Abject Suffering

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Make no mistake: This is a game created for a furry vore comic… but it’s such a mild example of what we can only assume is fetish material that all we’re left with is a pretty okay Popeye arcade game clone. So we talk about the many faces of Gordon Ramsey instead.

People have been asking us to cover the Burger King games for as long as this show has existed. They fit the remit of Abject Suffering so perfectly! But emulation is difficult, and we wanted to make absolutely sure we could play these games perfectly, so we could avoid talking about them and instead dwell on how the Burger King corporation wasted a character with the amazing name “The Duke of Doubt”.

One of our least favorite game coverage schticks is pretending that a game’s concept is so wacky that you can’t understand it. You play as a mosquito who’s tormenting a family, and it’s a flight sim? Okay, cool, I get it. A domino wants to run little courses? Sure, why would I try to stop him? A studio’s whole deal is putting aquatic life in strange situations? This can totally fit in my brain and it would diminish us all to pretend that’s not the case.

Listen, Mercenary Force isn’t a bad game at all. It’s actually quite interesting, if a bit too hard. A side scrolling shooter where you control four feudal Japanese warriors? It’s a good premise! Nobody knows what Gary was thinking when he brought this one. “Why is one of the hosts named differently? What happened!?” Kaye is transitioning! Find out more here. (https://www.patreon.com/posts/127161202)

Given how many super soldiers there are out there, you’d think there would be more social support for them. Groups, meetings, organizations. Shit, did I just reinvent the Venture Bros. from first principles? Come in and find out! “Why is one of the hosts named differently? What happened!?” Kaye is transitioning! Find out more here. (https://www.patreon.com/posts/127161202)

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.

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.

Cybermania ‘94 [See Adaptation Decay 97, true believers!-- Grinning Gwen] 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.

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.

A sub-par Guitar Hero clone that doesn't list band names or anything. Just shitty, shitty covers of pop songs.

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.

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?