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 827 Episodes.
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ES 201: The 20 Lost Levels of Joshua
November 25th, 2024 | 37 mins 51 secs
Wisdom Tree is an interesting company that makes very bad games about the Bible, but you kinda have to give them credit for reverse engineering Nintendo hardware. This GameBoy game, The 20 Lost Levels of Joshua, is attached to a GameBoy version of the NIV Bible, and it’s hard to tell which side of the cart is more riveting.
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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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ES 200: Beyblade: Let it Rip!
November 9th, 2024 | 34 mins 12 secs
Beyblade! It's a top you can spin! Beyblade! It's a game... you can win! BEY BLADE! It's not made of Hay! It's in fact, a blade made of bey. --The Beyblade theme song, probably.
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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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ES 199: Phantom 2040
October 19th, 2024 | 33 mins 23 secs
Watch out! It’s the Phantom! Don’t let him… do whatever he does. Nobody knows, except maybe the people in the near future of 2040. But even they are kind of scratching their heads about this one.
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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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ES 198: Demolition Girl
October 6th, 2024 | 39 mins 27 secs
She's big, sure, but does she know how to collate a print job? Nobody every considers what the giant girl's job prospects are.
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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.