Exquisite Suffering

The middle part of the 16-bit era brought us a lot of platformers that were pretty to look at, at the expense of fluidity of play. Garfield: Caught in the Act was a part of this wave, featuring very pretty sprites with fluid animation that really got in the way of moving that big ol' cat around. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about all of the biggest Garfield news...

Mr. Bean is the world's favorite pre-verbal homunculus, blundering around like a Roomba and upsetting society ladies. Don't worry, we don't see Mr. Bean as an indictment of the British isles like, say, Little Britain. We just don't get him! And that probably has to do with not really being exposed to him at an age when Bean antics would have taken. What we can all agree on is that the PS2 game tha...

A groundbreaking 3D animated feature film became a very bad platformer developed and published by... drum roll... Psygnosis! So you know exactly what that means. Impressive but dated visuals and basically unplayable. We also talk about the fundamental problems with Toy Story and its message, and endeavor to rehabilitate Sid's image.

Our centennial premium episode talks about The Adventures of Mighty Max, a truly awful 16-bit platformer based off of the "boy" version of Polly Pocket play sets. But we'd rather spend this time inventing the perfect son, Teeny Timmy, who will cleanse us of our sins.

Listen, Britain. You tried to pull a fast one on us. You pretend to be all smooth and clever, exporting media that shows an acerbic wit alongside truly engaging whimsey. But that facade can't last forever. Not when we here in America know about the disaster of bad taste that is "Little Britain", a sketch show whose only rule seems to be "punch down". And someone thought it would be a good idea to...

Fight Club is an entertaining movie based on a fun enough pulp book. It's also widely misunderstood as endorsing the things it seeks to condemn. All of that nuance is lost when you make the property into a PS2 game that introduces the "x-ray zoom in on broken bones" visual effect, and rewards you with the ability to play as Fred "Limp Bizkit" Durst.

B.O.B. is a pretty insubstantial game, so this episode continues our exploration of iconoclastry before descending into the madness trapped within a particularly tasteless tattoo and the horrible Twitter behavior of a particularly onerous AAA game studio executive.

We catch a strange breeze here and ride it until our sails fray. In the depths of summer, an uninspired platformer causes us to turn toward attacking and dethroning Santa, holiday porn, and how plausible it is to live as a killer for hire. This is continued in the next episode.

A surprisingly fun game about construction equipment gives us inspiration for a product that will revolutionize the lives of everyone and everybody.

Any day you don't wake up as Motaro is a victory. But what's not a victory is Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, a misguided attempt to make a platformer out of the MK engine that looks into the backstory of the series' most famous character. It's just really bad!

This series of elaborate virtual pet games that supposedly modeled very complex genetics and behaviors has spawned a very wholesome community of dedicated weirdos. Which is weird, because all the creatures do is walk left and right.

This game is ridiculously bad, don't get us wrong. But we ended up kind of being down with Homie figurines as a product, despite being ready to find them unpalatable. Turns out their creator is really in tune with his audience, and the toys/comics are a force for good. Additionally: Gary springs an absurd surprise on Kole.

Richard "Dynamite Dick" "Demo Dick" "Rogue Warrior" Marcinko is a foul-mouthed former Navy Seal who committed a bunch of war crimes, wrote an autobiography, then wrote a series of fictional books about things he would have done, then wrote a self help business book. Then 20 years later there was a horrible video game based on him, with a rap song at the end. Mickey Rourke did the voice. Welp, that...

We both like Bomberman quite a lot. This, though, is not Bomberman, because it succumbs to the late-90s sickness of needing to make everything a mascot platformer with shitty friends and too much dialogue. Also, we talk about quarantine and weird reviews. Because of course we do!

It's shocking that we've recorded nearly 500 of these things, and haven't yet talked about an Army Men game. Well, here we are. The first thing you need to understand is that there's a depressing amount of Army Men lore. The second thing you need to understand is that 3DO was a massive bully to publications. The third thing you need to understand is that this game was released on 9/11/2001.

It's a classic fish out of water story, and you must help our Blacktop Bigfoot learn how to serve food, swim in the sewer, and ultimately: fuck. This is a crazy game that feels like an artifact from another dimension, and it's kind of difficult to describe in words.

Hong Kong 97 is a joke game developed by a Japanese columnist back in the mid-90s. In that regard it's actually impressive, though it's difficult to discern exactly what this is satirizing. You play as a heroin-addicted relative of Jackie Chan, trying to stop the "fuckin' reds" from invading the recently annexed Hong Kong. It's super weird, so we talk about clown sex.

A misunderstanding about what a Power Pig is drives the majority of this episode, as we learn how to save the planet from really embarrassing government ad campaigns.

This premium episode is about a cyberpunk roleplaying adventure game with vampires. Because this topic speaks to us so much, we decided to spend a good deal of time talking about the felons our schools hired to inspire us.

If you ever needed proof that these games are pulled for voting randomly, the Christmas game winning in January is it. We spend a good deal of time talking about the nightmare fever dream that is Jim Carey's Grinch movie, and also hit on the absolutely bog standard 3D platformer as well.

Bayou Billy is an infamously bad NES game by Konami. So it only makes sense that we spend the whole episode brainstorming ScorpWorld.

Hooters is an American chain restaurant where all the waitstaff are busty women, dressed in low-cut tanktops and short orange skirts. This burger and wing restaurant decided the best move for their brand was to release an abysmal late-era PSX racing game. But nothing about the game is as interesting as Hooters' history of legal entanglements.

A senseless mascot leads to senseless crime, but that's the way of things. Yo Noid! is better than it has any right to be, that's for sure, but the Noid himself is such a rich vein that we don't dwell on the game for too long. Surprising no one.

This sorely miscalculated minigame collection puts you in the feet of a theme park attendee on a work release program. You get the privilege of picking up garbage while waiting for the Backdraft attraction to open up. So, living the dream, basically.

If I was in a position to at the time, I would have just written "RPG" on a hunk of plastic and sold it in an N64 box. That would have made me a lot of money, given how horny and deprived the N64 audience was for anything role playing. How do I know this? Because Hybrid Heaven is looked on fondly by people who played it, and it doesn't deserve any benefit of the doubt.