Abject Suffering

It turns out "Zendor" is what your grand uncle called "debt". What I'm saying is you just inherited a lot debt.

Come KRUM!

Wine, sodomy and the lash. Or something like that I'm assuming. I'm not saying it is porn but I sure felt embarassed accidentally googling it at my day job.

Inside of you are two wolves. One is a Litil Debil. The other, a Litil Angle. Who will you listen to?

You know, it's probably about time we give freeware Linux games a shot! Ew. Nevermind, let's go to Chili's.

Nobody knows why, but people in the 90s thought if golf video games had comedians in them, maybe that would connect with the kids? Anyway, Eugene Levy fails to convince the boys that this golf is all that whacky.

Bionic Commando is one of the best games for the NES. Taking away your jump and forcing you to rely on predictable swinging physics was (and is!) a novel concept, matched by a delightful semi-serious, semi-goofy tone and exquisite level design. So you can imagine how high hopes were when a sequel was announced. Well, that was a mistake.

Tootinis is a game that feels like a student project that ended up getting a little money behind it. Very little money, mind you. So we're fully in "Please Be Cool" mode because all these people did was make a weird kids' game with baffling characters and a very funny intro. Additionally we talk about what Totino's Pizzas become when they enter your mouth, the new garage that Kole saw, and Gary's...

Magician Lord is an okay arcade game about a transforming wizard. That's not what's important, however. What's important is that we know that 2023 will be the year of the Buff Wizard, Who May or May Not Be a Frog Man. It's imperative that we embrace and hype this early so we can make it happen. Extremely ripped wizard. Possibly a humanoid frog. Strong as hell. Lots of lightning. Lovingly rendered...

We've spoken on the charms and pitfalls of FMV video games before, and we're happy to report that Corpse Killer falls well on the charms side. It's a dead basic lightgun game, making Terminator 2 look like Time Crisis, but it also has ridiculously over the top acting and a bonkers story. So instead of laying into it for too long, we talk about how it's driving us crazy that someone out there is tr...

City Connection is a fun arcade maze chase that takes place in a world where everything's the same, but cars jump for some reason? So we talk about the dangers of being so competitive that you scream about Bingo, and also cap things off with a vexatious Burger King anecdote.

First off, it's podcast malpractice that we didn't make this entire episode about the video for the KISS song "Psycho Circus". That's on us. We weren't even that distracted by the ho-hum Lithtech shooter that is KISS colon Psycho Circus colon The Nightmare Child. We just got very wrapped up in the concept of KISS itself, which basically amounts to Insane Clown Posse for boomers. This is also part...

The image of a person with an eyeball for a head is very good. That's the nice thing we'll say about the Residents. But Bad Day on the Midway underlines some fundamental problems we have with them, since it's unpleasant to look at and listen to, and not to a very interesting artistic result. You poke around a demented carnival amusement park learning about mentally ill people, killers, and racists...

Who is Seymour, and where is he going? What does he want when he gets there? We can only answer one of these questions, but we barely care. Seymour catfished us, saying it was a game about a little potato man, only for us to learn that it's actually another horrible Dizzy game with the serial numbers filed off.

Simon the Sorcerer is a rude teen who likes boobs, doesn't know what's happening around him, and never stops talking. This, his improbable second adventure, draws him back into the fantasy world because he can't stay out of containers designated for clothing. Is there zero joy to be had in a Simon the Sorcerer game? We don't know. But this one just never... stops... talking. Why should a joke ever...

It's time to do a mini-WOFF! about one of the funniest games we've played recently: The Looker. It's a candid and scathing parody of The Witness, taking place on a very similar island, and having you use a pen to solve placemat mazes while listening to faux-deep audio recordings. We stay on topic throughout this one and spoil quite a bit, so consider going and playing The Looker for yourself . It'...

This week's episode is about Hidden Agenda, a really neat DOS game that is both too serious and too good to joke much about. It's a strategy game where you run a fictional post-revolutionary Central American country, making decisions that steer its development and inevitably piss off the people around you. So instead we talk about Gary's recent solo PRGE, and give some extremely belated takes on t...

It's a shame when a great idea is wasted on a terrible execution. That's what happened with Michigan: Report from Hell. You play as a television camera man who is out with a team covering mysterious and violent incidents in Chicago as a strange fog rolls in. You shape the events through what you choose to film. Great idea, right? Too nothing about it holds together, leaving us with a clunky and aw...

If I was a kid and I got a Muppet game where I couldn't play as Kermit, I'd be pissed. That's the world that Muppet Monster Adventure forces on us, one where people know who Robin the Frog is. The good Muppets have been kidnapped by an evil monster, and it's up to Robin to rescue them, maybe? This is a bog standard licensed platformer, and it's not especially terrible as those go.

Clive Barker's most famous forray into video games is 2001's Undying, but that wasn't his first attempt. Before that, we learned all about the Nightbreed. It's unclear what a Nightbreed is, how you become one, or what they even do, but this Interactive Movie adventure game does its best to get you up to speed, terrible checkpointing and all.

Listen, it's not great when the way you earn points in a game is to find a lady and have vigorous sex with her before she disappears. That's what happens in Dan Dolme, a game about a man with a large penis whose girlfriend goes missing and he must find her and engage with her sexually. But the whole presentation is so surreal that it's hard to condemn it too much, at least from our point of view....

You had to be around in the early '00s to know exactly how hard Razor scooters were being pushed on us. These were collapsable metal scooters meant for radical teens to ride to class. And they made a game about them, a not entirely terrible Tony Hawk clone. So we spend some time talking about the gimmick shoes that were foisted on us as kids.

People love incremental and idle games. Kole's ambivalent. Gary hates them. Somehow this turned into an extremely on-topic mini-WOFF! about the genre at large, with Cookie Clicker as the starting off point. Welcome to Hell!

Say what you will about stop motion animation, there's an undeniable degree of difficulty associated with it that makes it a little more impressive than CGI emulating the clay sculpture style. This is the core hubris of the "Wallace and Gromit " people hooking up with Dreamworks to make "Flushed Away", a story about a posh surface rat getting flushed down the toilet to fight a frog king. And then...

Better late than never, right? Even if it's 21 years too late. 1986 saw the release of "An American Tail", a Don Bluth-animated film about a family of mice that fled Russia to head to America... 1986 being, of course, one of the last times that an optimistic story about immigration could be told in America. Then, in 2007, some weirdos decided to make a licensed game about it. One that even manages...