Abject Suffering

Dried fruit almost had a home in the NES in this mediocre platformer published by Capcom. The problem is, the popular California Raisins commercials, where sentient fruit performed Motown classics, cost more to produce than they generated in sales. So the California Raisins went away, and this game didn't see the light of day until recently.

And the award for "most obscure Lovecraft game adaptation" goes to... This thing. It's actually not that bad, though! While this is our first Hidden Object game, the genre was extremely popular with casual gamers for a while. And this seems like a good one, eschewing most of the pixel hunting for a basic point-and-click adventure setup. We honestly thought this would be worse.

Back around the turn of the millennium, before social media forever changed what the word "celebrity" meant, "Celebrity Death Match" was a staple of the late night MTV lineup. It was an exceedingly violent claymation show where different celebrities wrestled to the death, often with "jokes" that mostly just made fun of women. They made a game out of this, and we made an episode out that game, whic...

This game is nothing, but it's also a reminder of a forgotten era of Windows 3.1 aesthetics and production values. We know basically nothing about jets, so instead we invent the character of Periodicles and talk about the Torso Killer.

Timecop was created out of necessity once someone realized "Time" and "Crime" rhymed. Jean-Claude Van Damme took a break between railing miles of coke to act as an enforcer for an agency trying to stop people from using time travel to get rich. Then they made a really bad game out of it.

This cinematic game for the NES is slightly divisive between us, as it awkwardly fumbles to be Rainbow 6 before Rainbow 6 was possible on hardware.

Torque may or may not have killed his wife and child, and now he's in a haunted prison with plenty of time to sort himself out... in between monster attacks. This honestly isn't a terrible game, but it's just outrageous enough to talk about here.

This week we talk about Warlocked, the tiny RTS that kind of could. That's right... they made a real time strategy game for the Game Boy Color and it actually works, although it doesn't feel like your usual strategy game. We also talk about a horrifying video involving a toilet.

To celebrate episode 400 of Abject Suffering, we dip into some Steam crapware, based entirely on its funny name. Last of Ass has nothing to do with The Last of Us, instead being a low-effort take on Slender: The Pages meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You're trapped on the land of some goddamn cannibals, and you need to sneak around to get the parts you need to fix your car. That's it.

We believe that Guilty Gear is a good series that just isn't for us. We don't really go in for hyper-stylized, chaotic fighting games like this. What everyone can agree on, we think, is that Guilty Gear Isuka is a very bad entry in that series. In an attempt to add some gimmicks to the series, the developers break the design conventions that make 2D fighters work, making for a uniquely unpleasant...

They killed Marlow Briggs on the wrong day with the wrong scythe. So an ancient Incan god king has revived him as a spirit of vengeance, Captain Planet-like! This game is actually competent, so we spend time talking about how the only reasonable way to spend money if you're a billionaire is to restore your hometown to exactly the way it was when you were ten.

Truth time: Buffy is a blind spot for us. Both of us were watching different things in the 90s, and sometimes it's just too hard to go back to something from that era if you don't have any nostalgia for it. This first Buffy game is an anemic GBC brawler, so instead we talk about our newest supernatural villain: the incompetent Frankenstein.

William Shatner's magnum opus spans nine books, a theatrical release, a television show, and several TV movies, and you probably only know it from an offhand joke on the Simpsons. It's cyberpunk without the punk, where a digital drug named Tek is the scourge of the streets. In the game, you play as a Tek addict turned narc agent who has to hunt down dealers in awkward first person shooter combat....

Eternam is a very strange adventure game. Taking cues from Westworld, you play as Don Jonz, who won a vacation package to a fantasy planet, only to learn that his arch rival is working some kind of scheme there. Decent jokes and horrifying faces abound!

The wild swings that developers took on the PS2 are infinitely fascinating, and one that you don't hear too much about is Dog's Life. It's a bad game, but there's not much else like it. It's open-ish world, you play as a dog, and you can shit and piss at the press of a button. One person does all of the voices, and the ending needs to be seen to be believed.

This mediocre brawler about Kabuki warriors fighting generic monsters doesn't provide much fertile ground for discussion, so we default to talking about tragedy and the ways out education failed us.

In a remarkable bit of serendipity, this game wasn't a hit because you couldn't hit anything in it. Garry Winnick and Steve Purcell set about creating a quirky little brawler for the NES, and they made a comic to promote it. Then they made an animated series to promote it. And people were excited. Then they played the game and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

We all know the stereotypical traits of nerds. Thick glasses, nasally voice... narcolepsy? Lester the Unlikely is a cinematic platformer, a la Out of This World or Prince of Persia, that highlights how important good level design is to that kind of game. However, if you're looking for a game that lets you punish turtles, this one's got your number.. Shredder.

It's a fantasy saga of high flying dragons and alien invasions where nothing at all happpens. This episode is our followup to the Companions of Xanth episode, this time featuring a fantasy series from Kole's childhood. Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern is a Dreamcast adventure game based on Anne McCaffrey's books about dragon riders who don't do very much.

This week's Abject Suffering is about an admirable joke game that asks the question: is it possible for a dog to be bad?

When you're a kid with unlimited free time, and games are not plentiful and the internet isn't around, you end up reading a lot of questionable novels. Enter Xanth: Piers Anthony's problematic saga that continues to this day. Listen as we talk about the Legend adventure game based on the books, and also dig into bad kids fantasy in general.

Imagine a pop-o-matic world. That might have made the Game of Life more interesting! Everything ensconced within perfect plastic and metal, the ideal randomizer. However, another way to make the Game of Life more interesting is to make it into a video game like Jones in the Fast Lane. A lesser-known Sierra title that plays like a board game, you start at the bottom rung of your career, and try to...

We all like Contra, right? What if we did it again but worse? And what if Konami wasn't as great as you remembered it, and you've been letting them coast on Castlevania for decades?

This kind of good PC shoot-em-up game takes your regular arcade shooter like Raiden and adds more story and a dash of humor. That doesn't give us a lot to work with, so we talk about the prospect of grown-up sleepovers, and start recommending products.

Everyone remembers the X-Files game for PlayStation. It was an FMV game that shipped in a huge case with a ton of CDs. Less well-known is this PS2 survival horror game that is... actually pretty neat! We talk about this, and also pitch a spin-off show: The X-Fires. Support Abject Suffering