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

Jul 19, 2021 · 34 min
Abject Suffering 412: Pass the Pigs: Let the Good Swines Roll
There was no reason for them to digitize this simple dice game, but they did it anyway, and gave it one crackerjack title. We talk about road trip memories, rural fair competitions, and generally vibe about how great and horrifying pigs can be.
Jul 12, 2021 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 411: Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hands
Do you have fond memories of this? Sorry! It's pretty bad! We talk about the misguided gimmick (a cartridge with a solar light sensor) that looms large over a stealth RPG that was already pretty bad. Games will need to get up much earlier in the morning if they want to make us go outside.
Jul 5, 2021 · 48 min
Abject Suffering 410: Knuckles' Chaotix
Knuckles' Chaotix is the only game that could possibly embody the sheer awkwardness of the Sega 32X. It stars Knuckles and his shitty friends as they attempt to stop Dr. Robotnik from doing something I guess. The problem is, Knuckles is bound to his co-op partner by a stretchy energy band, which makes doing "Sonic" stuff impossible. But they still expect you to do Sonic stuff.
Jun 28, 2021 · 42 min
Abject Suffering 409: Chaos Legion
A divine agent has gone rogue, taking the sacred texts with him and throwing the whole world into chaos. It's up to you to find him and stop the crisis in the most mind-numbing way possible. Also, we talk about that time a car crashed into Gary's house at 3am.
Jun 21, 2021 · 33 min
Abject Suffering 408: The California Raisins: The Grape Escape
Dried fruit almost had a home in the NES in this mediocre platformer published by Capcom. The problem is, the popular California Raisins commercials, where sentient fruit performed Motown classics, cost more to produce than they generated in sales. So the California Raisins went away, and this game didn't see the light of day until recently.
Jun 14, 2021 · 35 min
Abject Suffering 407: Mystery Stories: Mountains of Madness
And the award for "most obscure Lovecraft game adaptation" goes to... This thing. It's actually not that bad, though! While this is our first Hidden Object game, the genre was extremely popular with casual gamers for a while. And this seems like a good one, eschewing most of the pixel hunting for a basic point-and-click adventure setup. We honestly thought this would be worse.
Jun 7, 2021 · 57 min
Abject Suffering 406: Celebrity Deathmatch
Back around the turn of the millennium, before social media forever changed what the word "celebrity" meant, "Celebrity Death Match" was a staple of the late night MTV lineup. It was an exceedingly violent claymation show where different celebrities wrestled to the death, often with "jokes" that mostly just made fun of women. They made a game out of this, and we made an episode out that game, which turns out to be the Super Smash Bros. of gathering as many sexual predators into one game as possible.
May 31, 2021 · 37 min
Abject Suffering 405: F-18: No Fly Zone
This game is nothing, but it's also a reminder of a forgotten era of Windows 3.1 aesthetics and production values. We know basically nothing about jets, so instead we invent the character of Periodicles and talk about the Torso Killer.
May 24, 2021 · 36 min
Abject Suffering 404: Timecop
Timecop was created out of necessity once someone realized "Time" and "Crime" rhymed. Jean-Claude Van Damme took a break between railing miles of coke to act as an enforcer for an agency trying to stop people from using time travel to get rich. Then they made a really bad game out of it.
May 17, 2021 · 35 min
Abject Suffering 403: Rescue: The Embassy Mission
This cinematic game for the NES is slightly divisive between us, as it awkwardly fumbles to be Rainbow 6 before Rainbow 6 was possible on hardware.
May 10, 2021 · 37 min
Abject Suffering 402: The Suffering
Torque may or may not have killed his wife and child, and now he's in a haunted prison with plenty of time to sort himself out... in between monster attacks. This honestly isn't a terrible game, but it's just outrageous enough to talk about here.
May 3, 2021 · 33 min
Abject Suffering 401: Warlocked
This week we talk about Warlocked, the tiny RTS that kind of could. That's right... they made a real time strategy game for the Game Boy Color and it actually works, although it doesn't feel like your usual strategy game. We also talk about a horrifying video involving a toilet.
Apr 27, 2021 · 45 min
Abject Suffering 400: Last of Ass
To celebrate episode 400 of Abject Suffering, we dip into some Steam crapware, based entirely on its funny name. Last of Ass has nothing to do with The Last of Us, instead being a low-effort take on Slender: The Pages meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You're trapped on the land of some goddamn cannibals, and you need to sneak around to get the parts you need to fix your car. That's it.
Apr 19, 2021 · 40 min
Abject Suffering 399: Guilty Gear Isuka
We believe that Guilty Gear is a good series that just isn't for us. We don't really go in for hyper-stylized, chaotic fighting games like this. What everyone can agree on, we think, is that Guilty Gear Isuka is a very bad entry in that series. In an attempt to add some gimmicks to the series, the developers break the design conventions that make 2D fighters work, making for a uniquely unpleasant experience.
Apr 12, 2021 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 398: Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death
They killed Marlow Briggs on the wrong day with the wrong scythe. So an ancient Incan god king has revived him as a spirit of vengeance, Captain Planet-like! This game is actually competent, so we spend time talking about how the only reasonable way to spend money if you're a billionaire is to restore your hometown to exactly the way it was when you were ten.
Apr 5, 2021 · 32 min
Abject Suffering 397: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Truth time: Buffy is a blind spot for us. Both of us were watching different things in the 90s, and sometimes it's just too hard to go back to something from that era if you don't have any nostalgia for it. This first Buffy game is an anemic GBC brawler, so instead we talk about our newest supernatural villain: the incompetent Frankenstein.
Mar 29, 2021 · 37 min
Abject Suffering 396: William Shatner's TekWar
William Shatner's magnum opus spans nine books, a theatrical release, a television show, and several TV movies, and you probably only know it from an offhand joke on the Simpsons. It's cyberpunk without the punk, where a digital drug named Tek is the scourge of the streets. In the game, you play as a Tek addict turned narc agent who has to hunt down dealers in awkward first person shooter combat. After all, the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later.
Mar 22, 2021 · 41 min
Abject Suffering 395: Eternam
Eternam is a very strange adventure game. Taking cues from Westworld, you play as Don Jonz, who won a vacation package to a fantasy planet, only to learn that his arch rival is working some kind of scheme there. Decent jokes and horrifying faces abound!
Mar 15, 2021 · 38 min
Abject Suffering 394: Dog's Life
The wild swings that developers took on the PS2 are infinitely fascinating, and one that you don't hear too much about is Dog's Life. It's a bad game, but there's not much else like it. It's open-ish world, you play as a dog, and you can shit and piss at the press of a button. One person does all of the voices, and the ending needs to be seen to be believed.
Mar 8, 2021 · 40 min
Abject Suffering 393: Mystical Fighters
This mediocre brawler about Kabuki warriors fighting generic monsters doesn't provide much fertile ground for discussion, so we default to talking about tragedy and the ways out education failed us.