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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606: Jurassic Park (SNES)
April 21st, 2025 | 42 mins 20 secs
This week a patron demand takes us into a discussion about a game that Gary likes quite a bit. The Jurassic Park SNES game is open world, mixed perspective, and overall a huge surprise, since Ocean doesn’t usually do work this interesting.
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605: MegaRace
April 14th, 2025 | 44 mins 29 secs
It’s the future. You’re on a gameshow. You need to wipe out the speed gangs with vigilante car violence, murdering every last one of them… for real! But not really though. But really, it’s VR. But it’s LIKE death. But not death. We can’t emphasize enough how unlike and like real death this is.
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604: Dennis Miller: That's News to Me
April 7th, 2025 | 36 mins 16 secs
Cybermania ‘94 reminded us that there’s a Dennis Miller game on the 3DO. And we figured we might as well take a deep dive into a guy who sucks, via talking about a very strange multimedia product from the nineties.
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603: Tony Hawk's Underground 2
March 31st, 2025 | 40 mins 46 secs
We’ll be honest, this isn’t a bad game. A Tony Hawk game will generally have a high floor for quality, unless it’s Downhill Jam or something. No, this is here because you voted for it, and it’s also the most Bam Margera you’re going to get in a video game by volume. And though we love Jackass, there’s a lot to dislike about ol’ Bam Bam himself.
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602: Popstar Guitar
March 24th, 2025 | 35 mins 41 secs
A sub-par Guitar Hero clone that doesn't list band names or anything. Just shitty, shitty covers of pop songs.
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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
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February 19th, 2025 | 4 mins 2 secs
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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.