Abject Suffering

The Oregon Trail is a simple game, but it’s timeless. The Amazon trail is complicated and involves time traveling magic panthers, and nobody has thought about it in thirty years. There’s a lesson there. Additionally, there are lessons in hiring contractors to fix your bathroom, and lessons about how the Liar’s Dividend has made public defecators of us all.

This is a sequel episode to Abject Suffering 619: Wild Woody.

Look, we totally intended to record an episode about a video game. But sometimes you’re at a discount grocery store and you stumble across the deal of a lifetime. How many lives could you change with $100?

It’s time for another McDonald’s episode because they released a new game on the sly when they brought back the Changeables Happy Meal Toys. You know, those little toys that are like Transformers but the “disguise” form is food that scientists labored over to make sure you’d eat it forever.

This game is basically nothing, a little Flash-like web game platformer. But this new toy drop has wildly expanded the McDonald’s cosmology, and that must be addressed.

Look out! It's tiny Sweettooth! He's going to run us over in his tiny car!

This episode is about a Donkey Kong sequel that's about a man who kills bugs. Kaye also talks about schlepping her cats across the country and Gary uses a bathroom in a haunted house.

The Dangerous Dave games are a series of PC platformers that acted as a precursor to Commander Keen, except with a redneck aesthetic and hyperviolence. This entry is hard, but not terrible, so we talk about how modern Helltimes have rendered thinking about having superpowers unpalatable.

Beast Wars: Transformers is an ugly show, and the PlayStation game based on it is even uglier. It’s a little bleak to consider that the cheap animation of the 80s cartoon is the best that these robots would ever look. So instead, Gary proposes a new sex move called “Trick or Treat”, and we work out the logistics of how to pull it off.

It’s honestly weird that we haven’t already covered the NES version of Bad Dudes, a game with an infamous intro and horribly choppy handling. So Kaye brings it as her vanity pick, and we talk about how bad times have also made ALL of us into Bad Dudes.

Friday Night Funkin’, a rhythm game credited with keeping Newgrounds relevant in the 2020s, is actually pretty good. The music works better than the visuals, and the fan community is really… enthusiastic… but there’s not much to hate here. So instead we talk about Gary’s trip to San Francisco, where he got mindfreaked.

Love Is… is a very sad and weird comic strip about naked eight year olds who are married and like being really bossy about what is and isn’t love. The game is nothing, but we cannot bring ourselves to stop diving into the comic’s archive to boggle at what was once (and apparently still is?) acceptable.