Abject Suffering

Minority Report: Everybody Runs is a licensed tie in game to a movie where ladies lay eggs that tell the future. Since this is a perfect fit for us, we talk about what precog powers would do to our lives, and Kaye talks about preparing for her upcoming move.

The Biker Mice from Mars was an also-ran in the Turtles boom of the early nineties. Its premise was exactly what the title implies, and it relied on the idea of bikers being a lot cooler than they actually are. But given any chance to talk about the Turtles, we dig into the missed potential in not focusing on the TEENAGE part of TMNT.

Panic! isn’t really a game, it’s a mouse training program with some context-free visual gags. Faced with the possibility that disliking this makes us sticks in the mud, we talk about why this presentation is a disservice to the very necessary emotion of whimsy.

We’ve done most of the major Christmas-themed games, so we had to dig deep and find some of the worst slop Steam could provide. Satan Santa is an asset flip game that makes generous use of AI in its text and marketing materials. A demon has replaced Santa and a kid needs to walk really slow about it.

Rock n’ Roll Racing is a game that people love. It’s pog monsters doing combat racing from an irritating isometric perspective, set to SNES chiptune renditions of classic rock songs. For what it is, it’s hard to find too much to complain about… so we talk about Gary’s ongoing crisis of whether or not he should become best friends with his dentist.

Everyone has to start somewhere. For Cliff Blezinski, starting meant making a pale imitation of Shadowgate called Palace of Deceit: The Dragon’s Plight. Playing it is a master class in what makes Shadowgate good. But you can’t be too hard on the kid for it, he was sixteen. Be hard on him for the things he said and did later.

Gamer Simulator is an unfinished piece of slopware available on Steam that doesn’t really simulate being a gamer, as much as it simulates being under a geas that makes it so you can only derive sustenance from powerups you find in video games. And when you’re done eating virtual hamburgers, you can learn about the cruelest reality television shows of all time.

At the twilight of Macauley Culkin’s first act, he released a trio of flops that included the movie The Pagemaster, a combination live action and animated film where he plays an awful little nerd who learns confidence by going into books. Because it was 1994, they made a ton of very bad and loose platformers based on this stinker of a property. We talk a little bit about those before digressing onto “Knights and Warriors”, a syndicated television show whose premise was “American Gladiators, but evil.”

The kids today don’t know the cautionary tale of Spore, Will Wright’s big gamble on a universal god sim that absolutely didn’t pay off. And even fewer kids know about the avalanche of Spore shovelware that followed EA taking a bath on the main game. It’s so fitting for a game about evolutionary viability to drown in its own ooze.

We thought there would be meat on something called “Action Man”, but then we found out that it’s just a re-badging of what we in America know as G.I. Joe. Which is disappointing. While we wait to talk about these exciting “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles” next week, we also discuss the Free Willy animated series, and try to decode why kids everywhere are saying “6-7”.