Exquisite Suffering

Time was, just saying another character's catch phrase was enough to make people like you. Unfortunately, rapid fire quips aren't enough to save Gex from irrelevance.

One of the least functional games we've covered acts as a springboard for hubris. Namely, we break down exactly which animals we think we could take in a fight. Not that fighting an animal to the death wouldn't make us really really sad.

People likely voted for this episode because the game is named after diarrhea. I'm sorry to report that there's not as much bodily function talk in this episode as you'd think there would be. Although this might come as a relief to most of you.

This uninspiring platformer about a bubblegum chewing pirate slayer gives us plenty of opportunity to talk about Gary facing his greatest fear: Jellyfish.

It's not enough to be weird! This early PSX game is about a tribe of cavemen who wander a mostly empty void, eating cookies and maybe collecting bones to make into a tower. We run out of steam talking about it, so we switch to a nuclear grade digression that you'll have to hear to believe.

Our old friend Matt Dickie turns his sights on making a... realistic?... simulation of prison life. Featuring lots of people in Bane masks. And full-screen brawls. And people carrying around television cameras. And toilets. And people telling you to stop being friends with yourself.

Nothing good ever happens to fictional people named Alec. Alec Trevelyan, Alec Holland, Alec Baldwin.... You might look at Swamp Thing fondly because of Alan Moore's run on the comic series, but most other attempts to use this strange character end up being really misguided and hollow. Case in point, this very bad NES game based on the very bad animated series.

In this strange episode we try to cancel Eliot Ness, the babyfaced cop who brought down Al Capone. And we settle on pretending to be mad about adoption for some reason. Also, the game adaptation of The Untouchables is really bad and you shouldn't play it.

There once was a time when the more your PC tried to be a console, the worse it was. And that's all this is: worse Castlevania. But we don't have a lot of new stuff to say about Castlevania, so instead we hear four short horror stories about being trapped in cars with baffling people.

Champions of Zulula is an amateur DOS fighting game where you play as any number of champions from strange, fantastical races like "Squid" and "Ostrich" who have gathered in Zulula to fight for supremacy. The game isn't very good, so instead we spend time clowning on ridiculous commercials from Gary's youth. We discuss three Eagleman Insurance commercials in this episode. Here's the first , here's...

Science fiction allows us to create infinite worlds of infinite possibility, exploring truths and synthesizing concepts with no limitation whatsoever. You could, for example, say that the far future of the Earth will basically just be the 60s but with robots.

This forgotten followup to Dragon's Lair and Space Ace is charmless, confusing, and it expects us to care about an imp named Fritz. So instead, we revisit the concept of Roomba Force.

Virtual Bart takes us back to a simpler time when we had much grander ideas of what VR could do. And it uses this unfettered imagination to give us Pig Bart and Dino Bart. We also spend time wondering what Virtual Eggs could do, which brings our attention to this monstrosity .

You ever looked at an owl and thought, "Gee, I wonder what kind of kingdom and warriors that owl belongs to?" The truth is that it's a very dumb creature which we've anthropomorphized, and all it cares about is where and when it will find its next vole.

What do you do when you've told the story of the cabin twice? You tell it a third time! Ash goes back to the cabin for basically no reason, and gets into bad Resident Evil clone hijinks that are pretty much devoid of the humor from the movies.

There are many implausible things about the movie Cliffhanger. First and foremost, we're to accept John Lithgow as a villain. Second, is everything else. The Cliffhanger game, unfortunately, is an uninspired brawler/platformer in the vein of Double Dragon. And we didn't even play the version that has you, apparently, snowboarding on a corpse.

When you think of Alone in the Dark, you probably associate it with good things. It helped establish the survival horror genre! It's Lovecraftian as all hell! But the truth is, outside of that first game, the series just isn't that good. Enter Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare for GameBoy Color... the port that shouldn't be, of the reboot that shouldn't have been.

It's a late-era PSX game that looks and plays like a launch-era PSX game, and all it has going for it is its sense of humor. You play as Mort, a chicken who must rescue baby chicks from the invading interdimensional cubes from Buillon.

Before there was a Grand Theft Auto III, we had Carmageddon to generate moral outrages amongst legislators. The PC games were ahead of their time, which makes the hobbled N64 port a real shame. But can car combat be any good? And did we have it wrong when we said demolition derbies were boring?

You all voted for another 3D fighter, this time with characters too boring to do a roster run. So we talk about QAnon and the fallout left to us after Biden's inauguration! We hope you're happy.

A familiar face can move a lot of units. That was the theory behind releasing Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring in the U.S. It was a bad 3D arcade fighter, so they decided to sweeten the pot with characters from Final Fantasy VII, and they added a weird dungeon crawling mode. It wasn't enough.

Sprung was an early attempt by Ubisoft to Americanize the dating sim/visual novel. It's the story of either Brett or Becky, two lifelong friends who are headed to a mountain to get their bone on with randos, when they should realize what they were looking for was right in front of them all along. It's really not good, and we talk about how weird this kind of dating culture is in general.

This is a very strange game from that time in the early 2000s when people looked at PlayStation 2s and said "I think this should make people horny". You play as Hugh Hefner in a mash-up of The Sims and Smut Tycoon, throwing parties and hiring writers and things like that. Disappointingly, the actual game features very little Piss 2000.

It's rare that we find something so strange and awful that we need to share it in its entirety. This strange Snow White "game" is one of those awful things. This is a low effort minigame collection where each game clumsily uses assets from the centerpiece of the product, a seven minute animated retelling of the story of Snow White. Except is bad. Really bad. At a certain point we decide to just do...

Freddy is objectively the most entertaining of the slasher monsters. But how could he get better? Sure, he has clashed with Jason before, but that's not a conflict of like vs. like. We propose a friendly rivalry between Freddy and Beetlejuice, where they can really sharpen their blades against each other... As long as Lydia doesn't make Beetlejuice soft first.