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.

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Episodes

  • 601: Pigskin 621 AD

    March 17th, 2025  |  38 mins 15 secs

    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.

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    600: Tiger Handheld Electronics

    March 10th, 2025  |  31 mins 49 secs

    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?

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    599: Tuneland Starring Howie Mandel

    March 3rd, 2025  |  34 mins 59 secs

    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.

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    598: Get the Girl

    February 25th, 2025  |  34 mins 22 secs

  • We've improved the way you get our premium episodes!

    February 19th, 2025  |  4 mins 2 secs

  • 597: Herc's Adventures

    February 17th, 2025  |  36 mins 44 secs

    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.

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    596: Big Rig

    February 10th, 2025  |  37 mins 47 secs

    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.

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    595: OnlyCans: Thirst Date

    February 3rd, 2025  |  36 mins 50 secs

    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.

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    594: Cat in the Hat

    January 27th, 2025  |  36 mins 11 secs

    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.

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    593: Virtua Cop

    January 20th, 2025  |  34 mins 46 secs

    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.

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    592: Rocky Rodent

    January 13th, 2025  |  38 mins 32 secs

    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.

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    591: Spider Man: City Raid

    January 6th, 2025  |  34 mins 54 secs

    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.