Wtf is this guys, a smoke break?

Oops! All Poetics

Yeah, I know it’s shit. It took me like 20 minutes, and I’m not getting paid for this. You’re welcome.

The Aurora’s Sleeper Car shitter!

During the trek across Irradiated Russia, your steam engine, The Aurora, starts to get a little crowded because of all the weirdos, loners and vagabonds you keep picking up. Thankfully, the gang meets a really nice mechanic, who isn’t even a mutant freak. As if that’s not miracle enough, he says there’s a sleeper car somewhere in the Volga territory. If you drive it back to the engine, he can even install it for you. Great.

Even better, it has a shitter. The colors are fucky because it was dark as all hell in there, but the hover image shows it with nightvision. When you first find the car, you have to eliminate all the guys who are abusing the shit out of it. They’re not taking care of the place, they’re really just squatting. As you can see, the facilities in this train car are in a sorry state. Don’t worry about the guy on the ground. He’s completely fine.

Once you triumphantly return with the train car, everyone works together to shine it up like a Hyrule powergem and look at the results! Glimmering chrome and a floor cleared of detritus! There’s also no bodies. I don’t know where he went, but I didn’t kill anyone during this playthrough, so maybe we simply dumped him out the back door. Who cares if the toilet paper on the wall-mounted dispenser is in the exact configuration in both the before and after? There’s a signed biker chick calender on the wall now, and you really can’t beat that, so please cut the crap and enjoy this beautiful bathroom, hero!

Ooookay guys. Roll a D20 for me.

The Droughts, Pandora shitters!

When bucket brigadier Solo Espresso told me he was playing Borderlands 3, the first question I asked was, of course, ‘Does it have shitters.’ This was his response. His commentary on these outhouses:

“It’s a place outside the starting zone. After the intro stuff, you get this. Kind of a mini-junkyard, but it isn’t. Second picture is same place as previous one, just a second one.

That silver beam of light looking like excalibur in the toilet is an ammo clip. The surrounding scrapheap makes for quite the dismal dump, but my say something nice is the colorful bunting is cheerful at best. Better than nothing, but still, it would bum me out to have to use this.

I guess to sidestep the inevitable inquiry of who maintains these shitters, the designers popped what looks like a vacuum cleaner onto the side of them so you get the impression they are some kind of automated composting toilet. That effort is admirable, but I still have questions. As far as I can tell, there’s no lore in the game that states what happens to the compost after it is processed. Does it just go into the ground? In what way does this impact the land? Is there a monster somewhere deep beneath the planet’s crust who is angered by the intrusion of the compost? I get the feeling the designers don’t want you to think too much about it. It’s just a crapper, so move on, gamer. Well, I think about these things!

It’s time for the 2019 Blue Bowl Awards!

Each year, the illustrious committee of experts at Gaming Thones, consisting of myself, likes to give a nod where it’s due to the best of the bowls. There were a lot of great potentials this year, but the clear winner for 2019 is the train depot shitter from Metro: Exodus. I’ll tell you what makes this shitter so outstanding:

1. It’s dreadful. Look at this fucking thing. Metro: Exodus is in the horror genre, and this shitter itself is a nightmare. There is no seat. It’s a metal basin that was probably originally intended for a urinal, with a concrete surround. It’s almost completely exposed to the elements, including radioactive snow that is currently falling right onto it.

2. It’s not clear where the thing drains to. Does it just empty out directly underneath the basin? Why would anyone use this? And clearly people do. Because there are several books and someone even left the lights on, implying they plan to return.

3. Metro: Exodus shows us the current demand for shitters is relevant. The game came out this year, and the presence of shitters of this design quality indicates not only that video game shitters are no passing trend, but that in time they may only improve.

Our second place winner is this prison shitter from Dishonored 2. As you know, I love me a good prison shitter. The tiny bucket in the corner is, for me, a joy to behold. That bucket says, “I know this is the last place on Earth you ever want to end up, and it’s probably the last place you’ll ever be. But I want you to know, I’m here for you.” When the going gets rough, a prison shitter is the one friend who will stay by your side, also because you aren’t allowed any contact with the outside world. You better appreciate a prison shitter. A terrific note on which we finish off 2019 - In gratitude, we thank our shitters, which provide comfort in even these terrible places.

The 2019 Bucket Brigadier of the Year is…

Congratulations to Khazya, the Gaming Thrones bucket brigadier of the year! What did he do to deserve this? Khazya contributed a lot of content to us this year by pairing up with me and streaming his playthrough of Dishonored 2. Together, we documented undiscovered shitters, shared laughs at the expense of the steampunk aristocracy, and swapped ideas for future projects. Thank you for giving so much of your time that you can never get back to Gaming Thrones this year. I can’t wait to do even more of this with the bucket brigade next year.

In honor of our brigadier, a donation of $10 USD has been sent to The World Toilet Organization.

2019 has been a year of learning and growing. I discovered something new about myself in 2019. It turns out that one of my favorite things is to peek into random Twitch streams, and find surprising places where shitters hide, in games I never played. So hopefully in the coming new year, there’ll be more surprises like that!

The Baron’s golden shitter!

In the futuretimes of post-war, dystopian Russia, the Caspian Sea is no longer an enormous lake shaped like an upside-down baby. Instead, it’s a dried up desert region full of loot and booty that the local pirate goons scramble to claim. This alarmingly low-iq pirate community is led by The Baron: A bald, toothpick-chewing dirtbag who just wants to be Immortan Joe so badly. The Baron invites you up to his crow’s nest to toast whisky at gunpoint, and celebrate your newfound, compulsory alliance. But since I’m never agreeing to that, it all goes to shit and a shootout begins. I survived, and during the cutscene, I caught a brief glimpse of this incredible artifact. Yes, once again it’s an elevated cistern shitter! Gleaming like an idol of Ba’al, comfortably perched among richly patterned carpets and rugs. I think that’s also a gold-plated basin or something against the wall, but let’s be really real and just admit it’s spraypaint. Look at the tacky gold rams’ skulls. The Baron’s exquisite taste in only the finest bathroom fixtures trumps everything I thought I knew about home design.

Handmade Metro: Exodus themed brass 12.7mm bullet lighter.

Yamantau Bunker shitter!

This solitary toilet can be found cowering from abuse and disrepair at the vast bunker at Mt. Yamantau. The rollover image shows the exquisite detail afforded by the miracle of nightvision goggles! This is the only shitter on the level that I had access to, but I have to believe there are others in the unexplored areas. In addition to the grunts, this bunker was supposed to boast heads of state and the finest military minds, and I can’t believe they’d all be shitting together in harmony.

The Yamantau Cannibal Troupe are truly evil creatures. It’s terrible what they did to this room. That urinal doubles as a deadly weapon. If the cave troll from Moria came after you, you could actually use this urinal to defend yourself against it. I’d really love to know why I keep having to ask ‘where is the sink’, and I would vastly prefer if the alternative was our customary standard of sanitation. I cannot stress this enough: The bathroom is the staging ground for a multi-step process, and one of those steps is washing your god damn hands when you’re through!

At this point, I have to pause, because question marks have started percolating around my ears. In Metro: Exodus, the elevated cistern flushable toilet boasts significant popularity all across Russia, and it shows up in a lot of my screenshots. The design dates back to the era of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1592). It’s certainly a conversation piece, and though some (who?) might deem it elegant, the presence of this ancient machine here at the Yamantau Bunker poses several issues. First, the issue of materials efficiency. If this thing breaks, where’s anyone going to find the obsolete valves and gaskets it needs? And actually maybe that’s why it looks this way, because there is actually no way to fix it. Second, there was extensive bombing in this region in the decades prior to our groups arrival (in fact, we passed a city-sized crater right before the main entrance came into view). The heaving of the ground, along with tremors, would have caused this tank to topple and smash, so it’s just not practical. Perhaps the entire machine was salvaged and installed by a scouting team after the bombing ceased, but I find that to be the most unlikely possibility of all. They would have had to find this object somewhere in Russia, but it probably wouldn’t have even been in a museum because by the time most households in the region had indoor plumbing the design had changed. These anachronisms have me wondering if Artyom snorted a little too much of that blue-green mold, and now he’s got a case of the Fantasies.