Gary Butterfield

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.

612: Paperboy 64

June 3rd, 2025  |  36 mins 11 secs

Would you believe that the Paperboy game for the N64 would be one of the ugliest things we’ve covered for this show? It seems like that would be hard to accomplish, given the competition, but this game’s spindly polygonal horrors are genuinely unnerving.