Abject Suffering

When you're a kid with unlimited free time, and games are not plentiful and the internet isn't around, you end up reading a lot of questionable novels. Enter Xanth: Piers Anthony's problematic saga that continues to this day. Listen as we talk about the Legend adventure game based on the books, and also dig into bad kids fantasy in general.

Imagine a pop-o-matic world. That might have made the Game of Life more interesting! Everything ensconced within perfect plastic and metal, the ideal randomizer. However, another way to make the Game of Life more interesting is to make it into a video game like Jones in the Fast Lane. A lesser-known Sierra title that plays like a board game, you start at the bottom rung of your career, and try to use your limited time and money to reach your goals. It's neat!

We all like Contra, right? What if we did it again but worse? And what if Konami wasn't as great as you remembered it, and you've been letting them coast on Castlevania for decades?

This kind of good PC shoot-em-up game takes your regular arcade shooter like Raiden and adds more story and a dash of humor. That doesn't give us a lot to work with, so we talk about the prospect of grown-up sleepovers, and start recommending products.

Everyone remembers the X-Files game for PlayStation. It was an FMV game that shipped in a huge case with a ton of CDs. Less well-known is this PS2 survival horror game that is... actually pretty neat! We talk about this, and also pitch a spin-off show: The X-Fires.

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Just so you're not disappointed, this isn't the PSX game that stars Bruce Willis. That would be the similarly anonymous game "Apocalypse". No, this is a really bland cinematic action game that stars a man with amnesia and a bizarre gun arm. It's like Contra, but the bad Contras.

This single-screen asset factory platformer posits the existence of a new kind of nose, while we talk about the nightmare of our cats bringing us a corpse.

It's crazy how developers kept on trying to make first person games happen on the DS, even when it was abundantly clear that they were painful to play. This breaks out into a more serious conversation about innovation vs. proficiency, and we apologize for that. We'll make it goofier next time.

The best, most expansive creepypasta universe lends itself to an admirable fan game. Problem is, it's multiplayer, and playing games with strangers is the pits!

A game that, for legal purposes, is unaffiliated with the real Santa or Christmas.