Exquisite Suffering

Tarzan: Untamed is a kiddie platformer that's not dissimilar to Crash Bandicoot, where the ape man declares war on all of Quebec. Neither Gary nor Kole can really tolerate a Tarzan. His story bores us. So instead, Gary torments Kole with the absolute dumbest fan theory that's ever cropped up on God's green Earth.

Sometimes it takes a Geekwad to save a kingdom. So we must venture back in time to grab outdated stereotypes about nerds and put them to work. Wacky Funsters! is a minigame collection with a budget, an early 90s DOS game that was probably sold in Office Max stores until 2005. And it gets us talking about all of the other not-quite-games that clogged the bargain bins, too.

One of the major dividing lines in video game history is when optical media became cheaper and more plentiful. That brought great stuff like Myst, and a few great FMV games... but it also brought us stuff like "Who Shot Johnny Rock?", a terrible FMV shooting game that's based entirely on fakeouts. Also, Gary torments Kole with a description of a segment from the Tales of the Darkside movie.

150 premium Abject Suffering episodes is a reason for celebration. It was a total accident that we happened to end up covering Chakan: The Forever Man, a cult Genesis game about a man who is cursed to live forever, named Chakan. Chakan is based on an indie comic by a person who goes by the initialism RAK, and RAK has a webpage.   We found the webpage. We were bowled over by what we found there. So...

When a baby is on a girder, you KNOW Gary Butterfield is on the scene. This unreleased prototype of a Lemmings-like game where you play as an angel stopping a baby from crawling into calamity is actually not terrible, just bizarre. Also bizarre? The movie "Baby's Day Out" was popular enough in India to warrant three different adaptations in different languages... including one named, and we're not...

This premium episode is about Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster, a PlayStation game that makes you realize that stunts are only cool when it's actual people doing them. A computer game character can, by definition, do anything its creator tells it to. But this middling beat-em-up provides a good springboard for us to talk about Gary's most recent thrift store find, an amateur comic from the '80s called "C...

It's the year 2012 and vacations are outlawed, so instead of just kicking back at home you engage in some car combat to cart unpleasant tourists around. Rogue Trip's premise is messy, and built on a genre that we don't really care for at all. But it might be a good idea to add some non-killing mechanics to car combat, so it's hard to write this off entirely. The characters are garbage though, and...

The world was clamoring for two things: a remake of Uniracers, and a mascot for Iguana Entertainment. And with Iggy's Reckin' Balls, it got both! This 2.5D racer supposes an abstract world made of racetracks and towers where spherical nonsense monsters vie to win races. And because it was N64 exclusive, you bet there are people who go to bat for it.

The Disney Afternoon cartoons delighted a whole generation. Every one except for TaleSpin, which was clearly the weakest link. It was in the unenviable position of having to go up against DuckTales and Darkwing Duck, so it never stood a chance. But it was popular enough to get a video game adaptation. A kinda good one, made by Capcom. We're not talking about that one. Instead, we're talking about...

The idea of millionaires who happen to be talented artists using their resources to make video games where they go on little adventures is extremely charming. That's our baseline approach to talking about Def Jam: Fight for NY, which is ABSOLUTELY not a bad game. Just not a game for us. But, growing up in the 90s, it was impossible to escape both hip hop and wrestling, even if you wanted to, so we...

Bratz dolls were so hideous that they started a moral panic, and they were also a transmedia property! Movies, TV shows, games, all dedicated to the dolls So Ugly They Made the News. This is one of the more robust mini-game collections we've covered, but we're more interested in the gossip to be found in the comments on the Bratz Wiki pagez.

The year 1998 brought us a Blues Brothers revival that shouldn't have happened, and which nobody wanted. But Dan Akyroid's face gets itchy without those sunglasses, and he charged ahead anyway. Then they made a game adaptation of the movie, kind of, two years later. Instead of talking about that, we talk about the ways that movie revivals have changed, and get really fixated on rebooting the horri...

3 Ninjas is a film franchise that is a beloved favorite of the post-Goonies pre-Sandlot set, and we didn't even realize they made a game of it. There's not much to talk about here, so we instead fixate on the movies, whether or not kids today share our martial arts fascinations, and how Kole is a very bad uncle.

Comix Zone is one of the worst examples of style over substance in the 16-bit era that you'll find outside of Psygnosis games. A perennial inclusion on Sega collections, this brawler about a comic artist who is drawn into his work is just no very fun to play. So we instead pitch the improbable comic adventures of Kole, whose comic gets cancelled... and then things start getting weird in his shut-d...

I'm sorry this is posted out of order! For some reason my original version didn't post. Project Overkill is a simple game whose entire premise is contained in its name... What if you killed a bunch of dudes in a very awkward isometric shooter. That's it. That's the game.

When you're an educational product, literally all you need to do is get the facts right. But it turns out Mario is on a mission to sabotage your kid's education by teaching them myths and lore about historical figures. It's devious in its way... but why is Mario doing it? What does Mario want?

Imagine, if you will, a very bad boy. Now make him 100% worse. That doesn't come close to the awfulness of Dennis the Menace, the young child born to kill the old man. This movie was a nightmare, the old television show was boring, and this game is bad too. So we talk about the times we were menaces ourselves, but mostly we were just weiners.

What if a house was also a monster? This is the essential question of the forgotten work, Monster House. And the game based on the movie based on this question is actually pretty neat. It's an actiony Resident Evil for kids, where you fight possessed household objects with Super Soakers. And speaking of Super Soakers...

Somebody stop him! No, please, stop this horrible green man. The Mask is a very frivolous movie that's all antics and no jokes, and this SNES adaptation isn't much more enjoyable. Stick around for the back third, when we pitch the best police procedural television show ever.

It's a kind of movie they don't make any more, and it's also a pretty good case against that kind of movie. It's just a shame that Chris Tucker will never be able to escape this role... although it's kind of the role he was born to play.

The most notable things about Solstice are its bangin' music and its baffling cover. Beyond that, it's a promising puzzle platformer whose wind is stolen by Europe's fascination with the isometric perspective. Also, we talk about needing lamps to be in society.

Maui Mallard is another entry in the "over-animated, hard to play" Disney animation games. You play as Donald Duck as he's having a horrible identity crisis, sliding back and forth between alter egos in a fugue tango of asset collection. Also, we talk about how embarrassing Sting is.

At least the title of the cartoon is accurate. CGI has been a blight on animation, generally, as the early 2000s wiped away most traditional 2D art and replaced it with cheap, hideous homunculi who vaguely gesture at each other while emitting wacky voices. And no show was more hideous than Butt-Ugly Martians. The cart racer based on it is pretty bad, too.

Someone really needs to put Ocarina of Time on trial for what it did to the pacing of action RPGs. We're too busy talking shit about Kevin Sorbo's bad, bad opinions to do that though.

This simple and forgotten game bounces right out of our minds. Fortunately, Kole makes an admission that drives Gary up the wall, and we spend a good deal of time talking about how reasonable it is to preserve your old things.