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
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587: The Brainies
December 9th, 2024 | 36 mins 1 sec
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?
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586: Poker Night 2
December 2nd, 2024 | 37 mins 12 secs
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.
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585: Pink Goes to Hollywood
November 25th, 2024 | 38 mins 1 sec
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.
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584: Shark Tale
November 19th, 2024 | 34 mins 19 secs
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.
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583: Hollywood Squares
November 11th, 2024 | 36 mins 35 secs
The NES saw a glut of games adapting popular gameshows, most of them developed by Rare. Improbably, Hollywood Squares is one of the more functional ones… albeit with some cuts. Gone are the stars! There’s nothing Hollywood about this! Additionally, Kole brings a chilling secondhand anecdote that might actually just be a straight up bummer.
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582: O.D.T.: Escape… or Die Trying
November 4th, 2024 | 37 mins 27 secs
O.D.T.: Escape… or Die Trying is a game with a confusing title. The O.D.T. is short for O.D.T.: Escape… or Die Trying or Die Trying. It’s a botched attempt at a Tomb Raider-like third person action game with theming and a story that are sure to put you to sleep. So we instead talk about how unfair the concept of Mario and Sonic competing in the Olympic Games would be.
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581: ALF
October 30th, 2024 | 39 mins 53 secs
It’s bizarre that we haven’t done an episode about the Alf game for the Sega Master System, but we have a good excuse: We were completely sure that we’d already done it. This famously bad game is a poor adaptation about everyone’s favorite fish-out-of-water sitcom about a fuzzy alien who lives with a family who barely tolerates him. However, it does accurately depict how miserable it was to MAKE the show Alf.
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580: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
October 22nd, 2024 | 40 mins 49 secs
In what amounts to a backdoor episode of Watch Out for Fireballs!, this listener-demanded discussion of the Return of the King game for Game Boy Advance has us mostly talking about how we would have enjoyed having this portable Diablo-like back in the day. We also talk about the Lord of the Rings’ cinematic legacy, and put 60 seconds on the clock for a Rebuttalfield about not being a weird crank about Trick or Treating teens.
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579: M&M’s Beach Party
October 15th, 2024 | 36 mins 18 secs
M&M’s Beach Party for the Wii is one of the more anemic minigame collections we’ve covered, and we’ve already done deep dives into M&M’s lore… So this week we pitch a new M&M’s character: a grey M&M with a cashew sticking out of it, named Hercules PoundClit. He’s a sensitive, masculine man who exists to make the ladies swoon.
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578: Faselei
October 8th, 2024 | 37 mins 17 secs
The word “faselei” means “babble” in German, which is a better description of this podcast than this game. Faselei!, our first Neo Geo Pocket Color game, is actually kind of neat… a turn-based tactics game with a very unique action system. The problem is, it’s about mechs… about which we have little to say. So instead we talk about inhalants, that wonderful feeling of finally identifying a half-remembered game from your childhood, and the bizarre ceremony of hockey games.
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577: Drac's Night Out
September 30th, 2024 | 38 mins 32 secs
If I mention Reebok’s Pump shoes, I know only one image comes to mind: Dracula. Specifically, Dracula having the time of his life, on stairs. No, I’m not on too many or too few drugs… This is an actual game that was almost released. We talk about it a little bit, before talking about shoes that give you superpowers and K’s recent trip to the Ohio Renaissance Festival.
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576: V.I.P.
September 25th, 2024 | 33 mins 21 secs
Pamela Anderson was everywhere in the 90s, as a sex symbol and an object of ridicule. And none of her projects is more forgotten than V.I.P., the show where she bumbles into starting a bodyguard agency for the stars. And now, you, can fulfill your lifelong dream of playing a barely interactive video game adaptation of her adventures!