Abject Suffering

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.

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.

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.

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.

First off, it's podcast malpractice that we didn't make this entire episode about the video for the KISS song "Psycho Circus". 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 Like the Carnival You Grew Up With, It's a Little Dark and Twisted!" games.

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 Residents' style, but we certainly draw the line here.

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 numbers filed off.

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.

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. It's free and it's about 90 minutes long.

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.