Readers add Zelda’s angry chickens and Eternal Darkness to our Nintendo theme park
The Happiest Place On Earth
Earlier this week, we shared some ideas for the Nintendo-based attractions that will be making their way to Universal theme parks in the future. Our designs covered everything from Ice Climbers to Animal Crossing, but the commenters had plenty more suggestions of their own. Here’s one from Duwease:
Pikmin Battle Adventure
Thanks to a loophole in Florida law that only outlaws intraspecies fighting, come and witness Mother Nature’s first sport in all its glory! Can five beetles take down a frog? Can 50 ants take down a lemur? Pick your favorite, and win Nintendo Fun Coins™ for great items in our gift shop!
Thesmokeylife envisioned something a little more scary:
The Roivas Mansion from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem! Solve the mystery of your grandfather’s death while slowly going mad at the same time! Features include blood spontaneously dripping from walls, statues that watch your every move, and a secret Lovecraftian city below the attraction. Don’t check the bathtub!
But Pgoodso took it to another level:
An Eternal Darkness ride would terrify all the parents by texting them halfway through and thanking them for upgrading all their park tickets to the $1,000 Nintendo VIP holiday package and that their credit cards have already been charged for their convenience.
Now that’s how you get someone to yell “THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!”
The lies of minnelli reached into Mario Party’s bag of detestable tricks:
At several locations are several Chance Time spots where you can randomly swap your stuff with another tourist. This can upgrade you to the best possible ticket available, but you can also lose everything and get kicked out of the park.
And subpar US adaptation of a witt came up with a way for tortured mascots everywhere to finally get their revenge:
There are chicken mascots roaming the park, and if you hit them, hundreds of chicken mascots appear out of nowhere to attack you.
Mario Kart was a popular suggestion throughout the comments. But dad pointed out that real-life Mario Kart is something Nintendo’s already tried. Thanks, dad.
Nintendo did a Mario Kart thing last year at SXSW Interactive. Jalopnik wrote about it:
“Here’s the basic idea behind it: a karting track with electric karts, outfitted with cameras, RFID sensors, and real-time up-and-down data communication to a central server. When the karts’ wheels pass over RFID-tagged decals on the track, information is relayed to the server and then back to the karts to affect the game.
So, for example, if you run over a power-up decal that increases speed (like the traditional mushroom), then a signal is sent to that kart to increase the voltage to the motor, giving a burst of speed. Run over something negative, like a turtle shell, and voltage is cut, slowing you down. One of the power-ups references the anti-gravity feature in the New Mario Kart game, and when its run over, the video feed flips vertically, so people watching the big screen see an anti-gravity kind of effect. The driver, of course, doesn’t see this.”
So it was kinda lame, but the framework and potential is there.
Captain Internet had an idea for a much simpler way to honor Mario Kart:
I think they’ll just have a guy dressed as a blue shell wandering around and punching anyone who looks like they’re having too much fun in the face.
Elsewhere, ItsTheShadsy wondered if these attractions could be used to educate the youths of today about some of Nintendo’s more obscure games:
God dammit, an Isle Delfino water park is so obvious, and I will be disappointed if that one doesn’t actually make the cut. For a second, I wondered if Super Mario Sunshine would be too old for kids, but I realized that the theme park could be a great way for Nintendo to keep its back-catalogue relevant. Thinking about Disney parks, I guarantee that there’s a few older cartoons I primarily learned about (and wanted to watch) through the rides and pavilions—certainly Song Of The South. What’s Nintendo’s Song Of The South equivalent here? Devil World?
Sweet16 provided one hell of an answer for that last question:
It’s definitely Time Twist, a Nintendo co-developed game that only came out in Japan. It’s an adventure game, with the typically cute Nintendo aesthetic, that features the murdering of the Jews in the Holocaust, baby Jesus being possessed by Satan, and Klu Klux Klan members murdering African-American slaves. This is not a joke.
No, it most definitely was not a joke. There’s not much Time Twist footage around English-speaking parts of the internet, but here’s a cringeworthy screengrab I pulled from a video on Japan’s NicoNico:
The story has something to do with a kid accidentally unleashing the devil, who then swaps bodies with him and steals a “Time Belt” so he can travel through time. The boy’s soul travels along with him, and you witness all kinds of atrocities and historical moments, including those Sweet16 mentioned. Here’s the scene where infant Jesus gets possessed and you exorcise him with the power of electricity:
Fact Robot Strikes Again
And now we jump to a slightly more nuanced portrayal of one of human history’s most horrific atrocities. In his review of Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Drew Toal called out one of B.J. Blazkowicz’s more serious lines: “When I was a kid, we had a monster in our basement. My father said if I done wrong, it’d creep out at night and come for me. I tried to do no wrong. The monster came all the same.” Fact robot thought it deserved some more credit than Drew gave it:
I don’t think you’re giving the game enough credit for the “monster” line. B.J. isn’t just American. He’s also Jewish. His parents were both Polish immigrants. It’s got nothing to do with American exceptionalism and everything to do with the fact that his father and mother have this history behind them of being victimized. That’s the monster in the basement; the thing they tried and failed to leave behind.
And that’s going to bring us to the close of another Gameological week. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you all again next week!