We might secretly like sports. Or, at least, Gary might. One imagines him as a closeted basketball hound, feverishly building brickets for his Springtime Fever league, going in on office pools to see which squadrons will tame the orange bounce.
Captain Planet got a raw deal. Nobody knows why he woke up the way that he did, with a head shaped like a globe. You can't blame him for being bitter... a guy with a globe for a head walks into a bank, he ain't gonna get a small business loan. So he leans into it, hanging out with some teens by the Stop-n-Grab. They scour the gutters for bottles to deposit. Captain Planet takes a cut of the proceeds, and buys them all 40's of Old English to share. He sleeps in an unadorned firetrap apartment and...
We're surrounded every day by things that will outlive us. This glass, if it doesn't shatter, will probably be in a Goodwill long after I'm dead... helping some other soul drink water without getting their shirt wet. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just like this glass. Once, they didn't exist. Then they started existing. And then they didn't stop existing. The NES game is an artifact of that violent cultural birth. Also, it doesn't really belong here, except it's kind of flickery and a lit...
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take this container of Vaseline, and smear it all over these Doritos. Just really get it in there. That's right. Rub it real good. Now stack them up and press your face into it. You deserve this, don't you? Welcome to the N64 club. Welcome to the new death.
If people don't stop having sex, then the human race is done for. The church has done all it can, but it's not enough. We must instead turn to our masked vigilante saviors to stop this sexy, sexy scourge once and for all. Jason Voorhees gets a pretty good start at Camp Crystal Lake, but I think I speak for everyone when I say "He hasn't gone far enough."
Home Alone was written by John Hughes. So were a bunch of other movies. He was a fixture, and then he just went away. Was he aware of this game? Did he conceive of the stereotyped mobsters that are in it? Were the giant spiders under the house the whole time... waiting? Who knows. Digital Daniel Stern will outlive us all.
You've gotta love a good moral panic. Of all the things that were supposed to ruin me as a child, very few of them did. Instead they twisted me and shaped me into the man I am today... Simpsons fixations and all. What I should have been wary of was crass commercialism... an avalanche of shitty licensed GameBoy platformers that had little to no relation to their source material (or little to no relation to action games). How can you capture something as fucking nutso as Ren and Stimpy in a game? ...
Let me tell you a few things about Michael Henderson. He's a Duckfeed.tv superfan who regularly contributes to our shows. He graciously backed the Watch Out for Fireballs! Kickstarter campaign. He's also a merciless, calculating miscreant who means only to do Gary and Kole harm. We're somewhat convinced that Michael designed Mohawk and Headphone Jack specifically to be as unappealing as possible. Good job, Michael. You broke us.
We don't contend with mediocrity that often. So far, the closest we got was Pac Man 2, and that doesn't really count since it's so weird. Captain Skyhawk doesn't really belong here. You fly around and shoot some aliens and stuff, you do a bunch of different kinds of missions, and the graphics aren't terrible. Instead of complaining, just have stories about Kole's childhood and Gary's balloon fetish.
This is the singularity that happens when 1000 bad ideas try and cram their way into a premise that isn't promising. This is our first mascot platformer... any why not live life to the hilt?
Kole has become unstuck in time. This is the epicenter of his primary dissonance: how can he be a 26 year old man, but appreciate Road Runner cartoons and Nick at Nite? The only explanation involves temporal fuckery, and a holistic approach to why he is entirely out of touch with this modern American world. Dream on, and play a bad platformer, you pilgrim of the (pre)modern age.
Saving Private Ryan started out as a Where's Waldo film adaptation. True fact. But Spielberg descended into the heart of darkness, gradually turning Martin Handford's whimsical vision into a twisted hellscape of severed limbs and broken hearts. This NES game is a re-telling of that re-telling.
Michael Jackson put out a game where the objective is to collect as many children as possible. Don't worry, we make the obvious jokes as soon as possible. We continue the streak of Abject Suffering games about known sex offenders. Got any suggestions for others?
It's an allegory for all of mankind's struggle for equality. What if you were born different? What if everyone was afraid of you? What if you were the worst NES game Abject Suffering has played yet?
There aught to be a Chick Tract about Spellcraft. It tells you the reagents and processes necessary to do such awful things as Much to Stone and Return Home. What's this you say? You joust demons? I'll not hear of it. Wait... there's heartbreaking, regret-wracked love letters hidden in the code? Well... huh.
Routine errands beckon to you in a non-maze-like world. You are being mocked by a capricious god whose only mechanical means of influencing you are temptation and punishment. Can you feed your child and get to your finger-licious reward?
So there I am, in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, at about 3 o'clock in the morning, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass, or Ozzy wouldn't go on stage that night. So, Jeff Beck pops his head 'round the door, and mentions there's a little sweets shop on the edge of town. So - we go. And - it's closed. So there's me, and Keith Moon, and David Crosby, breaking into that little sweets shop, eh. Well, instead of a guard dog, they've got this bloody great big Bengal tiger. I man...
Dick Dagger: It's more than just an incredibly predictable porn star name. It's what you kill things with in this awful game. Join us as we try and talk about anything and everything but this atrocity.
Hey there, Clever Girls... are you ready to have a prepubescent crush on Laura Dern? We thought so. There really isn't a great Jurassic Park game, but the Genesis one is made of human butt. And we don't care that you get to be a raptor, because that's the dream we live every night... as were-raptors.
Auuegh!? What we need now is more power. Wilson is across the fence, and we should mow him down with our Binford=Taylor Hedge Trimmers, because that's the only way to the truth about what happened in my tragic head injury. Also, something about men and women being different, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas being the wellspring from which all fetish flows.
Shaq is baq, and he's on the attaq! Sucked into the Second World and tasked with saving a little Japanese boy, it's sure to be a shoq to his system. However, us qanny gamers will know how to guide him to victory against voodoo priestesses and, Carnage? I guess.
I don't remember the part of Lord of the Rings where Frodo got a sword that would turn things into skeletons... let alone, I don't think he had it in Hobbitton. But that's the least of our worries, as we try and ignore the bitchin' tunes and talk about how weird this action RPG is.
While just blog-checkin' on Tyson, we found this amazingly awful and weird game. Things take a turn for the serious as we talk about the ethics of professional sports, and how they relate to Space Jam. Is Noted Rapist Mike Tyson able to punch out the alien threat? We should find out. This podcast is dedicated to our collective dead Aunts. God bless, Jesus is Lord. Abject Suffering
It's a dark night for the world... Mandatory Municipal Pepsi has rendered the entire population diabetic, and only one man, Captain Novolin can save us. Eat the good aliens, and avoid the bad, and hope to Christ that you have enough blood.
Kid Kool is here to teach you the ways of love, as he begins our long and fruitful affair with bad NES platformers. Have you been good? If you died today, would you go to Jump Heaven or Speed Hell? We will all be judged, abjectly.
Living it up while you're going down? Picture Steven Tyler making a series of tuna fish sandwiches, while you're suffering through a pretty crappy light gun game. That's Revolution X. Gary and Kole aren't pleased, but we quickly get off the topic of this game, glowing green skulls and all.
