Abject Suffering - podcast cover

Abject Suffering

Duckfeed Productions LLCwww.abjectsuffering.com
This is a podcast that's nominally about bad games. In reality, it's about the horror of daily life, GameFAQs Gold, strange combatants in the battle of Good vs. Evil, and a singular patriarch known only as Crick. Every Monday, Gary Butterfield and Kole 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 the absurd.
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Episodes

Episode 498: Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.

To maintain order, the Secret Games Commission (SGC) is formed to organize tournaments deciding which organization gets to control all of Neo-Amerika, leading to the creation of Biological Flying Robotic Enhanced Armored Killing Synthoids (Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.) serving as the champions for each participating organization.

Mar 27, 202333 min

Episode 495: Hell's Kitchen

This episode is fuckin' RAW! If you ever wanted a weird CGI Gordon Ramsey yell at you in a lifeless void, oh man, do I have the game for you.

Mar 06, 202333 min

Episode 494: Heir of Zendor

It turns out "Zendor" is what your grand uncle called "debt". What I'm saying is you just inherited a lot debt.

Feb 27, 202340 min

Episode 492: Strange Flesh

Wine, sodomy and the lash. Or something like that I'm assuming. I'm not saying it is porn but I sure felt embarassed accidentally googling it at my day job.

Feb 13, 202336 min

Episode 491: Litil Divil

Inside of you are two wolves. One is a Litil Debil. The other, a Litil Angle. Who will you listen to?

Feb 06, 202337 min

Episode 489: Wacky World of Miniature Golf

Nobody knows why, but people in the 90s thought if golf video games had comedians in them, maybe that would connect with the kids? Anyway, Eugene Levy fails to convince the boys that this golf is all that whacky.

Jan 23, 202336 min

Episode 488: Bionic Commando (2009)

Bionic Commando is one of the best games for the NES. Taking away your jump and forcing you to rely on predictable swinging physics was (and is!) a novel concept, matched by a delightful semi-serious, semi-goofy tone and exquisite level design. So you can imagine how high hopes were when a sequel was announced. Well, that was a mistake.

Jan 16, 202341 min

Episode 487: Tootinis

Tootinis is a game that feels like a student project that ended up getting a little money behind it. Very little money, mind you. So we're fully in "Please Be Cool" mode because all these people did was make a weird kids' game with baffling characters and a very funny intro. Additionally we talk about what Totino's Pizzas become when they enter your mouth, the new garage that Kole saw, and Gary's glimpse at our cold metallic future.

Jan 09, 202336 min

Episode 486: Magician Lord

Magician Lord is an okay arcade game about a transforming wizard. That's not what's important, however. What's important is that we know that 2023 will be the year of the Buff Wizard, Who May or May Not Be a Frog Man. It's imperative that we embrace and hype this early so we can make it happen. Extremely ripped wizard. Possibly a humanoid frog. Strong as hell. Lots of lightning. Lovingly rendered buttocks and genitalia. Let's make it happen, people.

Jan 02, 202335 min

Episode 485: Corpse Killer

We've spoken on the charms and pitfalls of FMV video games before, and we're happy to report that Corpse Killer falls well on the charms side. It's a dead basic lightgun game, making Terminator 2 look like Time Crisis, but it also has ridiculously over the top acting and a bonkers story. So instead of laying into it for too long, we talk about how it's driving us crazy that someone out there is trying to make people care about Avatar.

Dec 26, 202242 min

Episode 484: City Connection

City Connection is a fun arcade maze chase that takes place in a world where everything's the same, but cars jump for some reason? So we talk about the dangers of being so competitive that you scream about Bingo, and also cap things off with a vexatious Burger King anecdote.

Dec 19, 202245 min

Episode 483: Kiss: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child

First off, it's podcast malpractice that we didn't make this entire episode about the video for the KISS song "Psycho Circus". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWIW6Ti0PbE) That's on us. We weren't even that distracted by the ho-hum Lithtech shooter that is KISS colon Psycho Circus colon The Nightmare Child. We just got very wrapped up in the concept of KISS itself, which basically amounts to Insane Clown Posse for boomers. This is also part two of our inadvertent duology of "Our Carnival Isn't ...

Dec 12, 202240 min

Episode 482: Bad Day on the Midway

The image of a person with an eyeball for a head is very good. That's the nice thing we'll say about the Residents. But Bad Day on the Midway underlines some fundamental problems we have with them, since it's unpleasant to look at and listen to, and not to a very interesting artistic result. You poke around a demented carnival amusement park learning about mentally ill people, killers, and racists... and then it just ends, regardless of how you play. More power to you if you're down with the Res...

Dec 05, 202234 min

Episode 481: Seymour Goes to Hollywood

Who is Seymour, and where is he going? What does he want when he gets there? We can only answer one of these questions, but we barely care. Seymour catfished us, saying it was a game about a little potato man, only for us to learn that it's actually another horrible Dizzy game with the serial numebrs filed off.

Nov 28, 202235 min

Episode 480: Simon the Sorcerer 2

Simon the Sorcerer is a rude teen who likes boobs, doesn't know what's happening around him, and never stops talking. This, his improbable second adventure, draws him back into the fantasy world because he can't stay out of containers designated for clothing. Is there zero joy to be had in a Simon the Sorcerer game? We don't know. But this one just never... stops... talking. Why should a joke ever end? It can just keep going. That's what we call value.

Nov 21, 202236 min

Episode 479: The Looker

It's time to do a mini-WOFF! about one of the funniest games we've played recently: The Looker. It's a candid and scathing parody of The Witness, taking place on a very similar island, and having you use a pen to solve placemat mazes while listening to faux-deep audio recordings. We stay on topic throughout this one and spoil quite a bit, so consider going and playing The Looker for yourself (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/). It's free and it's about 90 minutes long.

Nov 14, 202240 min

Episode 478: Hidden Agenda

This week's episode is about Hidden Agenda, a really neat DOS game that is both too serious and too good to joke much about. It's a strategy game where you run a fictional post-revolutionary Central American country, making decisions that steer its development and inevitably piss off the people around you. So instead we talk about Gary's recent solo PRGE, and give some extremely belated takes on the Silent Hill announcements. We recorded this a while ago.

Nov 07, 202240 min

Episode 477: Michigan: Report from Hell

It's a shame when a great idea is wasted on a terrible execution. That's what happened with Michigan: Report from Hell. You play as a television camera man who is out with a team covering mysterious and violent incidents in Chicago as a strange fog rolls in. You shape the events through what you choose to film. Great idea, right? Too nothing about it holds together, leaving us with a clunky and awkward PS2 survival horror game that should have been great.

Oct 31, 202248 min

Episode 476: Muppet Monster Adventure

If I was a kid and I got a Muppet game where I couldn't play as Kermit, I'd be pissed. That's the world that Muppet Monster Adventure forces on us, one where people know who Robin the Frog is. The good Muppets have been kidnapped by an evil monster, and it's up to Robin to rescue them, maybe? This is a bog standard licensed platformer, and it's not especially terrible as those go.

Oct 24, 202249 min

Episode 475: Clive Barker's Nightbreed

Clive Barker's most famous forray into video games is 2001's Undying, but that wasn't his first attempt. Before that, we learned all about the Nightbreed. It's unclear what a Nightbreed is, how you become one, or what they even do, but this Interactive Movie adventure game does its best to get you up to speed, terrible checkpointing and all.

Oct 17, 202238 min

Episode 474: Dan Dolme

Listen, it's not great when the way you earn points in a game is to find a lady and have vigorous sex with her before she disappears. That's what happens in Dan Dolme, a game about a man with a large penis whose girlfriend goes missing and he must find her and engage with her sexually. But the whole presentation is so surreal that it's hard to condemn it too much, at least from our point of view. If you want to argue that, we're fine, but please understand that this is a game where in order to p...

Oct 10, 202241 min

Episode 473: Razor Freestyle Scooter

You had to be around in the early '00s to know exactly how hard Razor scooters were being pushed on us. These were collapsable metal scooters meant for radical teens to ride to class. And they made a game about them, a not entirely terrible Tony Hawk clone. So we spend some time talking about the gimmick shoes that were foisted on us as kids.

Oct 03, 202242 min

Episode 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 26, 202237 min

Episode 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 ca...

Sep 19, 202238 min

Episode 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 12, 202245 min

Episode 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.

Sep 05, 202249 min
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