Abject Suffering

Listen, Mercenary Force isn’t a bad game at all. It’s actually quite interesting, if a bit too hard. A side scrolling shooter where you control four feudal Japanese warriors? It’s a good premise! Nobody knows what Gary was thinking when he brought this one. “Why is one of the hosts named differently? What happened!?” Kaye is transitioning! Find out more here.

Given how many super soldiers there are out there, you’d think there would be more social support for them. Groups, meetings, organizations. Shit, did I just reinvent the Venture Bros. from first principles? Come in and find out! “Why is one of the hosts named differently? What happened!?” Kaye is transitioning! Find out more here.

This week a patron demand takes us into a discussion about a game that Gary likes quite a bit. The Jurassic Park SNES game is open world, mixed perspective, and overall a huge surprise, since Ocean doesn’t usually do work this interesting.

It’s the future. You’re on a gameshow. You need to wipe out the speed gangs with vigilante car violence, murdering every last one of them… for real! But not really though. But really, it’s VR. But it’s LIKE death. But not death. We can’t emphasize enough how unlike and like real death this is.

Cybermania ‘94 [See Adaptation Decay 97, true believers!-- Grinning Gwen] reminded us that there’s a Dennis Miller game on the 3DO. And we figured we might as well take a deep dive into a guy who sucks, via talking about a very strange multimedia product from the nineties.

We’ll be honest, this isn’t a bad game. A Tony Hawk game will generally have a high floor for quality, unless it’s Downhill Jam or something. No, this is here because you voted for it, and it’s also the most Bam Margera you’re going to get in a video game by volume. And though we love Jackass, there’s a lot to dislike about ol’ Bam Bam himself.

A sub-par Guitar Hero clone that doesn't list band names or anything. Just shitty, shitty covers of pop songs.

What would it take to get you interested in football? Knights? Ogres? Vikings? Oh, none of the above… Well, you’re going to be very disappointed with this week’s game then. We’ll work on making tennis cooler next.

For our very special 600th episode, we talk about the most video game-shaped thing you could get that wasn’t a video game: the Tiger Handheld Electronics game. These heavily licensed consolation prizes were barely interactive, made heinous noises, and were ubiquitous in the early nineties. You can play many of them on the Internet Archive, but why would you?

Did you know that Howie Mandel made a series of kids games? Did you know that the music was a collaboration between artists from Pink Floyd, Yes, the Doobie Brothers, and Supertramp? If you did, that’s a very strange thing to know.

When you're a teen, you do stupid things. You might drive recklessly, you might make some off-color jokes you won't be proud of later, or you might make a dating sim with your friends that will be on the internet forever. That's the case with Get the Girl, a DOS quiz game by a group of teens who have a very tenuous grasp on how to interact with women.

Hey folks, Herc’s Adventures is actually kind of a good game. Made by the Zombies Ate My Neighbors team at LucasArts, it expands on that formula with some neat ideas like its novel death mechanic and its open world. But to be honest, a lot of this episode is informed by residual Guppy Energy left over from recording the Sonic 3 Adaptation Decay with Will.

Once you’ve played Lemonade Stand, you start seeing Lemonade Stand everywhere. This week’s game is like that, but the Lemonade is trucks. And the rainy day is a drunk driver careening into you for no reason, ending your cross country haul. Which inspires us to rank vehicles by how scary they would be to drive.

Everyone’s seen the warning they put on cans of soda: Don’t photograph this or it will ejaculate all over the place. That universally acknowledged fact is the basis for the joke of OnlyCans: Thirst Date, a free comedy game where you take pictures of sexualized pop cans and are graded on how good they cum.

Honestly, how did we go so long without talking about this? The Cat in the Hat is an infamously bad movie, and stories about its botched production are how we learned that Mike Myers is a real dick. Which is a shame, given the Wayne’s World of it all. The biggest surprise here is that the game, a 2.5D platformer, isn’t terrible.

A patron demanded that we talk about a kinda good game, played incorrectly. Virtua Cop was genuinely impressive not because of its 3D graphics, but because for the first time enemies would animate and move and not just be pop up animated gif targets. Honestly, that’s probably enough, though you really want to play this in the arcade.

Rocky Rodent is a dine-and-dashing menace, and one of the most unsavory-looking characters we’ve discussed on this show. Everything about this IREM Sonic clone is off, in the way SNES slop tends to be. We also talk about ringmaster and bellhop uniforms, for some reason.

You likely don’t know what Spider-Man: City Raid is. It’s not a big budget title like the the Activision movie tie-ins or the recent Insomniac titles. In fact, it has no official license at all. It’s a Flash game made purely for the love of Spider-Man, and the Ram Jam song “Black Betty” for some reason.

This week we talk about the little-known PS2 game adaptation of Home Alone, a Christmas classic that was already super old in 2006 when this came out. But honestly, there’s very little there to talk about. Instead, we camp out on the taxonomical horror of a picture of corndogs Gary took ten years ago. Here’s the photo: https://bsky.app/profile/garybutterfield.bsky.social/post/3ldi4heqxj22c

What is the meaning of Inspector Gadget? Is he basically a cyberzombie, which would explain the bungling? In which ball is the essence stored? This mostly on-topic episode is not afraid to ask the important and hard-hitting questions about this awful metal man.

Bubble Bobble is elemental! How could you screw it up? Well, they found a way. Bubble Bobble Revolution isn’t just bad because it’s nonfunctional… even if you could get past level 30, it would still be an ugly game that feels bad in your hands. But there isn’t much to say beyond that, so enjoy a meandering talk about what the existence of the Costco Guys says about our chances of the world getting...

With a name like The Brainies, you know Gary brought this game to the show. He’s been on a tireless search for new Zoombinis, new Babos, new Creatures… any annoying little guy to dunk on. The problem is, the Brainies don’t got the sauce. And they might be kinda racist?

Poker Night 2 is a perfectly fine concept for a game, featuring beloved characters playing Texas Hold ‘Em after dark. Brock Sampson, Ash Williams, and Sam from Sam & Max are all delightful in their own right and you wouldn’t be blamed for wanting to hear their quips. And then along comes Claptrap.

We’ve gotten mad at a lot of things on this show. Some of them just, some of them goofy. This might be the maddest we’ve gotten recently, trying to figure out what the Pink Panther’s whole deal is. Why has he been an enduring character? What does he even do? There’s zero information online, but this fucker is everywhere and someone needs to answer for it.

Shark Tale is a notoriously crappy DreamWorks movie, which is already a deck with a lot of low cards. But DreamWorks had this habit of making good-looking licensed games based off of these movies, and for some reason they are kinda beloved. That is a false idea, though. It’s a bad thing to believe, that this could have been good.