Abject Suffering
Why are you doing this to us?
About the show
This is a podcast that's nominally about bad games. In reality, it's about the horror of daily life, GameFAQs Gold, strange combatants in the battle of Good vs. Evil, and a singular patriarch known only as Crick. Every Monday, Gary Butterfield and Kole Ross choose a game at random from the titles submitted by listeners, play it, and venture off on a freeform discussion that winds between the topic at hand, and the absurd.
Abject Suffering on social media
Episodes
-
624: Gender Wars
August 26th, 2025 | 41 mins 40 secs
It’s hard to think of a more damning indictment of the state of the world in 2025 than the fact that a cheap RTS developed to shock people with gender stereotypes in 1996 is really tame in comparison to what happens today. What happens in this game is by no means good, but it plays in tropes that are so outdated as to be cartoonish. Tim HomeImprovement would tell it to get better material.
-
623: Virtuoso
August 18th, 2025 | 34 mins 35 secs
You are a rock and roll musician who fights creatures in virtual reality! You embody rock'n'roll in every way except the music. What's more, you received a job offer from Uganda!
-
622: Dynamite Dux
August 11th, 2025 | 32 mins 53 secs
Dynamite Dux is a forgotten Sega arcade beat-em-up with a profoundly cursed aura. Play five minutes of it and tell me this game isn’t haunted to hell and back. Then, come with us as we talk about the raunchy easter egg that took people 30 years to uncover.
-
621: Superman (NES)
August 4th, 2025 | 31 mins 11 secs
Are you ready for an episode about a notoriously derided Superman game hosted by two people who don’t really care for or know about Superman, and haven’t seen that new movie everyone’s raving about? We hope so!
-
620: Troddlers
July 28th, 2025 | 35 mins 19 secs
Picking games to cover on Abject Suffering is hard. We don’t like hitting ones that have been talked to death. So sometimes we just grab something with a name that calls out to us. What’s a Troddler? What does a Troddler mean for my life? We never would have guessed that Troddlers, a game nobody has heard of, might actually be a pretty fun puzzle game. Color us shocked!
-
619: Wild Woody
July 21st, 2025 | 41 mins 35 secs
Wild Woody is a swan-song for a system nobody owned, built around a power fantasy nobody has ever had. Who wants to be a pencil? So we introduce a much more tempting fantasy… How many hot dogs could you be trusted with?
-
618: Arachnophobia
July 14th, 2025 | 35 mins 22 secs
Arachnophobia is now mostly forgotten, but it was once a beloved one-off horror comedy movie about extremely virile spiders overtaking a small town. Then they made a game out of it, and it was very boring! So we talk about Brian Wilson’s obsession with “Short’nin’ Bread” instead.
-
617: Mega Man Soccer
July 7th, 2025 | 38 mins 11 secs
We don’t know anything about soccer, but we DO know things about Mega Man. Unfortunately, this game leans more on the soccer side of the equation. So we default back to the last time either of us played sports: in gym class. We also talk about our recent trips to festivals, both Renaissance and Pride.
-
616: Bug!
June 30th, 2025 | 33 mins 57 secs
To prove just how dead in the water Sega was in the mid-1990s, they bet big on Bug!, a very slow 2.5D platformer that began life as a Sonic game. The Sega Saturn was a system in search of an identity, and boy howdy, Bug! did not provide it.
-
615: Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six
June 23rd, 2025 | 34 mins 14 secs
Have we talked about Spider-Man more than any other superhero on this show? Maybe Batman is up there. And Gary has definitely shoehorned “Turn Off the Dark” into more episodes than is necessary. But this is the first time we’ve really camped out on the Sinister Six, one of the more incoherent supervillain groups of all time. Also, take a look at Spider-Man’s sprites for this game. He’s so schlubby!
-
614: Black Eyed Peas Experience
June 16th, 2025 | 35 mins 30 secs
Folks, Gary chose to harm all of us by picking this game for Abject Suffering. Part of the shovelware dance game craze of about fifteen years ago, the Black Eyed Peas Experience ranks pretty low on the list of things we’ve covered. And that list is long.
-
613: Guardian War
June 9th, 2025 | 32 mins 52 secs
Covering Guardian War right after Paperboy 64 is a one-two punch of some of the most hideous games we’ve played. But looking past its shoddy veneer, Guardian War is kind of interesting, if insufficient. Of all of the 3DO games we’ve played, this is the one that’s most like an actual video game… being a kind of over-the-shoulder tactics RPG.
Gary also underwent a harrowing medical experience, so we had to talk about that too.