Kole Ross

ES 202: My Stop Smoking Coach

December 4th, 2024  |  34 mins 32 secs

If you weren’t there, you might not understand that there was a small movement to market the Nintendo DS as a kind of PDA, with utility software being sold as games. This also included self improvement games like Brain Age. Hot on this trend, Ubisoft went all in with a line of “My Coach” games, with none being more baffling than “My Stop Smoking Coach”. It’s admirable to want to help people end a dangerous addiction, but this product shows that a game is not the ideal way to try to do that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.