Abject Suffering

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

Just so you're not disappointed, this isn't the PSX game that stars Bruce Willis. That would be the similarly anonymous game "Apocalypse". No, this is a really bland cinematic action game that stars a man with amnesia and a bizarre gun arm. It's like Contra, but the bad Contras.

This single-screen asset factory platformer posits the existence of a new kind of nose, while we talk about the nightmare of our cats bringing us a corpse.

It's crazy how developers kept on trying to make first person games happen on the DS, even when it was abundantly clear that they were painful to play. This breaks out into a more serious conversation about innovation vs. proficiency, and we apologize for that. We'll make it goofier next time.

The best, most expansive creepypasta universe lends itself to an admirable fan game. Problem is, it's multiplayer, and playing games with strangers is the pits!

A game that, for legal purposes, is unaffiliated with the real Santa or Christmas.

Crystalis is, first and foremost, a pretty good game. There are fun details about its story, and why they still honor the American dollar, but mostly it serves as a good launching point for talking about the absurdities of NextDoor.

Is there a name for the kind of stealth horror game that's popular with streamers? Things like Hello Neighbor and Bendy and the Ink Machine? Whatever that is, this is one of those, but with a fun, crappy educational vibe. Truth is, this is actually pretty good and fun, so we range far afield on this episode.

You may be thinking, "Hey guys! That Capcom NES Little Mermaid game wasn't bad! What gives?" And you're right. The only crime that game commits is being too simple. This week, we're talking about the very bad Little Mermaid game made for the Sega Genesis, which looked at the Dam level from TMNT and said "hold my conch".

Imagine, if you will, a kind of battling toad. Nobody asked for this episode, we just felt like talking about it. Rare's darling baby that launched a thousand memes, about things ranging from its difficulty to its availability in stores. We don't care for it very much! But we only talk a little bit about why the game doesn't work, and spend most of our time talking about the Dark Queen's Pixar ass...

This survival horror/survival sim set in an arctic base is notable for one reason: It was made entirely in Blender, which is not a game engine. It would be like somehow making a JRPG run in MS Paint. Other than that, it's got a baffling "barely translated" charm... so instead, we talk about how Gary recently developed hypothermia in his house.

We need to re-calibrate what constitutes an "Abject Suffering Emergency". It's hard to tell how earnest the Whiteboyz Wit' Attitude are. On one hand, the music is pretty bad and farcical, but on the other hand, they've been at it for many years. This Steam game is a gussied up sales pitch for their compilation album, featuring some limited rhythm gameplay set to their low production value videos.

This is our second rock band management sim this year, and it's by far the superior to "Rock Star Ate My Hamster". The drug fixation aside, this is a fun little Lemonade Stand sim that has a fair bit of complexity and some of the best procedurally generated names we've seen. Special Thanks to Beyond Reason for the theme song remix.

This week we look at a humble, gag-based point and click puzzle game that's a parody of a parody of MacGuyver. We also talk about the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Junior. At length.

They turned a good book into a very frustrating text adventure.