Gary Butterfield
Co-Host of Abject Suffering
Gary Butterfield is an author, musician, and the host of Check It Out, Comrade!, Bonfireside Chat, Watch Out for Fireballs!, and others. Buy his book, Souls of Darkness.
Gary Butterfield has hosted 818 Episodes.
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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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ES 204: Death Crimson
January 18th, 2025 | 38 mins 2 secs
In this final premium episode of Abject Suffering, we talk about the legendary kusoge “Death Crimson”, a barely-functional light gun shooter that qualifies as genuine outsider art. We also get kind of wistful about urban exploration and talking to our past selves.
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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.
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590: Home Alone (PS2)
December 30th, 2024 | 41 mins 25 secs
This week we talk about the little-known PS2 game adaptation of Home Alone, a Christmas classic that was already super old in 2006 when this came out. But honestly, there’s very little there to talk about. Instead, we camp out on the taxonomical horror of a picture of corndogs Gary took ten years ago. Here’s the photo: https://bsky.app/profile/garybutterfield.bsky.social/post/3ldi4heqxj22c
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589: Inspector Gadget
December 23rd, 2024 | 35 mins 36 secs
What is the meaning of Inspector Gadget? Is he basically a cyberzombie, which would explain the bungling? In which ball is the essence stored? This mostly on-topic episode is not afraid to ask the important and hard-hitting questions about this awful metal man.
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ES 203: Reign of Fire
December 18th, 2024 | 32 mins 28 secs
Reign of Fire is the kind of movie you can’t make anymore, and that’s a good thing. It’s the perfect storm of post-9/11 militarism, and post-Lord of the Rings fantasy bandwagon chasing, with a pre-Batman Christian Bale and a pre-McConaughssaince Matthew McConnaughey. While a game about shooting dragons with guns should have a pretty high entertainment floor, this one absolutely biffs it by making you enact some of the worst vehicle combat to date.
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588: Bubble Bobble Revolution
December 16th, 2024 | 45 mins 54 secs
Bubble Bobble is elemental! How could you screw it up? Well, they found a way. Bubble Bobble Revolution isn’t just bad because it’s nonfunctional… even if you could get past level 30, it would still be an ugly game that feels bad in your hands. But there isn’t much to say beyond that, so enjoy a meandering talk about what the existence of the Costco Guys says about our chances of the world getting better, ever.
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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?