This expansion to Doshin the Giant is truly bizarre. Essentially, it’s just a list of challenges for the first Doshin game, but the way it’s presented, and the disk swapping itself, is really quite strange. None of the stuff in this expansion was included in the GameCube version, and as this works in a unique way for an N64 game, I’ll talk about the process of playing the game.

The first thing you have to do when you launch the expansion is confirm that you have the first game. So straight away you’re told to eject the expansion disk (I’ll call it Disk 2) and insert the original Doshin the Giant disk (Disk 1). Then you have to swap back over to Disk 2 to finally boot to the menu.

Here you pick the “design” of your character – all of them are black silhouettes of kids with a few coloured accessories. You get told to go to bed (you can say no but nothing happens until you say yes), where you start dreaming that you get sucked out of the window and into the Doshin Expo of 1996, with Doshin chained up in the centre of it.

This is a circular area that you can walk around. There’s a heart metre that fills up from water dripping from the top of the screen. If the bar fills up, waves will crash onto the screen and you’ll wake up, watch the falling sleep animation again, and go back to the Expo. The only other button in the game – the Z button – will let you keep this meter down. Press it, and hearts will fly out of your character’s crotch in an arc. Yup, this isn’t water. It’s piss, and pissing on people and objects is how you interact with them.

The billboards are the main thing you need to focus on to start with. These display colours of tribes, as well as a monument type. Urinate on the sign and you’ll be prompted to insert Disk 1, then back to Disk 2. If you don’t have the required monument, then nothing will happen (you’d need to shut down Disk 2 and play Disk 1 on its own to complete it). If you do have the required monument (thankfully there was one for the only monument I was able to build), then you get to progress.

An attraction will be built in the park, of which there are 17 to complete. But that’s only the first part. After this is built, you’ll then be presented with a new challenge. This will be something like “find something” or “hop up and down a lot” – this a challenge for the original game. You’ll be prompted to insert Disk 1 and press reset, where you’ll boot up into the first game.

The game plays out just like normal (incidentally, I discovered that the system clock is used, and the villages will evolve when you’re not playing, like in Animal Crossing) and I don’t think anything is different at all, and there’s nothing to remind you of the current challenge. I played through a day and wasn’t sure what to do (I thought I failed the challenge anyway), so I put disk 2 in and hit reset.

Thankfully, that was the right thing to do. Not only that, but I had apparently completed the challenge (despite nothing telling me, unless it was the spoken Japanese voice). With this completed, you then get your reward.

Which is a short animation from a collection of Doshin the Giant shorts called “More than Giant”, which tell the story of Doshin and how he ended up imprisoned in the Expo. These were also released on VHS and have since been uploaded to YouTube, which also includes an N64/Doshin rap. This is the biggest part of the game, although there are a few more things.

Other kids will start appearing an the Expo. The ones that match your character can be recruited by doing the only action you can do. You will also encounter gangs of other kids, and need to defeat them by… yes, peeing on them. The ultimate goal of the game is to urinate on Doshin enough so he grows big enough to escape, and I think getting a larger crew helps with that.

And that’s Tinkling Toddler Liberation Front, a rather unusual game. When you free Doshin, the final cutscene is your mum cleaning your bedsheets, so this seems to be some kind of explanation regarding bed wetting – that bed wetters are on a noble crusade in their dreams, or something like that. It’s certainly an interesting way to add some very simple challenges to a game.

Poor

Remake or remaster?

I can’t see Nintendo ever re-releasing or referencing this in any way, and it was left out of the GameCube version. Challenges that unlock bonuses are a neat addition to god games, though.

Official ways to get the game.

There’s no official way to get Doshin the Giant: Tinkling Toddler Liberation Front