Abject Suffering

Hey Robin Williams: You cool, dawg? Can't quite settle on a single voice there. We're on to your "spaghetti against the wall" garbage. Black preacher? So played, and kind of racist. Nobody actually remembers when you were any good at anything.

We were walking the perimeter of the Crick estate, shoring up the tree line and clearing brush. Michael kicked aside some beer cans, and chuckled quietly to himself. "What's so funny?" I asked, wiping my brow to keep the sweat bees at bay. "Teens. It's always the teens" he said, looking back to the compound. My time with Michael had been short, but I knew to let it go. He'd seen his fair share of dudes with attitude, and I could leave it at that.

Mark another tally up on the "Canonical Worst Games" wall. Odds are good we're going to clear this pantheon out. One day a hard rain is gonna come, suffering style.

Wherein we consistently miss the easiest target.

Legacy of the Wizard is a good game. Listen to us talking about making No. 3.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound he pulls the spitting high tension wires down. Helpless people ona subway train scream, bug-eyed as he looks in on them. He picks up a bus and he throws it back down as he wades through the buildings toward the center of town. Oh no, they say he's got to go. Go go Godzilla! Oh now, there goes Tokyo. Go go Godzilla! History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men.

Mediocrity is the most mortal sin of all. So we'll kindly excuse ourselves out the side door.

This might be the third rail, but I'll bend over and take it. Spray your disapproval all over me if you must, but I believe, to the very last drop of my being, that we need more positivity in this world. If it has to come in the form of Cho Aniki, in its celebration of the male form, then sign me up.

Like thieves in the night, we assassinate a game that is misguidedly referred to as a "classic" by some poor souls who don't know any better.

Being on a weekly format, we've had to cut some corners. Syndication is tough, so in order to keep our quality consistent (if mediocre), we've farmed the creation of these shows out to a network of corporate subsidiaries. Stay tuned for the reveal of Gary and Kole alarm clocks and calendars. It's a living!

Come with us to a time before sound, when dancing cats were no longer condemned as signs of witchcraft, even though they carried bags of tricks. To a time where Kole, unstuck in time, actually liked Felix the Cat at a young age. To a time when we play an amazing platformer on this show that is ostensibly about bad games.

Faster than a frightened cockroach. More powerful than my aversion to the sun. Able to disappoint your parents in a single loan. It's Superman 64!

Jenni from Video Games Taco joins us to answer the most pressing question of our time: "Is horses like cars but with meat?" Special Guest: Jenni Polodna.

It’s strange but true, but customs that we attribute to a given locale often have shared roots. For example, did you know that seppuku and pumpkin carving come from the same, misguided place? Listen to the end to find out! We are joined by Riff from Video Games Hot Dog. Follow him at @rifflesby (http://twitter.com/rifflesby). Special Guest: Riff Conner.

There are many ways in which a man can be small. Let's take stature as a given. There's also pettiness, deceit, closed-mindedness... All of these diminish us. What else diminishes us? Shrink rays of our own design. We already live in an alien world, we just don't have the perspective to appreciate it. Additionally: These cans with articulated lids don't speak with H. Jon Benjamin's voice, and jetpacks are compromised grappling hooks.

In the long view, the Ninentdo 64 might be Abject Suffering, the system. In our initial estimate, the NES seemed like the most fertile and hateful ground... but the N64 is a remarkable moment in history where everyone's reach exceeded their grasp. Example: Body Harvest, an open world game that came out almost a decade before open world games were good. But someone had to be first, right?

We're not fond of turning nouns into verbs, but "thrifting" is to be considered a valid terminology for the purposes of this podcast. We're not proud, and we never said we weren't hypocrites. We also never promised to do things like "actually talk about the game we're supposed to talk about". That's your bad. You assumed that.

Squares. Circles. Tetrahedrons. The stately geodesic dome. Icosahedrons. Cubes. Hypercubes. Sentient cubes. BALLZ.

How does a person feel when they stare into the smoldering, waiting eyes of their creation? When it clambers for your attention... wanting love, wanting validation... wanthing to feel something, ANYTHING. That's how God feels about you ever day. God loves you. To death. Special Guest: Brayton Cameron.

Not everyone knows the creation myth for anime. One day in a peaceful village in Japan, a truck carrying a surplus of decimal places from the war overturned, spilling extra zeroes and permanently altering the population. What was once 20 was soon 20,000. And so on, and so on, in kind. That's why everything in anime is predicated on shouting ridiculously high numbers... because the creators had no other choice.