Abject Suffering

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...

Let me tell you a few things about Michael Henderson. He's a Duckfeed.tv superfan who regularly contributes to our shows. He graciously backed the Watch Out for Fireballs! Kickstarter campaign. He's also a merciless, calculating miscreant who means only to do Gary and Kole harm. We're somewhat convinced that Michael designed Mohawk and Headphone Jack specifically to be as unappealing as possible....

We don't contend with mediocrity that often. So far, the closest we got was Pac Man 2, and that doesn't really count since it's so weird. Captain Skyhawk doesn't really belong here. You fly around and shoot some aliens and stuff, you do a bunch of different kinds of missions, and the graphics aren't terrible. Instead of complaining, just have stories about Kole's childhood and Gary's balloon fetis...

This is the singularity that happens when 1000 bad ideas try and cram their way into a premise that isn't promising. This is our first mascot platformer... any why not live life to the hilt?

Kole has become unstuck in time. This is the epicenter of his primary dissonance: how can he be a 26 year old man, but appreciate Road Runner cartoons and Nick at Nite? The only explanation involves temporal fuckery, and a holistic approach to why he is entirely out of touch with this modern American world. Dream on, and play a bad platformer, you pilgrim of the (pre)modern age.

Saving Private Ryan started out as a Where's Waldo film adaptation. True fact. But Spielberg descended into the heart of darkness, gradually turning Martin Handford's whimsical vision into a twisted hellscape of severed limbs and broken hearts. This NES game is a re-telling of that re-telling.

Michael Jackson put out a game where the objective is to collect as many children as possible. Don't worry, we make the obvious jokes as soon as possible. We continue the streak of Abject Suffering games about known sex offenders. Got any suggestions for others?

It's an allegory for all of mankind's struggle for equality. What if you were born different? What if everyone was afraid of you? What if you were the worst NES game Abject Suffering has played yet?

There aught to be a Chick Tract about Spellcraft. It tells you the reagents and processes necessary to do such awful things as Much to Stone and Return Home. What's this you say? You joust demons? I'll not hear of it. Wait... there's heartbreaking, regret-wracked love letters hidden in the code? Well... huh.

Routine errands beckon to you in a non-maze-like world. You are being mocked by a capricious god whose only mechanical means of influencing you are temptation and punishment. Can you feed your child and get to your finger-licious reward?

So there I am, in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, at about 3 o'clock in the morning, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass, or Ozzy wouldn't go on stage that night. So, Jeff Beck pops his head 'round the door, and mentions there's a little sweets shop on the edge of town. So - we go. And - it's closed. So there's me, and Keith Moon, and David Crosby, breaking into that little...