Abject Suffering

Legacy of the Wizard is a good game. Listen to us talking about making No. 3.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound he pulls the spitting high tension wires down. Helpless people ona subway train scream, bug-eyed as he looks in on them. He picks up a bus and he throws it back down as he wades through the buildings toward the center of town. Oh no, they say he's got to go. Go go Godzilla! Oh now, there goes Tokyo. Go go Godzilla! History shows again and again how na...

Mediocrity is the most mortal sin of all. So we'll kindly excuse ourselves out the side door.

This might be the third rail, but I'll bend over and take it. Spray your disapproval all over me if you must, but I believe, to the very last drop of my being, that we need more positivity in this world. If it has to come in the form of Cho Aniki, in its celebration of the male form, then sign me up.

Like thieves in the night, we assassinate a game that is misguidedly referred to as a "classic" by some poor souls who don't know any better.

Being on a weekly format, we've had to cut some corners. Syndication is tough, so in order to keep our quality consistent (if mediocre), we've farmed the creation of these shows out to a network of corporate subsidiaries. Stay tuned for the reveal of Gary and Kole alarm clocks and calendars. It's a living!

Come with us to a time before sound, when dancing cats were no longer condemned as signs of witchcraft, even though they carried bags of tricks. To a time where Kole, unstuck in time, actually liked Felix the Cat at a young age. To a time when we play an amazing platformer on this show that is ostensibly about bad games.

Faster than a frightened cockroach. More powerful than my aversion to the sun. Able to disappoint your parents in a single loan. It's Superman 64!

Jenni from Video Games Taco joins us to answer the most pressing question of our time: "Is horses like cars but with meat?" Special Guest: Jenni Polodna.

It’s strange but true, but customs that we attribute to a given locale often have shared roots. For example, did you know that seppuku and pumpkin carving come from the same, misguided place? Listen to the end to find out! We are joined by Riff from Video Games Hot Dog. Follow him at @rifflesby . Special Guest: Riff Conner.

There are many ways in which a man can be small. Let's take stature as a given. There's also pettiness, deceit, closed-mindedness... All of these diminish us. What else diminishes us? Shrink rays of our own design. We already live in an alien world, we just don't have the perspective to appreciate it. Additionally: These cans with articulated lids don't speak with H. Jon Benjamin's voice, and jetp...

In the long view, the Ninentdo 64 might be Abject Suffering, the system. In our initial estimate, the NES seemed like the most fertile and hateful ground... but the N64 is a remarkable moment in history where everyone's reach exceeded their grasp. Example: Body Harvest, an open world game that came out almost a decade before open world games were good. But someone had to be first, right?

We're not fond of turning nouns into verbs, but "thrifting" is to be considered a valid terminology for the purposes of this podcast. We're not proud, and we never said we weren't hypocrites. We also never promised to do things like "actually talk about the game we're supposed to talk about". That's your bad. You assumed that.

Squares. Circles. Tetrahedrons. The stately geodesic dome. Icosahedrons. Cubes. Hypercubes. Sentient cubes. BALLZ.

How does a person feel when they stare into the smoldering, waiting eyes of their creation? When it clambers for your attention... wanting love, wanting validation... wanthing to feel something, ANYTHING. That's how God feels about you ever day. God loves you. To death. Special Guest: Brayton Cameron.

Not everyone knows the creation myth for anime. One day in a peaceful village in Japan, a truck carrying a surplus of decimal places from the war overturned, spilling extra zeroes and permanently altering the population. What was once 20 was soon 20,000. And so on, and so on, in kind. That's why everything in anime is predicated on shouting ridiculously high numbers... because the creators had no...

Stones are pretty neat. They have things to say about the world around us. Like Andy Dufresne once said, "All it takes is pressure and time." Natural forces shape the elements of our world into beautiful crystalline forms that dazzle and delight. What stones can't do is support an entire multimedia blitz with bad puns related to (ugh) rock and roll.

Your average hot tub is kept at around 100 degrees farenheit. While many find this temperature to be pleasing on their muscles and soothing on their joints, what they don't realize is that this is also approximately the temperature of the inside of their buttholes. And, in fact, the act of sharing a hot tub with a group of strangers is a form of communal Butthole Soup Making. So, think about that...

We might secretly like sports. Or, at least, Gary might. One imagines him as a closeted basketball hound, feverishly building brickets for his Springtime Fever league, going in on office pools to see which squadrons will tame the orange bounce.

Captain Planet got a raw deal. Nobody knows why he woke up the way that he did, with a head shaped like a globe. You can't blame him for being bitter... a guy with a globe for a head walks into a bank, he ain't gonna get a small business loan. So he leans into it, hanging out with some teens by the Stop-n-Grab. They scour the gutters for bottles to deposit. Captain Planet takes a cut of the procee...

We're surrounded every day by things that will outlive us. This glass, if it doesn't shatter, will probably be in a Goodwill long after I'm dead... helping some other soul drink water without getting their shirt wet. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just like this glass. Once, they didn't exist. Then they started existing. And then they didn't stop existing. The NES game is an artifact of that...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take this container of Vaseline, and smear it all over these Doritos. Just really get it in there. That's right. Rub it real good. Now stack them up and press your face into it. You deserve this, don't you? Welcome to the N64 club. Welcome to the new death.

If people don't stop having sex, then the human race is done for. The church has done all it can, but it's not enough. We must instead turn to our masked vigilante saviors to stop this sexy, sexy scourge once and for all. Jason Voorhees gets a pretty good start at Camp Crystal Lake, but I think I speak for everyone when I say "He hasn't gone far enough."

Home Alone was written by John Hughes. So were a bunch of other movies. He was a fixture, and then he just went away. Was he aware of this game? Did he conceive of the stereotyped mobsters that are in it? Were the giant spiders under the house the whole time... waiting? Who knows. Digital Daniel Stern will outlive us all.

You've gotta love a good moral panic. Of all the things that were supposed to ruin me as a child, very few of them did. Instead they twisted me and shaped me into the man I am today... Simpsons fixations and all. What I should have been wary of was crass commercialism... an avalanche of shitty licensed GameBoy platformers that had little to no relation to their source material (or little to no rel...