Abject Suffering
661 episodes — Page 6 of 14
Ep 411Abject Suffering 411: Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hands
E<html><p>Do you have fond memories of this? Sorry! It's pretty bad! We talk about the misguided gimmick (a cartridge with a solar light sensor) that looms large over a stealth RPG that was already pretty bad. Games will need to get up much earlier in the morning if they want to make us go outside.</p></html>
Ep 410Abject Suffering 410: Knuckles' Chaotix
E<html><p>Knuckles' Chaotix is the only game that could possibly embody the sheer awkwardness of the Sega 32X. It stars Knuckles and his shitty friends as they attempt to stop Dr. Robotnik from doing something I guess. The problem is, Knuckles is bound to his co-op partner by a stretchy energy band, which makes doing "Sonic" stuff impossible. But they still expect you to do Sonic stuff.</p></html>
Ep 409Abject Suffering 409: Chaos Legion
E<html><p>A divine agent has gone rogue, taking the sacred texts with him and throwing the whole world into chaos. It's up to you to find him and stop the crisis in the most mind-numbing way possible.</p><p>Also, we talk about that time a car crashed into Gary's house at 3am.</p></html>
Ep 408Abject Suffering 408: The California Raisins: The Grape Escape
E<html><p>Dried fruit almost had a home in the NES in this mediocre platformer published by Capcom. The problem is, the popular California Raisins commercials, where sentient fruit performed Motown classics, cost more to produce than they generated in sales. So the California Raisins went away, and this game didn't see the light of day until recently.</p></html>
Ep 407Abject Suffering 407: Mystery Stories: Mountains of Madness
E<html><p>And the award for "most obscure Lovecraft game adaptation" goes to... This thing. It's actually not that bad, though! While this is our first Hidden Object game, the genre was extremely popular with casual gamers for a while. And this seems like a good one, eschewing most of the pixel hunting for a basic point-and-click adventure setup. We honestly thought this would be worse.</p></html>
Ep 406Abject Suffering 406: Celebrity Deathmatch
E<html><p>Back around the turn of the millennium, before social media forever changed what the word "celebrity" meant, "Celebrity Death Match" was a staple of the late night MTV lineup. It was an exceedingly violent claymation show where different celebrities wrestled to the death, often with "jokes" that mostly just made fun of women. They made a game out of this, and we made an episode out that game, which turns out to be the Super Smash Bros. of gathering as many sexual predators into one game as possible.</p></html>
Ep 405Abject Suffering 405: F-18: No Fly Zone
E<html><p>This game is nothing, but it's also a reminder of a forgotten era of Windows 3.1 aesthetics and production values. We know basically nothing about jets, so instead we invent the character of Periodicles and talk about the Torso Killer.</p></html>
Ep 404Abject Suffering 404: Timecop
E<html><p>Timecop was created out of necessity once someone realized "Time" and "Crime" rhymed. Jean-Claude Van Damme took a break between railing miles of coke to act as an enforcer for an agency trying to stop people from using time travel to get rich. Then they made a really bad game out of it.</p></html>
Ep 403Abject Suffering 403: Rescue: The Embassy Mission
E<html><p>This cinematic game for the NES is slightly divisive between us, as it awkwardly fumbles to be Rainbow 6 before Rainbow 6 was possible on hardware.</p></html>
Ep 402Abject Suffering 402: The Suffering
E<html><p>Torque may or may not have killed his wife and child, and now he's in a haunted prison with plenty of time to sort himself out... in between monster attacks. This honestly isn't a terrible game, but it's just outrageous enough to talk about here.</p></html>
Ep 401Abject Suffering 401: Warlocked
E<html><p>This week we talk about Warlocked, the tiny RTS that kind of could. That's right... they made a real time strategy game for the Game Boy Color and it actually works, although it doesn't feel like your usual strategy game. We also talk about a horrifying video involving a toilet.</p></html>
Ep 400Abject Suffering 400: Last of Ass
E<html><p>To celebrate episode 400 of Abject Suffering, we dip into some Steam crapware, based entirely on its funny name. Last of Ass has nothing to do with The Last of Us, instead being a low-effort take on Slender: The Pages meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You're trapped on the land of some goddamn cannibals, and you need to sneak around to get the parts you need to fix your car. That's it.</p></html>
Ep 399Abject Suffering 399: Guilty Gear Isuka
E<html><p>We believe that Guilty Gear is a good series that just isn't for us. We don't really go in for hyper-stylized, chaotic fighting games like this. What everyone can agree on, we think, is that Guilty Gear Isuka is a very bad entry in that series. In an attempt to add some gimmicks to the series, the developers break the design conventions that make 2D fighters work, making for a uniquely unpleasant experience.</p></html>
Ep 398Abject Suffering 398: Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death
E<html><p>They killed Marlow Briggs on the wrong day with the wrong scythe. So an ancient Incan god king has revived him as a spirit of vengeance, Captain Planet-like! This game is actually competent, so we spend time talking about how the only reasonable way to spend money if you're a billionaire is to restore your hometown to exactly the way it was when you were ten.</p></html>
Ep 397Abject Suffering 397: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
E<html><p>Truth time: Buffy is a blind spot for us. Both of us were watching different things in the 90s, and sometimes it's just too hard to go back to something from that era if you don't have any nostalgia for it. This first Buffy game is an anemic GBC brawler, so instead we talk about our newest supernatural villain: the incompetent Frankenstein.</p></html>
Ep 396Abject Suffering 396: William Shatner's TekWar
E<html><p>William Shatner's magnum opus spans nine books, a theatrical release, a television show, and several TV movies, and you probably only know it from an offhand joke on the Simpsons. It's cyberpunk without the punk, where a digital drug named Tek is the scourge of the streets. In the game, you play as a Tek addict turned narc agent who has to hunt down dealers in awkward first person shooter combat. After all, the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later.</p></html>
Ep 395Abject Suffering 395: Eternam
E<html><p>Eternam is a very strange adventure game. Taking cues from Westworld, you play as Don Jonz, who won a vacation package to a fantasy planet, only to learn that his arch rival is working some kind of scheme there. Decent jokes and horrifying faces abound!</p></html>
Ep 394Abject Suffering 394: Dog's Life
E<html><p>The wild swings that developers took on the PS2 are infinitely fascinating, and one that you don't hear too much about is Dog's Life. It's a bad game, but there's not much else like it. It's open-ish world, you play as a dog, and you can shit and piss at the press of a button. One person does all of the voices, and the ending needs to be seen to be believed.</p></html>
Ep 393Abject Suffering 393: Mystical Fighters
E<html><p>This mediocre brawler about Kabuki warriors fighting generic monsters doesn't provide much fertile ground for discussion, so we default to talking about tragedy and the ways out education failed us.</p></html>
Ep 392Abject Suffering 392: Defenders of Dynatron City
E<html><p>In a remarkable bit of serendipity, this game wasn't a hit because you couldn't hit anything in it. Garry Winnick and Steve Purcell set about creating a quirky little brawler for the NES, and they made a comic to promote it. Then they made an animated series to promote it. And people were excited. Then they played the game and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.</p></html>
Ep 391Abject Suffering 391: Lester the Unlikely
E<html><p>We all know the stereotypical traits of nerds. Thick glasses, nasally voice... narcolepsy? Lester the Unlikely is a cinematic platformer, a la Out of This World or Prince of Persia, that highlights how important good level design is to that kind of game. However, if you're looking for a game that lets you punish turtles, this one's got your number.. Shredder.</p></html>
Ep 390Abject Suffering 390: Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern
E<html><p>It's a fantasy saga of high flying dragons and alien invasions where nothing at all happpens. This episode is our followup to the Companions of Xanth episode, this time featuring a fantasy series from Kole's childhood. Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern is a Dreamcast adventure game based on Anne McCaffrey's books about dragon riders who don't do very much.</p></html>
Ep 389Abject Suffering 389: Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog
E<html><p>This week's Abject Suffering is about an admirable joke game that asks the question: is it possible for a dog to be bad?</p></html>
Ep 388Abject Suffering 388: Companions of Xanth
E<html><p>When you're a kid with unlimited free time, and games are not plentiful and the internet isn't around, you end up reading a lot of questionable novels. Enter Xanth: Piers Anthony's problematic saga that continues to this day. Listen as we talk about the Legend adventure game based on the books, and also dig into bad kids fantasy in general.</p></html>
Ep 387Abject Suffering 387: Jones in the Fast Lane
E<html><p>Imagine a pop-o-matic world. That might have made the Game of Life more interesting! Everything ensconced within perfect plastic and metal, the ideal randomizer. However, another way to make the Game of Life more interesting is to make it into a video game like Jones in the Fast Lane. A lesser-known Sierra title that plays like a board game, you start at the bottom rung of your career, and try to use your limited time and money to reach your goals. It's neat!</p></html>
Ep 386Abject Suffering 386: Contra Force
E<html><p>We all like Contra, right? What if we did it again but worse? And what if Konami wasn't as great as you remembered it, and you've been letting them coast on Castlevania for decades?</p></html>
Ep 385Abject Suffering 385: Tyrian 2000
E<html><p>This kind of good PC shoot-em-up game takes your regular arcade shooter like Raiden and adds more story and a dash of humor. That doesn't give us a lot to work with, so we talk about the prospect of grown-up sleepovers, and start recommending products.</p></html>
Ep 384Episode 384: X-Files: Resist or Serve
E<html><p>Everyone remembers the X-Files game for PlayStation. It was an FMV game that shipped in a huge case with a ton of CDs. Less well-known is this PS2 survival horror game that is... actually pretty neat! We talk about this, and also pitch a spin-off show: The X-Fires.</p><p><a href="http://patreon.com/duckfeedtv" target="_blank">Support Abject Suffering</a></p></html>
Ep 383Abject Suffering 383: One
E<html><p>Just so you're not disappointed, this isn't the PSX game that stars Bruce Willis. That would be the similarly anonymous game "Apocalypse". No, this is a really bland cinematic action game that stars a man with amnesia and a bizarre gun arm. It's like Contra, but the bad Contras.</p></html>
Ep 382Abject Suffering 382: Mouse Trap
E<html><p>This single-screen asset factory platformer posits the existence of a new kind of nose, while we talk about the nightmare of our cats bringing us a corpse.</p></html>
Ep 381Abject Suffering 381: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare DS
E<html><p>It's crazy how developers kept on trying to make first person games happen on the DS, even when it was abundantly clear that they were painful to play. This breaks out into a more serious conversation about innovation vs. proficiency, and we apologize for that. We'll make it goofier next time.</p></html>
Ep 380Abject Suffering 380: SCP: Secret Laboratory
E<html><p>The best, most expansive creepypasta universe lends itself to an admirable fan game. Problem is, it's multiplayer, and playing games with strangers is the pits!</p></html>
Ep 379Abject Suffering 379: Spud!
E<html><p>A game that, for legal purposes, is unaffiliated with the real Santa or Christmas.</p></html>
Ep 378Abject Suffering 378: Crystalis
E<html><p>Crystalis is, first and foremost, a pretty good game. There are fun details about its story, and why they still honor the American dollar, but mostly it serves as a good launching point for talking about the absurdities of NextDoor.</p></html>
Ep 377Abject Suffering 377: Baldi's Basics
E<html><p>Is there a name for the kind of stealth horror game that's popular with streamers? Things like Hello Neighbor and Bendy and the Ink Machine? Whatever that is, this is one of those, but with a fun, crappy educational vibe. Truth is, this is actually pretty good and fun, so we range far afield on this episode.</p></html>
Ep 376Abject Suffering 376: Ariel the Little Mermaid
E<html><p>You may be thinking, "Hey guys! That Capcom NES Little Mermaid game wasn't bad! What gives?" And you're right. The only crime that game commits is being too simple. This week, we're talking about the very bad Little Mermaid game made for the Sega Genesis, which looked at the Dam level from TMNT and said "hold my conch".</p></html>
Ep 375Abject Suffering 375: Battletoads
E<html><p>Imagine, if you will, a kind of battling toad. Nobody asked for this episode, we just felt like talking about it. Rare's darling baby that launched a thousand memes, about things ranging from its difficulty to its availability in stores. We don't care for it very much! But we only talk a little bit about why the game doesn't work, and spend most of our time talking about the Dark Queen's Pixar ass, horrible holiday memories, and comparative power ratings of the toad boys.</p></html>
Ep 374Abject Suffering 374: Arctic alive
E<html><p>This survival horror/survival sim set in an arctic base is notable for one reason: It was made entirely in Blender, which is not a game engine. It would be like somehow making a JRPG run in MS Paint. Other than that, it's got a baffling "barely translated" charm... so instead, we talk about how Gary recently developed hypothermia in his house.</p></html>
Ep 373Abject Suffering 373: Whiteboyz Wit' Attitude: The Pursuit of Money
E<html><p>We need to re-calibrate what constitutes an "Abject Suffering Emergency". It's hard to tell how earnest the Whiteboyz Wit' Attitude are. On one hand, the music is pretty bad and farcical, but on the other hand, they've been at it for many years. This Steam game is a gussied up sales pitch for their compilation album, featuring some limited rhythm gameplay set to their low production value videos.</p></html>
Ep 372Abject Suffering 372: Rockstar!
E<html><p>This is our second rock band management sim this year, and it's by far the superior to "Rock Star Ate My Hamster". The drug fixation aside, this is a fun little Lemonade Stand sim that has a fair bit of complexity and some of the best procedurally generated names we've seen.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNVv9y63Kkw" target="_blank">Special Thanks to Beyond Reason for the theme song remix.</a></p></html>
Ep 371Abject Suffering 371: McPixel
E<html><p>This week we look at a humble, gag-based point and click puzzle game that's a parody of a parody of MacGuyver. We also talk about the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Junior. At length.</p></html>
Ep 370Abject Suffering 370: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
E<html><p>They turned a good book into a very frustrating text adventure.</p></html>
Ep 369Abject Suffering 369: Hareraiser
E<html><p>Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Britain was overtaken by treasure hunt fever, sparked by a childrens' book called The Masquerade and its promises of a valuable gold rabbit for anyone clever enough to solve its puzzles. The contest ended in allegations of fraud, and this cursed rabbit went on to become the basis for an outright scam called Hareraiser, a duo of games for microcomputers that were little more than unsolvable messes. The gold rabbit was auctioned off when the company was liquidated, and we were left with one of the worst "games" in all of history.</p></html>
Ep 368Abject Suffering 368: Reisdent Evil 0
E<html><p>Warm up your pipes, you opera singing leeches, because we're going to talk about the game that we blame for murdering classic-style Resident Evil experiences. Taking place shortly before the events of the original Resident Evil, STARS Bravo team medic Rebecca Chambers and failed Chili Peppers clone Billy team up to fight through a train and some anonymous facilities full of zombies and leeches, all while being too ineffectual to hold objects.</p></html>
Ep 367Abject Suffering 367: Castlevania Judgment
E<html><p>It's very hard to be a Castlevania fan, especially when Konami decides that this very ugly and shallow Power Stone clone is worth releasing. Famously featuring a story line where a little girl wants bigger boobs, it also has hideous costume redesigns for a large number of beloved Castlevania characters, and a pretty lame excuse plot.</p></html>
Ep 366Abject Suffering 366: Swords & Darkness
E<html><p>Swords &amp; Darkness, a game you've never heard of, is a very poorly made side scrolling Demon's Souls game released on the 3DS eShop. It's broken in some pretty entertaining ways, so give this a listen and save yourself the $7!</p></html>
Ep 365Abject Suffering 365: It Came From the Desert
E<html><p>This week Gary brings a character with a very ill-advised product pitch, then we get into talking about this charming and not-fun Cinemaware game about ants. Please stow your picnic baskets.</p></html>
Ep 364Abject Suffering 364: Kingdom O' Magic
E<html><p>Probably one of the most hideous games we've covered for the show?</p></html>
Ep 363Abject Suffering 363: Industrial Spy: Operation Espionage
E<html><p>A baffling game gives way to a discussion on obstinate linguistics.</p></html>
Ep 362Abject Suffering 362: Blazing Dragons
E<html><p>We use this kind of okay point and click adventure game as an excuse to eat stunt food. Warning: Mouth sounds abound.</p></html>