That’s all Twink can do in this room, so he backtracks all the way across the upper level again and enters the room with the fire wall for the third fucking time. Twink is traveling in the opposite direction from before, and now the fire starts behind him on this side of the room and chases him across. This is kind of ridiculous when you think about it, because if the fire can travel from either end of the room, wouldn’t it make more sense for it to travel toward Twink from the front so that he will automatically run into it? GGI did not do a lot of quality testing in this dungeon, that’s for sure. At the other end of the room, Twink has to make a leap of faith and grab onto a side ledge that leads to a new door. He finds himself in another rock tunnel that seems like it leads to a Goron cell, but doesn’t. GGI is just full of surprises. Twink brings up his map here for the first time in a while, and he finds that the Fire Temple consists of two circular towers (underground, of course) connected by a corridor. Because of the small, circular room in the center of each tower, the map looks like a pair of tits. And Twink thought he couldn’t hate this place more. Right now he’s in the tunnel connecting the two boobs, and he’s only explored the right one so far. He passes through the door at the end of the tunnel, which takes him into the left boob, and the very worst room in the dungeon.
Just the tip?
I know I’ve already spent a good deal of time complaining about the giant lava room and then the rabbit shit room, but those are really small potatoes when compared to this festival of torture. The room is shaped like three quarters of a boob, circling around a pillar in the center which encloses the nipple on the map. Thin poles, about Twink’s height, form a sort of grid pattern on the floor. Each pair of poles is connected by a wall of fire that only appears when Twink gets close enough. And by “close enough,” I mean when he’s fucking touching it. Only a small number of pole pairs are not connected by fire, turning this room into an invisible flame maze that Twink must navigate by trial and error. To add to the difficulty, there are several leering Goron totem poles scattered around the room, and these shoot jets of fire out of their mouths intermittently. The game designers made sure to include the most irritating features of the other terrible rooms as well, such as the rolling rabbit shit boulders, flaming bats, multiple hard-to-reach doors along the outer wall, and fake doors around the central column. The final result is that the room is both extremely confusing to navigate and obnoxiously lethal. Twink misses the giant lava room and the rabbit shit room.
I have to fast forward through most of the footage in this torture chamber, because it is emotionally painful to watch. I slow down when Twink reaches a door on the outer wall, where he finds the Comp Ass at the end of a rocky tunnel. Better late than never, but I could have used that fucking thing half an hour ago. Now I can actually tell where I am on the torture chamber map — yeah, I forgot to mention I was navigating through the room blind. Twink returns to the torture chamber, and I fast forward some more as Twink nearly burns to death trying to find his way to the correct locked door on the central column. This is agonizing. Inside the nipple — which is red, by the way — there’s another Goron cell, but Twink can’t do anything about it right now. He passes through the door on the opposite side of the nipple. I don’t even know why he had to go back into the torture chamber this way — maybe the flaming maze blocks this section from any other direction. I have no idea what’s going on now, so let’s just go with that. Twink maneuvers his way over to a pressure switch…and this is really the last straw. It’s another God damn timed switch puzzle. You have got to be kidding me. Motherfucking motherfucks. That’s the one awful thing this room was missing so far. Ugh.
Fuck this the most.
There’s a raised area, kind of like a stage, in one of the outer curves of the boob. A — surprise! — wall of fire blocks the entire front of the stage, and the pressure switch extinguishes the fire temporarily. In the mere seconds before the flames return, Twink has to make his way to the stage via more fire maze. To make matters worse, a stone Goron face leers down at him from the wall behind the stage. At least Twink makes it on the second try, which doesn’t atone for his suffering, but he supposes it could have been worse. While Twink does some deep breathing to recover from the stress of that incident, he takes a moment to admire the craftsmanship of the stone columns in this section of the room. Just because he hates this place doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate the décor — he’s not dead, people. When he’s mentally ready, Twink heads toward the door on the back wall. He has to take out a fake door that’s hiding the real door first. What was Ganondorf thinking with these dorky things anyway? It’s kind of embarrassing, really. Next Ganondorf will be trying to pass off his Coach knock-off purse as the real thing.
I’m getting really tired of describing each of these different rooms. Twink is now in a smallish square brick-lined room with a square platform in the middle. Naturally, the platform has large flames shooting out the top of it. A sinister laugh greets Twink as the door bars behind him. Awesome, this is a fucking mini boss. Since the dragon at the end of the dungeon (which Twink will totally not have to fight) is likely to be a giant vagina with teeth, Twink can only imagine that this mini boss will sport a pair of jiggling boobs that shoot fire. Well, color Twink surprised, he’s actually wrong about this. The mini boss, with the masculine name of Fire Dancer, is the one that the Goron mentioned earlier. It’s a ballerina made out of — you guessed it — flames. It twirls around gracefully, gearing up for some big attack, which Twink thwarts by ripping out its heart with the Moneyshot. This extinguishes the flames, leaving behind a little black ball on tiny red legs — it kind of looks like a deformed Bob-omb. It giggles again as it runs away from Twink, but it sounds like a chipmunk now. So threatening. Twink has to run in the opposite direction and stab it with his sword a few times before it jumps back into the fire on top of the platform and returns to its demon ballerina form. If Twink had a water bucket this battle would be over in two seconds. There isn’t much else to say about the rest of this battle, except that Twink must repeat the entire process several times while the Fire Dancer changes from orange to blue to green. This is actually the most fabulous enemy Twink has gotten to fight in a while. He almost feels a little bad for killing it, right up until it explodes in his face, damaging him severely. Fuck that thing, Twink decides.
Boobs!
When the Fire Dancer expires, the flames on the platform disappear, revealing a grinning Goron block that also serves as an elevator. Twink rides it up to the floor of another brick room — this time the platform slides into the floor a little more gently than the first one, instead of just jamming in there. Now if only Darunia could learn that lesson. The next room, which is another of the glowing green brick variety, houses a crystal switch and perp fence puzzle with the same camera issues as last time. I’m starting to get to copy/paste territory with this recap. At the top of that room, Twink enters another door and finds himself in a large circular chamber with a giant hole in the middle of the floor. It’s almost identical to the one that I called a Goatse room before I knew what it really was, and when Twink checks his map, sure enough, this is the corresponding room in the left boob. And on the map the two rooms look even more boobish, to Twink’s dismay.
Now, I’ve probably blown my wad complaining about the puzzles in this dungeon, but the one in this room is by far the very worst. A narrow staircase circles the massive pit in the center of the room, leading up to a large chest with flames surrounding it. The floor on the outside of the staircase is solid, though covered with more rolling rabbit shit. The inside of the staircase is, as I mentioned, an open pit. If Twink falls down, he’ll have to retrace his path from (I’m guessing) the torture chamber, including that timed switch puzzle I was bitching about several paragraphs ago. Speaking of timed switch puzzles, guess what puts out the flames around the big treasure chest? Twink is about to start weeping, you guys. That’s right, in a matter of seconds, Twink must step on the switch at the base of the staircase, run in a circle up the narrow staircase without falling and having to repeat a bunch of shit, and get to the treasure chest while the flames are still out. Just for that extra little kick in the nuts, Twink has to jump down from the switch to get to the actual beginning of the staircase, and that jump is way too easy to overshoot. And that’s exactly what happens on Twink’s first try. Luckily, when he overshoots, he lands on the floor instead of the pit. The timing is so precise here, the best course of action is to wait for the switch to reset and then try again, but Twink is motherfucking sick of all these motherfucking timed puzzles, and he is going to try his damnedest to get that chest immediately. He pulls himself up onto the staircase and sprints up and around like a gazelle, reaching the chest at literally the last split second. Wow, Twink could not have cut that any closer. I don’t even know what to say. I was not expecting success on the first try. Either I earned some sort of pity from the gaming gods for the terrible job I’ve done so far, or else I’m going to be paying hard for this gift later.
Loading ...I’m just so flabbergasted over not fucking that up that I forgot to mention what was in the chest. Twink now has in his possession the Hammer of Recapper Revenge. This rather bland metal hammer is a disappointment compared to the monstrous Skull Hammer from Wind Wanker, but it can still pound things. And Twink likes pounding things. So anyway, this is the legendary Goron weapon that defeated Vulvagina all those years ago. I guess it’s just been up here in a boob tower all this time, guarded by penis pillars and a timed switch. Or it could have been sitting in the attic of the boob tower until recently and Ganondorf got it down and set up all these shitty puzzles just before Twink arrived. Either way, Darunia is going to feel like a jackass for not searching just a little harder for it. A big flappy vagina dragon is probably swallowing him at this very moment, and it serves him right.
The last sentence isn’t about the hammer.
On the off chance that Darunia is alive and hasn’t gone catatonic from the horror of a giant vagina, Twink should probably go deliver this weapon to him so Darunia can take care of Vulvagina like he promised. And then they can talk. As Twink makes his way back to the beginning of the room, he almost gets murdered by flaming bats. But he makes it out of the situation with one and a quarter hearts remaining. There’s a slightly raised Goron block in the floor here, and wailing on it with the hammer breaks it loose so Twink can drop through the hole it leaves behind.
The room below is fairly empty except for a conspicuous leering Goron statue on one wall. Twink pretends it’s Darunia and beats on it with extreme prejudice, destroying it and revealing a totally secret and unexpected door behind it. Some more flaming bats in the next room reduce Twink to half a heart. I love how after all the shit Twink went through in the torture chamber with the ten thousand walls of fire and flame spitting Goron statues, he’s going to die from a fucking flaming bat. Classic. Just as Twink resigns himself to his fate, two of the bats drop multiple hearts. Again I am suspicious of my good fortune — I don’t know how to react when things go well. Once Twink gains back enough of his health to function, he beats the shit out of another Goron face in the floor, causing the floor blocks to drop and create a staircase. For some reason, Ganondorf put some tiny crates in the corner — he must have had some left over from turning Jabba into a dungeon — and it just so happens that a switch at the bottom of the stairs needs to be weighted down. It takes Twink way too many tries to do this, thanks partially to the spastic camera work every time his toe accidentally touches the switch and the bars on the door retract. The rest of the responsibility goes to the flaming bat that keeps dive bombing Twink while he’s trying to place the crate. God damn it. Eventually, Twink manages to complete this simple task, and the unbarred door leads to yet another room with a poundable Goron face. That’s, what, three rooms in a row with the same “puzzle”? Way to change things up, game designers. Well, this Goron block is angled at 45 degrees to the rest of the room, which I guess makes it different. Whew, I almost didn’t figure that one out! This block falls down and Twink jumps down the remaining hole to find himself back in the torture chamber. Hooray. He’s on an upper platform just outside the nipple column in the center. The door in the column is barred, and the nearby floor switch is rust-colored, rather than yellow or turquoise like the rest of the dungeon switches. Gosh, this sure is a head scratcher.
On cue, Naggy starts flying around Twink’s head like a kid with ADD. Twink is having so much trouble figuring out how to activate this switch, he’d better just break down and consult the expert. “This switch looks rusted,” Naggy contributes. Someone give her a medal. Jesus, that might be the most useless “contribution” from Naggy so far. Well, Twink is truly stumped now — if only he had some type of heavy implement he could use to smack the rust off that stuck switch. Oh! I won’t insult your intelligence by pointing out the solution to the switch puzzle, so let’s move on to the inside of the nipple. Twink finds himself on one of the ledges above the Goron cell he found earlier. A green block across the room means he has to play the Song of Time on his Cockarina to move the block to the lower level. This creates a pathway which allows Twink to jump across and access the floor switch which is also rusted. To add insult to injury, Naggy starts freaking out around this one as well. Are you fucking kidding me?