Abject Suffering

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This is a podcast that's nominally about bad games. In reality, every Monday, Gary Butterfield and Kaye Ross choose a game at random from the titles submitted by listeners, play it, and venture off on a freeform discussion that winds between the topic at hand and some dumb nonsense.

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672 episodes
Updated July 27
Explicit

Episodes672

Newest first

Sep 26, 2022 · 37 min
Abject Suffering 472: Cookie Clicker
People love incremental and idle games. Kole's ambivalent. Gary hates them. Somehow this turned into an extremely on-topic mini-WOFF! about the genre at large, with Cookie Clicker as the starting off point. Welcome to Hell!
Sep 19, 2022 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 471: Flushed Away
Say what you will about stop motion animation, there's an undeniable degree of difficulty associated with it that makes it a little more impressive than CGI emulating the clay sculpture style. This is the core hubris of the "Wallace and Gromit " people hooking up with Dreamworks to make "Flushed Away", a story about a posh surface rat getting flushed down the toilet to fight a frog king. And then they made a game about it. And then we mostly talked about Jackass, and a bizarre YouTube channel called "Max TV".
Sep 12, 2022 · 45 min
Abject Suffering 470: An American Tail
Better late than never, right? Even if it's 21 years too late. 1986 saw the release of "An American Tail", a Don Bluth-animated film about a family of mice that fled Russia to head to America... 1986 being, of course, one of the last times that an optimistic story about immigration could be told in America. Then, in 2007, some weirdos decided to make a licensed game about it. One that even manages to make Monkey Ball mechanics un-fun!
Sep 5, 2022 · 48 min
Abject Suffering 469: Mugsy's Revenge
Nyah, see? Myah. That's mobster talk, because we're talking about a pair of ZX Spectrum games which concern themselves with various illegal dealings in 1919. The roaring teens! Establish protection rackets, run hooch, pinch nanners, flip gatorboys, if it's illegal you can do it all. As long as it fits within the "Lemonade Stand" format.
Aug 29, 2022 · 51 min
Abject Suffering 468: Rise of the Dragon
Rise of the Dragon is a perfectly serviceable first person adventure game, held back by some misguided action sequences and a predictable plot. Cyber drugs? You're kidding me! So once we dispense with the formalities, Gary regales us with a tale of his return to the All-American Magic Show. Sometimes you CAN step in the same river twice.
Aug 22, 2022 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 467: Major Leauge Eating: The Game
WiiWare is an untapped market for us, and Gary brought in a doozie: a game about eating a lot in a very short amount of time. And you know what? It's not that terrible. It would at least have kept us entertained for a night in our dirtbag early twenties. So listen in and hear us talk about competitive eating, and learn a little more about Gary's horrible childhood.
Aug 15, 2022 · 39 min
Abject Suffering 466: Dragonfable
Dragonfable is the long-forgotten followup to Adventure Quest, and somehow it still runs, and somehow you can still play it. Cribbing heavily from the hyper self-aware diction of webcomics in the mid-2000s, this is a repetitive, grindy RPG that's perfectly at home on this show.
Aug 8, 2022 · 34 min
Abject Suffering 465: The Adventures of Gilligan's Island
Gilligan's Island is a hell named after its devil. The incompetent first mate of the S.S. Minnow bumbles about with an efficiency that cannot be accidental, ensuring that the island's flawed inhabitants will never again see another shore. Gilligan's Island is also a corny 60s television show which, for some reason, got an NES game made of it in 1990. It contains multitudes.
Aug 1, 2022 · 33 min
Abject Suffering 464: Galerians: Ash
Galerians for the PlayStation is a flawed but interesting survival horror game, existing today primarily for people who are passionate about that era of the genre. Galerians: Ash is beloved by none. Picking up right at the end of the original game, Ash follows the continuing adventures of Rion through the world of Basically Akira, trying to stop synthetic humans from destroying the world. But they made it an action game and they shouldn't have done that.
Jul 25, 2022 · 42 min
Abject Suffering 463: Feel the Magic: XY XX
Will Hughes joins Kole once again to talk about the DS launch game "Feel the Magic: XY XX", which is best described as "horny Warioware". We end up talking about the game quite a bit, though Will does frequently bully Kole the whole time. There's nothing to be done about it. Special Guest: Will Hughes.
Jul 18, 2022 · 41 min
Abject Suffering 462: Zoop
Gary went and caught Covid, so this week Kole is joined by the AV Club's Will Hughes to talk about Zoop, the shallow puzzle game that magazines in the 90s put a lot of effort into getting people to buy. And since Gary isn't here, we kind of go hog wild on talking about things that would otherwise send him into the stratosphere.
Jul 4, 2022 · 50 min
Abject Suffering 461: M&M's Kart Racing
It's a classic Gary Butterfield pick: it's an advergame about snack food. But M&M's Kart Racing for the Wii also happens to be the least fun, and least functional, kart racer we've covered for the show. It also leads us to one of the more bizarre and sad wikis we've found for a property.
Jun 27, 2022 · 37 min
Abject Suffering 460: Mr. Bones
Somehow it took us 460 episodes to reach Mr. Bones. I don't have an answer as to why. But, man, is it a sight to behold. You play the one skeleton on the side of good (guitars) fighting against a mindless army on the side of evil (drums), playing just the grossest, smelliest white boy blues you can.
Jun 20, 2022 · 41 min
Abject Suffering 459: Nickelodeon GUTS
Nickelodeon's GUTS, later Global GUTS, was a mainstay of the network's "cheaply produced gameshows" that acted as ballast for some of the other, bigger shows. Each episode, a group of kids competed in physical challenges, culminating in a trip up the Aggro Crag, for a chance to win a "glowing piece of that radical rock". From this setup, we get a really anemic minigame collection that's mostly repeats... so Gary talks about a juggler he saw recently.
Jun 13, 2022 · 39 min
Abject Suffering 458: The Curious Expedition
The Curious Expedition isn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but it sits at a table set with a lot of outdated tropes that don't look so great nowadays. We're pretty sure this Patron just wanted us to make a bummer episode about colonialism. So we talk about that, along with how people just drown in pig shit and we, as a society, have decided to accept that.
Jun 6, 2022 · 45 min
Abject Suffering 457: Fear Factor: Unleashed
We're not interested in talking about whether or not Joe Rogan is a force for good. You can probably guess how we feel about his show. BUT, we are interested in how wild reality game shows got in the early 2000s, and this is a great inroads to talking about a whole bunch of them. Also, making a video game version of Fear Factor is a terrible idea.
May 30, 2022 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 456: Harvester
Something is happening with our brains, and we're in this period where we're extremely receptive to schlock. To the point where we can't guarantee that Harvester won't become a WOFF! episode at some point. It's a bizarre FMV adventure game that's all about the glorification of violence, and it's full of some extremely potent, trashy horror ideas.
May 23, 2022 · 46 min
Abject Suffering 455: Loaded
The kids are going to have to learn about FUB and his obscure war at some point. That's why we're covering Loaded, a bonkers shooter that has all the charm of seven Twisted Metal games rammed together. We also talk about the Miracle of Uncles.
May 16, 2022 · 35 min
Abject Suffering 454: Hugo's House of Horrors
Hugo's House of Horrors is a classic adventure game that's actually quite charming. Doubly so when you see how vehemently the designer insists that he'd never heard of Maniac Mansion before making it. We also talk about how J. Jonah Jameson and Cornholio are related, and how Kole's got snakes.
May 9, 2022 · 52 min
Abject Suffering 453: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past
This SNES has a mission to boringly go where no man has gone before! An interface that mimics the bridge of the Starship Enterprise does a lot to make this feel like a more complex game than it is, but it can't hide the terrible Away Team and ship-to-ship combat. We also talk about our Holodeck fantasies, and Kole finally gets to tell his falconry story.