Abject Suffering

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.

I don’t believe we’ve covered a game from Lithuania on the network… until now. Extreme Sprint 3010 is a literal Running Man game, if running man was about dumpy little guys ambling lazily toward the camera. We also talk about War-Torn Portland, and Gary’s fascination with the show and phrase “Farmer Wants a Wife”.

Blue Stinger has the call to take you to Dinosaur Island and not have you fight any actual dinosaurs, and this is the least of its sins. From the same developer as Illbleed, it’s one of the many Resident Evil clones that history forgot, slightly bolstered by the fact that it was exclusive to the Dreamcast, which is a wounded baby bird that must be protected at all costs. We also talk about hiring...

Bigfoot is, unfortunately, not about big hairy cryptids. Instead, it’s about monster trucks, which we are very bored of… until we make one of the most profound 180s in podcasting history.

Yo Noid! 2 is a comedy game that expands on the adventures of the Noid as he hops and bops to fight for his continuing relevance. It’s a fine platformer, but boy is the story and humor dated at this point! We also talk about Hatsune Miku, whether or not Tablet is bread, and expression vs. performance.

Finally a very old piece of media that Gary and Kaye can agree on: Gumby. He’s a psychedelic little shapeshifter who hasn’t been relevant since the sixties, and he has but one single video game about him.

Quarantine ends up being a very bad Doom clone, but instead of DoomGuy, you’re DoomCar, and you can only see five feet in front of you. And its snarl of lore is just too boring to pick apart. So instead we ask… what was the deal with the Three Tenors, and do you think you could take them in a fight?

This reskin of a Goemon game is kind of fun and interesting, despite its problems. But the discovery of Cowboy Kid's amazing American cover art leads us into a deep well of appreciating the Gay Cowboy trope as a celebration of having fun with the guys. The "Life at the Outpost" video is required viewing.

Todd hates slime. He hates it when things get goopy. So he went to a planet full of it to exact his revenge. We, however, are indifferent to slime, and also think this game isn't too terribly bad. So we talk about the dead-end economics of the slime-content, and carousels for some reason.

Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum advertises itself as a lost NES adaptation of the Garbage Pail kids line of collectible trading cards. In reality, it’s a modern game made by talented devs who make games for NES hardware. And it’s pretty fine! But there are so many Garbage Pail kids to talk about, so we spend most of our time camping out on them. Want 204 bonus episodes of t...

It’s hard to think of a more damning indictment of the state of the world in 2025 than the fact that a cheap RTS developed to shock people with gender stereotypes in 1996 is really tame in comparison to what happens today. What happens in this game is by no means good, but it plays in tropes that are so outdated as to be cartoonish. Tim HomeImprovement would tell it to get better material. Want 20...

You are a rock and roll musician who fights creatures in virtual reality! You embody rock'n'roll in every way except the music. What's more, you received a job offer from Uganda!

Dynamite Dux is a forgotten Sega arcade beat-em-up with a profoundly cursed aura. Play five minutes of it and tell me this game isn’t haunted to hell and back. Then, come with us as we talk about the raunchy easter egg that took people 30 years to uncover.

Are you ready for an episode about a notoriously derided Superman game hosted by two people who don’t really care for or know about Superman, and haven’t seen that new movie everyone’s raving about? We hope so!

Picking games to cover on Abject Suffering is hard. We don’t like hitting ones that have been talked to death. So sometimes we just grab something with a name that calls out to us. What’s a Troddler? What does a Troddler mean for my life? We never would have guessed that Troddlers, a game nobody has heard of, might actually be a pretty fun puzzle game. Color us shocked!