Abject Suffering

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.

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.

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.

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 proceed you must learn how to double jump off of your own piss.

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.

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!

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".

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!

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.

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.