the GBA programmers included a run button.  That's right: in the SNES version, you had to walk everywhere.  As a surreal anachronism, or warning, holding down B lets you purists walk.

But it's not just technical delays.  I'm no great RPG expert, but I've always looked askance when reviewers whine THE ENCOUNTER RATE IS THREE STEPS PER BATTLE about certain games.  Usually, the complaint is a fairly large exaggeration, at worst you're actually going to be dealing with a random battle once every screen, or twenty steps or so.  But hey, Breath of Fire is ready to show you the truth.  While it's not always as bad, I've gone through certain caves where I went two steps before I had to face yet another pack of evil flies as I try to find my way out of my fifth identical hallway.  To be fair, there are extremely cheap items that remove encounters, but the insane grinder monkey in me refuses to utilize them unless the XP gain is negligible or I'm completely fucking lost.

Which slickly leads me to my next point: the dungeon design is so goddamned bad.  I'm wracking my head to think of worse dungeons in RPGs, but it's so far an utter blank.  Generally, I'm used to designers of bad dungeons at least having the common decency of making them short (ala Golden Sun).  Even the caves Breath of Fire take over five minutes to get through,  thanks both to the aforementioned awesome encounter rate and just the general unending corridors of the same texture without any variation.  Even the maps I drew for my imaginary rpg starring my cats when I was eight had more verve. 

Here, I am including a FASCINATING DEMONSTRATION (mute the first video, unless you like autistic commenters and/or hate awesome japanese music) of what I am talking about.  I'd like to note two things here:

1) This dungeon is the second-most interestingly designed dungeon I have seen.
2) The most interestingly-designed dungeon was literal carbon copy of this dungeon (even the weird placeholder floors), except the water was replaced by LAVA!  Holy fucking shit.

A side effect of generally being stuck in endless hallways with absolutely no landmarks is that you will frequently get lost as shit.  The constant enemy interruptions also ruin things monumentally.  The whole thing is like some awful videogame interpretation of Kafka with floating blue bird pin things replacing the laconic gatekeeper.  Oh, and as a special fuck you, some dungeons won't even give you an automatic exit once you get Mission Critical Item #42, forcing you to try to remember everything in reverse, as there is apparently no "warp out of dungeon" spell or item, which is especially confusing as the game does give you a town warp spell when you're in the overworld (one of the very few "convenience" additions to the game).

Graphics are whatever.  Not exactly awful, but certainly unimaginative.  Towns are actually worse than dungeons as you will run into houses with the exact same layout, including placement of chests and hidden items. Enemies haven't already descended into alternative palette hell, so kudos for that, Capcom, I guess.  I've given up listening to RPG music since Fugazi gives me far more inspiration to murder evil fleas and amoebas than whatever lame themes you babies consider to be music.

Of course, I'd be willing to forgive all this shit if the combat was genuinely interesting, or at least treated party members as vaguely different units requiring different commands and tactics to maximize efficiency.  As we'll see in the next part, any hope for this is false and what were you thinking, you dirty disgusting little piggy?

things that keep me warm at night

the likely possibility that icycalm of haha you seriously think I read that knows that Lisa Foiles' amazingly forgettable articles have likely gotten more views and comments than he ever will receive

GOOGLE RON PAUL (and the wario land series)

I was roughly ten years old when I got Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.  If you've ever played it, you should know that it has one of the most drastic late-game difficulty spikes ever seen.  Unlike most Mario games (when I would get to the end of the third world or so and declare myself the victor because otherwise I would have to come to grips that my motor skills were shit), the majority of the game is seriously piss easy.  The structure of the game is that Mario has the freedom to visit six different worlds to get six golden coins so he can open his castle, which has been co-opted by his evil dick double Wario.  Almost all of the levels were extremely forgiving, frequently throwing power-ups, extra lives, and coins at you while you dodged simple obstacles.  At the end of every world, you faced a boss with the same devistating pattern:

1. Do a really obvious and telegraphed attack
2. Drop down low for like five seconds so Mario can jump on your head
3. Repeat three times.

Granted, the easy difficulty was the side-effect of the non-linear gameplay, as giving the player the option to visit any world first means that you can make any particular world difficult, as this would potentially frustrate some unlucky 10-year-old.  So, eventually you get all the golden coins, and go into Wario castle, being only one stage from completing this game.

One thing about Mario Land 2 is that the physics are noticeably different from how most other Mario games function.  Most notable is the jumping, as Mario tends to sink in his descent, and just seems more bulky in general.  Not to paraphrase Tim "youarenotamusician" Rogers, but the nature of Mario's friction is just weird.  Of course, this isn't a problem in everything up to Wario's castle, but then suddenly the game reverts to pure fuck you mode and suddenly you're noticing that the movements that you used to beat similar sections in other Mario games are fucking you over because Mario isn't moving the same way.  The castle is probably easier in design that most Mario final stages, if just for the fact that there are multiple power-ups, but now you have to rely on Mario's revised jumping to complete sections that aren't baby simple.

Then you get to Wario, and things just get ugly.  While it's not really saying much, Wario is easily the most difficult boss in the Mario series.  He has three forms, and while the first and third aren't really that difficult compared to his castle, the second is a fucking nightmare.  Wario will acquire the bunny ears powerup that Mario had through the game, which are basically the equivalent of the Raccoon Suit from Mario 3, giving him insane jumps and forcing you to carefully hit him on the head during his ground slams.  Die, and WHOOPS BACK TO THE START OF THE CASTLE HA HA FUCK YOU.


(note this guy is not a ten-year-old, or at least I hope not)

Mario Land 2 was a good game, but for me, the big benefit from it was the introduction to Wario, which soon led to Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land and the Wario Land series in general.  Except for Link's Awakening and Kirby's Dreamland 2, Wario Land was easily my favorite Gameboy title as a kid.  And as I say that, I also realize that Wario and his game series is the reason that Democrats are scared about November 2010.

Wario's appeal as a game character, especially coming from Nintendo, is that he is basically a huge prick who is interested only in making bank.  There's no other game character as unrepentently awful as him; even when former villains like Bowser are controlled by the player, the character is altered in that we now see that while they're bad guys, they have a soft side too.  Wario just wants money, and while he's not some ridiculous anti-hero like every other 360 or PS3 protagonist, that's honestly for the better.  Wario's just a guy you love to hate, and his lack of REAL ISSUES means that you don't have to imagine how many people have made terrible internet music videos about him.

It doesn't help that the Wario games are really fucking fun.  While internet nerds apparently feel the need to play Mario 3 and Super Mario World an infinite number of times, the Wario series has always been pretty unappreciated.  While it's not as polished as those two other games, there's something amazingly fun about controlling a fat, greedy man who, instead of neutrally jumping on enemies, knocks them off the screen with bum rushes.  The same weird jumping physics that infuritated me with Mario Land 2 actually work with Wario, and the game's difficulty curve doesn't suddenly throw acid at your face at the end (if anything, the game gets easier at the final section).  Taking a cue from Super Mario World, Wario Land and subsequent sequels featured a wide array of diverging stage paths and alterable scenery.

But this is all boring game review stuff.  Was Never a Fan is a serious review site, and I'm interested in tackling the big questions.  Questions liek, what is the moral theme of the Wario series?  That's not actually a big question, though, as I already know the answer.  Simply put, Wario is the America we have currently been living with since the Clinton Presidency, and what currently we face as Proud Americans.

Wait, you say as you close your futanari h-doujin, suddenly perplexed, Wario is a japanese thing!  The name even comes from some weird play on Japanese words from Mario's name!  Don't you think you're reading things a little too forced?

Consider this.  Mario Land 2 was released on October 2, 1992 in Japan, and November 2, 1992, a mere week before the election that changed America forever.  Mario is already sort of a conservative hero, having instituted several regime changes and refusing to alter what already works.  Suddenly, there's a regime change, and the Mushroom Kingdom is being ruled by a fat, lascivious man whose only concern is amassing wealth and providing social services to the lazy underclass (how else do you think Wario commanded all those goombahs and giant ants to try to kill Mario?  Follow the signs, people).



Of course, Wario was eventually thwarted (perhaps a foreseeing of the 1994 midterm elections), but not defeated, as he simply came to a compromise with Mario: I'll let you control stuff for awhile, as long as I can just continue getting money for everyone.  I'm not sure where the villains of Wario Land fit into this (the female Captain Syrup and the unfortunately named Brown Sugar Pirates), maybe it's Hillary or Milosevic.  What matters is that Wario Land is all about acquiring wealth, Clinton/Wario tricking the American Man into believing that, now that he is rich because he just found a chest with a whale figurine in it, it doesn't really matter that you are empathizing with a man who has no real empathy to others.


(note that both Wario commercials feature hypnosis.  I don't think there's anyone who would deny that Clinton's speaking ability was the functional equivalent of a weird moustached guy waving a golden coin in front of our face)

Then came Wario Land 2, which diverged further from the Mario formula in that Wario could literally not be killed in the game.  In fact, Wario's various powers came at the hands of being hit by certain enemies: getting smashed by a giant weight makes a pancake Wario that can float into small gaps, getting stung by a bee will inflate Wario's cheeks, allowing him to floating around.  Wario Land 2 was naturally released in mid-1998, during the full swing of the impeachment hearings.  Like Wario's travails against his enemies, Clinton emerged from the proceedings only in a sort of "well everyone knows that I'm horny" form, and is still fully capable of reducing conservatives into a sort of frothing terror

(from a game standpoint, while Wario Land 2 is pretty fun, the fact that you can't die does harm being able to enjoy it for long periods, as the only real challenge is finding secret coin rooms and new plotline paths, of which only the latter has any real point in the game, since you will literally be drowning in coins by the mid-point of the game).

I have no idea about Wario Land 3, as I never played it.  Game Boy Color is for babies.  MUCH LIKE CLINTON.

google captain syrup

BLOOD MONKEY

My only defense about watching BLOOD MONKEY was that I had to watch either this or Blood Gnomes (which I am probably going to watch later).

Maybe it was a little unclear in my last review, but while I didn't like Staunton Hill, there's honestly far worse for a hardcore slasher fan to watch.  The question before me is whether a hardcore creature feature/Syfy original fan would be able to sit through Blood Monkey.  I was able to sit through it, but I was also playing Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 for the Gameboy, so I was able to endure the endless scenes of people walking around in very obvious set jungles.

I'm not going to go through the plotline, as there is a disturbingly detailed synopsis on Wikipedia.  I can't say this really surprises me, as there is apparently a cabal of basement dwellers who somehow feel it is essential to go through every fucking scene in shitty horror.  Long story short, there is an evil professor who lures some graduate students to an unexplored ravine in Africa that contains SUPER INTELLIGENT BLOOD MONKEYS (also they are totally gorillas, so the title should be "Blood Apes."  Or actually, just "Apes" as there is absolutely nothing in the film that explains the "Blood" part except that the apes' POV shots have a really stupid red layer over them, like someone stuck a Fruit Roll-up on the lens).

So, the movie's only really strong positive is that the acting is honestly fairly decent for something film as the opening movement in the "Maneater series," which is apparently a film mill for creature features that all premiered on the Syfy network.  F. Murray Abraham (yes, the guy that played Salieri) clearly doesn't give a shit about the movie, and just gorges on scenery while doing the laziest Ahab impression possible.  He's still pretty fun to watch, and at least gives an effective villain to root against.  The students aren't bad, except for the token "hot chick," which the camera desperately attempts to avoid and the movie kills first because he face is seriously in that British category of the uncanny valley.  The movie gives a fair amount of pathos and character development to the characters, so it's a little surprising the the film is, by Syfy original standards, really fucking grim.  Indeed, the ending is honestly pretty good, or at least a good imitation of those moments of jarring, claustrophobic panic that you see in something like Cloverfield and Blair Witch, which just makes it even more confusing that the vast majority of the movie is the same robotic directed made-for-TV garbage as usual.

So, the movie's real distinction is how, even for a low rent creature feature, they manage to avoid showing the titular BLOOD MONKEY until the last few frames of the films.  I mean, there's still sudden flash cuts and gorilla arms, but it's all really really obscured, and pretty fucking amazing.  It's understandable when movies featuring giant snakes and demon scorpions are a little reluctant to parade their Full Sail-level CGI for the entire film, but this is a movie about killer gorillas.  Oh, and before you go "well are they different looking killer gorillas," NO THEY ARE NOT.  The final shot of the film is basically a scary gorilla poser model with blood-stained teeth, nothing more.  I mean, it was really wretched CGI, but I think most people would have preferred you have more shitty shots of the BLOOD MONKEY or a guy in a gorilla suit.  Oh, you think that might be a little silly?  YOU ARE DIRECTING A MOVIE CALLED MOTHERFUCKING "BLOOD MONKEY."  NOBODY IS WATCHING THIS MOVIE TO BE SCARED.  HOWEVER, I CAN ASSUME THAT THEY ARE WATCHING IT TO SEE THE BLOOD MONKEY BEFORE THE LAST MINUTE OF THE FILM.

I don't know what else to say about this film.  The directing is boring right until the end, with not a single interesting shot.  Gore is absolute shit.  The only actually funny scene, despite the film's attempt to ascribe hilarious lines to the characters, is when the BLOOD MONKEYS piss all over the characters' tents.  No, there is no blood in the urine.

Ultimate verdict is that if you have someone willing to tolerate this bullshit, just skip to the hour mark and be glad that I'm better at Wario Land than I used to be.