Review of Super Pii Pii Brothers
By Jimmy Chen
I’ve never actually played Super Pii Pii Brothers, but I’ve done enough of the real thing to have an opinion.
The game comes with a belt-harness that turns the Wiimote (Wii remote) into a “strap-on,” whose phallic capacities, while asexual, are just as perverse. The goal is simple: to urinate as precisely as one can into any of three toilets. Too much piss on the floor, you lose. Hit the cat in the face (oh yeah, stray cats randomly pop out of the toilet in whack-a-mole fashion) for extra points—which eerily brings to mind bukkake, the also-crazy-Japanese “game” in which a woman’s face is covered with the aggregate of multiple emissions from a group of men. And then there’s the obvious allusion to “golden showers,” another perversity that maintains no prejudice towards the sexuality of fluids.
The manufacture’s description boasts (English trans.) “realistic fluid dynamics,” “over 100 different peeing environments with multiple toilet and urinal styles,” “up to two players can compete with dueling pee streams,” and—my favorite, as if linguistics is on the mind—”minimal Japanese text makes game easy to understand if you can’t read Japanese.” (I’ve always thought sashimi was cold cunnulingus, and never needed a translator to chew.)
The infantile vernacular of the “Wiimote” is peculiar, but expected, as that is what a baby would say. One need not get into Freud’s correlations between sexuality, the [un]development of the ego/id, and toilet training. Another description of Super Pii Pii Brothers reads “promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing,” and Freud is dragged on stage yet again to talk about penis envy. Where a man may take pleasure in assessing the accuracy of piss-physics, a woman simply takes pleasure in holding on to her plastic cock.
Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) is not a piss gag, but a comment on the post-industrial utilitarian inadvertent beauty of a urinal’s contour and form. He applied meaning onto its surface, thus embedding it with it. In 2006, a 76-year-old performance artist attacked “Fountain” with a hammer, slightly chipping it at the Pompidou Center in Paris. The same man, in 1993, urinated into it while it was on display in another exhibition. He told the police, both times, that the Dadaists would have been proud.
“Fountain” is estimated at $3.6 million. Super Pii Pii Brothers is available for $34.99 at ThinkGeek—the latter which, I just found out while writing this closing paragraph, invented the game as a hoax (fairly elaborate, as there’s even a youtube video showing the game being played casually at home). There—simply, sadly—is no Super Pii Pii Brothers. Oh, a rant from a hoax. In a world where we’re guaranteed only one life, we inexplicably have too much time. I guess Dada, or Daddy, would be proud.