Abject Suffering

BioForge is an also-ran in the world of Alone in the Dark clones, telling the story of a man who wakes up augmented into a cyborg on an alien ship. But you use the NumPad to kick, so everything neat about it goes out the window. It WAS, however, featured in a book called “1001 Games to Play Before You Die”, and boy is that list suspect.

We walked into this one completely unaware of preexisting stereotypes about professionals who drive white vans. Apparently Britons have thoughts. And as a joke game, this kind of works for a minute. So instead we talk about how to properly brand a plumbing company to attract a clientele that doesn’t really want to talk about it.

Haven: Call of the King is a PS2 platformer that doesn’t want you to think it’s a platformer. It wants you to think it’s anything and everything all at once. That’s why they don’t want you to call it a “platformer”, they want you to call it a “FreeFormer”. Which is… hey listen, we’re really sorry about this one, a lot of the episode is dedicated to trying to figure out how to get Gary a wheelbarro...

Nickelodeon was at the height of their powers in the 90s when they decided to start throwing more and more Nicktoons down the chute. This led to them trying to capture the grotesquery of Ren & Stimpy without any of its transgression. Thus, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was born, a show about monsters who live in a dump trying to learn to scare humans. This predated Monsters, Inc. by several years, bu...

The Oregon Trail is a simple game, but it’s timeless. The Amazon trail is complicated and involves time traveling magic panthers, and nobody has thought about it in thirty years. There’s a lesson there. Additionally, there are lessons in hiring contractors to fix your bathroom, and lessons about how the Liar’s Dividend has made public defecators of us all.

This is a sequel episode to Abject Suffering 619: Wild Woody. Look, we totally intended to record an episode about a video game. But sometimes you’re at a discount grocery store and you stumble across the deal of a lifetime. How many lives could you change with $100?

It’s time for another McDonald’s episode because they released a new game on the sly when they brought back the Changeables Happy Meal Toys. You know, those little toys that are like Transformers but the “disguise” form is food that scientists labored over to make sure you’d eat it forever. This game is basically nothing , a little Flash-like web game platformer. But this new toy drop has wildly e...

Look out! It's tiny Sweettooth! He's going to run us over in his tiny car!

This episode is about a Donkey Kong sequel that's about a man who kills bugs. Kaye also talks about schlepping her cats across the country and Gary uses a bathroom in a haunted house.

The Dangerous Dave games are a series of PC platformers that acted as a precursor to Commander Keen, except with a redneck aesthetic and hyperviolence. This entry is hard, but not terrible, so we talk about how modern Helltimes have rendered thinking about having superpowers unpalatable.

Beast Wars: Transformers is an ugly show, and the PlayStation game based on it is even uglier. It’s a little bleak to consider that the cheap animation of the 80s cartoon is the best that these robots would ever look. So instead, Gary proposes a new sex move called “Trick or Treat”, and we work out the logistics of how to pull it off.

It’s honestly weird that we haven’t already covered the NES version of Bad Dudes, a game with an infamous intro and horribly choppy handling. So Kaye brings it as her vanity pick, and we talk about how bad times have also made ALL of us into Bad Dudes.

Friday Night Funkin’, a rhythm game credited with keeping Newgrounds relevant in the 2020s, is actually pretty good. The music works better than the visuals, and the fan community is really… enthusiastic… but there’s not much to hate here. So instead we talk about Gary’s trip to San Francisco, where he got mindfreaked.

Love Is… is a very sad and weird comic strip about naked eight year olds who are married and like being really bossy about what is and isn’t love. The game is nothing, but we cannot bring ourselves to stop diving into the comic’s archive to boggle at what was once (and apparently still is?) acceptable.

Minority Report: Everybody Runs is a licensed tie in game to a movie where ladies lay eggs that tell the future. Since this is a perfect fit for us, we talk about what precog powers would do to our lives, and Kaye talks about preparing for her upcoming move.

The Biker Mice from Mars was an also-ran in the Turtles boom of the early nineties. Its premise was exactly what the title implies, and it relied on the idea of bikers being a lot cooler than they actually are. But given any chance to talk about the Turtles, we dig into the missed potential in not focusing on the TEENAGE part of TMNT.

Panic! isn’t really a game, it’s a mouse training program with some context-free visual gags. Faced with the possibility that disliking this makes us sticks in the mud, we talk about why this presentation is a disservice to the very necessary emotion of whimsy.

We’ve done most of the major Christmas-themed games, so we had to dig deep and find some of the worst slop Steam could provide. Satan Santa is an asset flip game that makes generous use of AI in its text and marketing materials. A demon has replaced Santa and a kid needs to walk really slow about it.

Rock n’ Roll Racing is a game that people love. It’s pog monsters doing combat racing from an irritating isometric perspective, set to SNES chiptune renditions of classic rock songs. For what it is, it’s hard to find too much to complain about… so we talk about Gary’s ongoing crisis of whether or not he should become best friends with his dentist.

Everyone has to start somewhere. For Cliff Blezinski, starting meant making a pale imitation of Shadowgate called Palace of Deceit: The Dragon’s Plight. Playing it is a master class in what makes Shadowgate good. But you can’t be too hard on the kid for it, he was sixteen. Be hard on him for the things he said and did later.

Gamer Simulator is an unfinished piece of slopware available on Steam that doesn’t really simulate being a gamer, as much as it simulates being under a geas that makes it so you can only derive sustenance from powerups you find in video games. And when you’re done eating virtual hamburgers, you can learn about the cruelest reality television shows of all time.

At the twilight of Macauley Culkin’s first act, he released a trio of flops that included the movie The Pagemaster, a combination live action and animated film where he plays an awful little nerd who learns confidence by going into books. Because it was 1994, they made a ton of very bad and loose platformers based on this stinker of a property. We talk a little bit about those before digressing on...

The kids today don’t know the cautionary tale of Spore, Will Wright’s big gamble on a universal god sim that absolutely didn’t pay off. And even fewer kids know about the avalanche of Spore shovelware that followed EA taking a bath on the main game. It’s so fitting for a game about evolutionary viability to drown in its own ooze.

We thought there would be meat on something called “Action Man”, but then we found out that it’s just a re-badging of what we in America know as G.I. Joe. Which is disappointing. While we wait to talk about these exciting “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles” next week, we also discuss the Free Willy animated series, and try to decode why kids everywhere are saying “6-7”.

Franko: The Crazy Revenge is a very bad shooter that, because of regrettable economic and political conditions, became the Polish gaming industry’s crown jewel for a little bit. And though the game is bad, it does have a very funny and sleazy energy about it. We end the episode by taking a moment to talk about the horrors of Granny’s Daycare.