Abject Suffering
661 episodes — Page 13 of 14
Ep 61Abject Suffering 61: Athena / Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu
E<html><p>"Let's roll with it." "Throw it in." "Fuck it." These are words that cowards are afraid to say. We here at Abject Suffering are far from cowards. No, we don't just admit our mistakes, we lean INTO them.</p></html>
Ep 60Abject Suffering 60: SwordQuest: EarthWorld
E<html><p>For Sale: Single Chalice, gold. Wands, scepters, gems and scimitars optional, will talk. No negotiation, cash only. I'm on to your games. I've been down this road before. Bow before the zodiac puzzlemaster.</p></html>
Ep 59Abject Suffering 59: Fester's Quest
E<html><p>TV Land, 2:00 A.M. - The Addam's Family, "Not Without My Kitty." Uncle Fester has a breakthrough and attaches a functioning second dick to himself. Meanwhile, Gomez disrobes and devours Morticia's elbow skin.</p></html>
Ep 58Abject Suffering 58: Doug's Big Game
E<html><p>Hey everyone, remember Doug? The nineties, am I right? Oh man, life is a grim chore.</p></html>
Ep 57Abject Suffering 57: Fish Dude
E<html><p>Listeners essentially listen to a podcast, and audio program released over the internet, about an ostensibly bad but actually good video game for the Gameboy called Fish Dude. Long story short, and stated as simply as possible, this is a wonderful compliment to video games the world round.</p></html>
Ep 56Abject Suffering 56: The Rocketeer
E<html><p>BREAKING NEWS: Babe Ruth sinks a fly ball right into the cerebral cortex of Joseph Goebbels in this alternate universe where balls are the new phallic symbol.</p></html>
Ep 55Abject Suffering 55: Fist of the North Star
E<html><p>Gather 'round and hear a tale of how two guys can't decide why they don't like anime.</p></html>
Ep 54Abject Suffering 54: Hydlide
E<html><p>Cat*fish [kat-fish]: noun. 1. any of various fishes having a fancied resemblance to a cat. verb (used without object), verb (used with object) 2. Slang. to deceive, swindle, etc. by assuming a false identity or personality online: "He fell in love with her online before he realized he'd been catfished." 3. Slang. to advertise that your game has sweet wizards and skeletons and then have the game not deliver on that promise. "He fell in love with the box to Hydlide before he realized that the game inside was Hydlide."</p></html>
Ep 53Abject Suffering 53: Chex Quest
E<html><p>GENERAL MILLS MEMORANDUM: All Staff. For several fiscal reporting periods, we've all felt the systemic pressure on the Chex brand that arises due to the close relationship between the corn-square vertical and the dairy vertical. If you will open the nearest box of Chex, you will see the results of our new corporate initiative to demonize milk and the phlegm it causes. And you'll also get 50 free hours of America Online.</p></html>
Ep 52Abject Suffering 52: Bébé's Kids
E<html><p>Job Posting: NEEDED - Tone Lōc Lookalike (or: Lōcalike). Does not need to sound like Tone Lōc, I will cover the auditory portion of the ruse. Need to handle infestation of Bébé's kids at my theme park. Will pay in funnel cakes and ride vouchers. Call between 7am and 4pm, ask for "Rap Man".</p></html>
Ep 51Abject Suffering 51: Psybadek
E<html><p>Text found on a flyer of a Bronx corner store: "HEY, YOU KIDS. DROP YOU'RE CYBADEKS AND STOP CONTRIBUTIN TO THE DEGRADATION'S OF SOCIETY. THE NEXT CYPADEK I SEE IS GOING RIGHT IN THE GARBAGE" and then the rest is torn off.</p></html>
Abject Suffering 50: Bad Mojo
E<html><p>We're tired of it. Being pushed around, look down upon, treated like garbage. One day, soon, we're going to... oh god, we're bugs now. Fortune, and good mojo, have ordained that our 50th episode be about a good game that one of us actually played to completion!</p></html>
Ep 49Abject Suffering 49: Darkwing Duck
E<html><p>Script Treatment: Duck Generations. EXT. -- DAY: Donald, Scrooge, Darkwing, and Jason Alexander waddle into a liquor store, shades perched precariously on their bill. Each squawks incomprehensibly, as if trying to out-fury each other. ECU on a nervous clerk's face as they flock toward the corn liquor. The streets would be rowdy.</p></html>
Ep 48Abject Suffering 48: Toys
E<html><p>Hey Robin Williams: You cool, dawg? Can't quite settle on a single voice there. We're on to your "spaghetti against the wall" garbage. Black preacher? So played, and kind of racist. Nobody actually remembers when you were any good at anything.</p></html>
Ep 47Abject Suffering 47: Dudes With Attitude
E<html><p>We were walking the perimeter of the Crick estate, shoring up the tree line and clearing brush. Michael kicked aside some beer cans, and chuckled quietly to himself. "What's so funny?" I asked, wiping my brow to keep the sweat bees at bay. "Teens. It's always the teens" he said, looking back to the compound. My time with Michael had been short, but I knew to let it go. He'd seen his fair share of dudes with attitude, and I could leave it at that.</p></html>
Ep 46Abject Suffering 46: Master Chu and Drunkard Hu
E<html><p>Mark another tally up on the "Canonical Worst Games" wall. Odds are good we're going to clear this pantheon out. One day a hard rain is gonna come, suffering style.</p></html>
Ep 45Abject Suffering 45: Toilet Kids
E<html><p>Wherein we consistently miss the easiest target.</p></html>
Ep 44Abject Suffering 44: Legacy of the Wizard
E<html><p>Legacy of the Wizard is a good game. Listen to us talking about making No. 3.</p></html>
Ep 43Abject Suffering 43: Godzilla
E<html><p>With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound he pulls the spitting high tension wires down. Helpless people ona subway train scream, bug-eyed as he looks in on them. He picks up a bus and he throws it back down as he wades through the buildings toward the center of town. Oh no, they say he's got to go. Go go Godzilla! Oh now, there goes Tokyo. Go go Godzilla! History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men.</p></html>
Ep 42Abject Suffering 42: Shadowrun
E<html><p>Mediocrity is the most mortal sin of all. So we'll kindly excuse ourselves out the side door.</p></html>
Ep 41Abject Suffering 41: Cho Aniki
E<html><p>This might be the third rail, but I'll bend over and take it. Spray your disapproval all over me if you must, but I believe, to the very last drop of my being, that we need more positivity in this world. If it has to come in the form of Cho Aniki, in its celebration of the male form, then sign me up.</p></html>
Ep 40Abject Suffering 40: Strider
E<html><p>Like thieves in the night, we assassinate a game that is misguidedly referred to as a "classic" by some poor souls who don't know any better.</p></html>
Ep 39Abject Suffering 39: A Week of Garfield
E<html><p>Being on a weekly format, we've had to cut some corners. Syndication is tough, so in order to keep our quality consistent (if mediocre), we've farmed the creation of these shows out to a network of corporate subsidiaries. Stay tuned for the reveal of Gary and Kole alarm clocks and calendars. It's a living!</p></html>
Ep 38Abject Suffering 38: Felix the Cat
E<html><p>Come with us to a time before sound, when dancing cats were no longer condemned as signs of witchcraft, even though they carried bags of tricks. To a time where Kole, unstuck in time, actually liked Felix the Cat at a young age. To a time when we play an amazing platformer on this show that is ostensibly about bad games.</p></html>
Ep 37Abject Suffering 37: Superman 64
E<html><p>Faster than a frightened cockroach. More powerful than my aversion to the sun. Able to disappoint your parents in a single loan. It's Superman 64!</p></html>
Ep 36Abject Suffering 36: Horse Isle - The Secret Land of Horses
E<html><p>Jenni from Video Games Taco joins us to answer the most pressing question of our time: "Is horses like cars but with meat?"</p><p>Special Guest: Jenni Polodna.</p></html>
Ep 35Abject Suffering 35: Samurai Ghost
E<html><p>It’s strange but true, but customs that we attribute to a given locale often have shared roots. For example, did you know that seppuku and pumpkin carving come from the same, misguided place? Listen to the end to find out!</p><p>We are joined by Riff from Video Games Hot Dog. <a href="http://twitter.com/rifflesby" target="_blank">Follow him at @rifflesby</a>.</p><p>Special Guest: Riff Conner.</p></html>
Ep 34Abject Suffering 34: Harley's Humongous Adventure
E<html><p>There are many ways in which a man can be small. Let's take stature as a given. There's also pettiness, deceit, closed-mindedness... All of these diminish us. What else diminishes us? Shrink rays of our own design. We already live in an alien world, we just don't have the perspective to appreciate it. Additionally: These cans with articulated lids don't speak with H. Jon Benjamin's voice, and jetpacks are compromised grappling hooks.</p></html>
Ep 39Abject Suffering 33: Body Harvest
E<html><p>In the long view, the Ninentdo 64 might be Abject Suffering, the system. In our initial estimate, the NES seemed like the most fertile and hateful ground... but the N64 is a remarkable moment in history where everyone's reach exceeded their grasp. Example: Body Harvest, an open world game that came out almost a decade before open world games were good. But someone had to be first, right?</p></html>
Ep 38Abject Suffering 32: King of Dragons
E<html><p>We're not fond of turning nouns into verbs, but "thrifting" is to be considered a valid terminology for the purposes of this podcast. We're not proud, and we never said we weren't hypocrites. We also never promised to do things like "actually talk about the game we're supposed to talk about". That's your bad. You assumed that.</p></html>
Ep 37Abject Suffering 31: Episode 31: Ballz 3D
E<html><p>Squares. Circles. Tetrahedrons. The stately geodesic dome. Icosahedrons. Cubes. Hypercubes. Sentient cubes. BALLZ.</p></html>
Ep 30Abject Suffering 30: Cool World
E<html><p>How does a person feel when they stare into the smoldering, waiting eyes of their creation? When it clambers for your attention... wanting love, wanting validation... wanthing to feel something, ANYTHING. That's how God feels about you ever day. God loves you. To death.</p><p>Special Guest: Brayton Cameron.</p></html>
Ep 29Abject Suffering 29: Yu-Gi-Oh!: Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel
E<html><p>Not everyone knows the creation myth for anime. One day in a peaceful village in Japan, a truck carrying a surplus of decimal places from the war overturned, spilling extra zeroes and permanently altering the population. What was once 20 was soon 20,000. And so on, and so on, in kind. That's why everything in anime is predicated on shouting ridiculously high numbers... because the creators had no other choice.</p></html>
Ep 28Abject Suffering 28: Stone Protectors
E<html><p>Stones are pretty neat. They have things to say about the world around us. Like Andy Dufresne once said, "All it takes is pressure and time." Natural forces shape the elements of our world into beautiful crystalline forms that dazzle and delight. What stones can't do is support an entire multimedia blitz with bad puns related to (ugh) rock and roll.</p></html>
Ep 27Abject Suffering 27: Scrapyard Dog
E<html><p>Your average hot tub is kept at around 100 degrees farenheit. While many find this temperature to be pleasing on their muscles and soothing on their joints, what they don't realize is that this is also approximately the temperature of the inside of their buttholes. And, in fact, the act of sharing a hot tub with a group of strangers is a form of communal Butthole Soup Making. So, think about that next time you're in a jacuzzi.</p></html>
Ep 26Abject Suffering 26: Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City
E<html><p>We might secretly like sports. Or, at least, Gary might. One imagines him as a closeted basketball hound, feverishly building brickets for his Springtime Fever league, going in on office pools to see which squadrons will tame the orange bounce.</p></html>
Ep 25Abject Suffering 25: Captain Planet and the Planeteers
E<html><p>Captain Planet got a raw deal. Nobody knows why he woke up the way that he did, with a head shaped like a globe. You can't blame him for being bitter... a guy with a globe for a head walks into a bank, he ain't gonna get a small business loan. So he leans into it, hanging out with some teens by the Stop-n-Grab. They scour the gutters for bottles to deposit. Captain Planet takes a cut of the proceeds, and buys them all 40's of Old English to share. He sleeps in an unadorned firetrap apartment and no longer fears death.</p></html>
Ep 24Abject Suffering 24: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
E<html><p>We're surrounded every day by things that will outlive us. This glass, if it doesn't shatter, will probably be in a Goodwill long after I'm dead... helping some other soul drink water without getting their shirt wet. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just like this glass. Once, they didn't exist. Then they started existing. And then they didn't stop existing. The NES game is an artifact of that violent cultural birth. Also, it doesn't really belong here, except it's kind of flickery and a little too hard.</p></html>
Ep 23Abject Suffering 23: Mission: Impossible
E<html><p>Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take this container of Vaseline, and smear it all over these Doritos. Just really get it in there. That's right. Rub it real good. Now stack them up and press your face into it. You deserve this, don't you? Welcome to the N64 club. Welcome to the new death.</p></html>
Ep 22Abject Suffering 22: Friday the 13th
E<html><p>If people don't stop having sex, then the human race is done for. The church has done all it can, but it's not enough. We must instead turn to our masked vigilante saviors to stop this sexy, sexy scourge once and for all. Jason Voorhees gets a pretty good start at Camp Crystal Lake, but I think I speak for everyone when I say "He hasn't gone far enough."</p></html>
Ep 21Abject Suffering 21: Home Alone
E<html><p>Home Alone was written by John Hughes. So were a bunch of other movies. He was a fixture, and then he just went away. Was he aware of this game? Did he conceive of the stereotyped mobsters that are in it? Were the giant spiders under the house the whole time... waiting? Who knows. Digital Daniel Stern will outlive us all.</p></html>
Ep 20Abject Suffering 20: Ren and Stimpy Space Cadet Adventures
E<html><p>You've gotta love a good moral panic. Of all the things that were supposed to ruin me as a child, very few of them did. Instead they twisted me and shaped me into the man I am today... Simpsons fixations and all. What I should have been wary of was crass commercialism... an avalanche of shitty licensed GameBoy platformers that had little to no relation to their source material (or little to no relation to action games). How can you capture something as fucking nutso as Ren and Stimpy in a game? We spend about 35 minutes figuring out that you can't do it with a monochrome spaceship where Log attacks you.</p></html>
Ep 19Abject Suffering 19: Mohawk and Headphone Jack
E<html><p>Let me tell you a few things about Michael Henderson. He's a Duckfeed.tv superfan who regularly contributes to our shows. He graciously backed the Watch Out for Fireballs! Kickstarter campaign. He's also a merciless, calculating miscreant who means only to do Gary and Kole harm. We're somewhat convinced that Michael designed Mohawk and Headphone Jack specifically to be as unappealing as possible. Good job, Michael. You broke us.</p></html>
Ep 18Abject Suffering 18: Captain Skyhawk
E<html><p>We don't contend with mediocrity that often. So far, the closest we got was Pac Man 2, and that doesn't really count since it's so weird. Captain Skyhawk doesn't really belong here. You fly around and shoot some aliens and stuff, you do a bunch of different kinds of missions, and the graphics aren't terrible. Instead of complaining, just have stories about Kole's childhood and Gary's balloon fetish.</p></html>
Ep 17Abject Suffering 17: Bubsy II
E<html><p>This is the singularity that happens when 1000 bad ideas try and cram their way into a premise that isn't promising. This is our first mascot platformer... any why not live life to the hilt?</p></html>
Ep 16Abject Suffering 16: Road Runner's Death Valley Rally
E<html><p>Kole has become unstuck in time. This is the epicenter of his primary dissonance: how can he be a 26 year old man, but appreciate Road Runner cartoons and Nick at Nite? The only explanation involves temporal fuckery, and a holistic approach to why he is entirely out of touch with this modern American world. Dream on, and play a bad platformer, you pilgrim of the (pre)modern age.</p></html>
Ep 15Abject Suffering 15: Where's Waldo?
E<html><p>Saving Private Ryan started out as a Where's Waldo film adaptation. True fact. But Spielberg descended into the heart of darkness, gradually turning Martin Handford's whimsical vision into a twisted hellscape of severed limbs and broken hearts. This NES game is a re-telling of that re-telling.</p></html>
Ep 14Abject Suffering 14: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker
E<html><p>Michael Jackson put out a game where the objective is to collect as many children as possible. Don't worry, we make the obvious jokes as soon as possible. We continue the streak of Abject Suffering games about known sex offenders. Got any suggestions for others?</p></html>
Ep 13Abject Suffering 13: The Uncanny X-Men
E<html><p>It's an allegory for all of mankind's struggle for equality. What if you were born different? What if everyone was afraid of you? What if you were the worst NES game Abject Suffering has played yet?</p></html>
Ep 12Abject Suffering 12: Spellcraft
E<html><p>There aught to be a Chick Tract about Spellcraft. It tells you the reagents and processes necessary to do such awful things as Much to Stone and Return Home. What's this you say? You joust demons? I'll not hear of it. Wait... there's heartbreaking, regret-wracked love letters hidden in the code? Well... huh.</p></html>