Once upon a
midnight dreary, while I listened, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and 16-bit soundtrack of Kondo yore,
While I nodded, nearly dreaming, suddenly there came a
theming,
As of a hero “Game Over”-screening, dying in a later score.
“'Tis a Mario riff,”
I muttered, “reused in
another Zelda score —
An old motif, and nothing more.”
Quoth the Kondo: “I hadn't noticed that before.”
Welcome to the Lumbar Nook.
Cozy, warm studio space with a groovy 70s-style conversation pit, now renting at $3200 a month in the Bay Area.
It’s a location in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, specifically somewhere inside Bowser’s lower spine, in between (or inside?) one of his lumbar vertebrae. After Bowser is betrayed by a trio of Fawful-loyal minions, he is stuffed inside a safe and then discarded into Princess Peach’s royal junkyard, where the safe shatters. Unfortunately for Bowser, the impact also leaves him in great pain. He pleads with Starlow to find some way to fix his spine, and so the erstwhile Brothers Mario travel to the Lumbar Nook.
Finding a boney sort of crevice in the tiny space, the two decide to drill into the spine. Toadsworth and Toadbert set a timer and have a cup of tea. After minutes of waiting, during which the player cannot do anything, the alarm sounds and the brothers reemerge to a rejuvenated Bowser. The Lumbar Nook is never visited again.
The whole episode is one of those Nintendo oddities that were particularly popular during the DS era, like that infamous puzzle in Phantom Hourglass which requires the player to close the DS to imprint a symbol from one screen to another. Is it engaging gameplay? Not at all. Does it ever play a role in the game’s mechanics again? Nope. Will you remember the Lumbar Nook segment once the story is all said and done? Probably not. But it’s endearing because of that baffling, almost standoffish quality, defying the player’s expectations of what should be happening minute-to-minute.
Which is why it’s weird that it can be skipped. Yes, in fact, Lumbar Nook Tea Time can be blown right through if you happen to speak to Toadbert at the right point in the story, specifically after defeating the memory brothers in Bowser’s brain. Toadbert describes a dream in which he is waiting in a small room drinking tea, and then (somehow) hears buttons being pressed – A B X Y L R Y X B A – which, if pressed during the wait, will shrink the time down to virtually nothing.
Screenshots from YouTube playthroughs of aWiibo and LuckySevenDX.
My question is: why? What’s the point in programming such a markedly odd little episode that asks the player’s patience, only to have it be skippable? Why include the skip code in an NPC dialogue that the vast majority of players are unlikely to see? Why does Toadbert have prophetic meta-dreams?
Feel free to ponder this over a nice cup of tea and some relaxing music. Or don’t.
SPIRIT: If Nintendo was an American company, we might have gotten a visit to the Chiropractic Zone, where the brothers play whack-a-mole with Bowser’s vertebrae and unintentionally doom him to quadriplegia.
When I was around 11 years old, I loved a site called Waluigious. It was a blog, run by someone going by Artemendo, that featured dozens of bits of Mario ephemera, jokes, and idle wonderings. The site is only preserved now via the magic of the Internet Archive, but even so, many of the posts are no longer accessible.
I don’t know why Artemendo decided to give up Waluigious. Maybe I did at one time. But I felt a kinship for this writer who put all these trivial thoughts and ideas up for people like me to see – kids, at least in some proportion. As I’ve gotten older, I play videogames less and less. I have less patience for playing. There’s now a gnawing sense of “what else could I be doing?” that hangs over every minute. Still, though, my head is filled with these same thoughts that have been knocking around since I was first entranced by these old games. So, here is my outlet.
The Seashell Mansion is a location in Link’s Awakening where Link may trade seashells for various upgrades. It’s faintly mysterious – you are bestowed gifts by the unseen “Spirit of the Mansion” – and serves as a repository for these secret collectibles hidden in the game. In that vein, this blog will become a collection of those thoughts that wash up on mental shores. Bits and baubles with nowhere else to go. Things that I would hate to leave behind as my life moves forward. They will be kept here.
Welcome to the Mansion. Stay as long as you like.