Abject Suffering

Crystalis is, first and foremost, a pretty good game. There are fun details about its story, and why they still honor the American dollar, but mostly it serves as a good launching point for talking about the absurdities of NextDoor.

Is there a name for the kind of stealth horror game that's popular with streamers? Things like Hello Neighbor and Bendy and the Ink Machine? Whatever that is, this is one of those, but with a fun, crappy educational vibe. Truth is, this is actually pretty good and fun, so we range far afield on this episode.

You may be thinking, "Hey guys! That Capcom NES Little Mermaid game wasn't bad! What gives?" And you're right. The only crime that game commits is being too simple. This week, we're talking about the very bad Little Mermaid game made for the Sega Genesis, which looked at the Dam level from TMNT and said "hold my conch".

Imagine, if you will, a kind of battling toad. Nobody asked for this episode, we just felt like talking about it. Rare's darling baby that launched a thousand memes, about things ranging from its difficulty to its availability in stores. We don't care for it very much! But we only talk a little bit about why the game doesn't work, and spend most of our time talking about the Dark Queen's Pixar ass, horrible holiday memories, and comparative power ratings of the toad boys.

This survival horror/survival sim set in an arctic base is notable for one reason: It was made entirely in Blender, which is not a game engine. It would be like somehow making a JRPG run in MS Paint. Other than that, it's got a baffling "barely translated" charm... so instead, we talk about how Gary recently developed hypothermia in his house.

We need to re-calibrate what constitutes an "Abject Suffering Emergency". It's hard to tell how earnest the Whiteboyz Wit' Attitude are. On one hand, the music is pretty bad and farcical, but on the other hand, they've been at it for many years. This Steam game is a gussied up sales pitch for their compilation album, featuring some limited rhythm gameplay set to their low production value videos.

This is our second rock band management sim this year, and it's by far the superior to "Rock Star Ate My Hamster". The drug fixation aside, this is a fun little Lemonade Stand sim that has a fair bit of complexity and some of the best procedurally generated names we've seen.

Special Thanks to Beyond Reason for the theme song remix.

This week we look at a humble, gag-based point and click puzzle game that's a parody of a parody of MacGuyver. We also talk about the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Junior. At length.

They turned a good book into a very frustrating text adventure.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Britain was overtaken by treasure hunt fever, sparked by a childrens' book called The Masquerade and its promises of a valuable gold rabbit for anyone clever enough to solve its puzzles. The contest ended in allegations of fraud, and this cursed rabbit went on to become the basis for an outright scam called Hareraiser, a duo of games for microcomputers that were little more than unsolvable messes. The gold rabbit was auctioned off when the company was liquidated, and we were left with one of the worst "games" in all of history.