Abject Suffering

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.