Abject Suffering

Come with us to a time before sound, when dancing cats were no longer condemned as signs of witchcraft, even though they carried bags of tricks. To a time where Kole, unstuck in time, actually liked Felix the Cat at a young age. To a time when we play an amazing platformer on this show that is ostensibly about bad games.

Faster than a frightened cockroach. More powerful than my aversion to the sun. Able to disappoint your parents in a single loan. It's Superman 64!

Jenni from Video Games Taco joins us to answer the most pressing question of our time: "Is horses like cars but with meat?"

Special Guest: Jenni Polodna.

It’s strange but true, but customs that we attribute to a given locale often have shared roots. For example, did you know that seppuku and pumpkin carving come from the same, misguided place? Listen to the end to find out!

We are joined by Riff from Video Games Hot Dog. Follow him at @rifflesby.

Special Guest: Riff Conner.

There are many ways in which a man can be small. Let's take stature as a given. There's also pettiness, deceit, closed-mindedness... All of these diminish us. What else diminishes us? Shrink rays of our own design. We already live in an alien world, we just don't have the perspective to appreciate it. Additionally: These cans with articulated lids don't speak with H. Jon Benjamin's voice, and jetpacks are compromised grappling hooks.

In the long view, the Ninentdo 64 might be Abject Suffering, the system. In our initial estimate, the NES seemed like the most fertile and hateful ground... but the N64 is a remarkable moment in history where everyone's reach exceeded their grasp. Example: Body Harvest, an open world game that came out almost a decade before open world games were good. But someone had to be first, right?

We're not fond of turning nouns into verbs, but "thrifting" is to be considered a valid terminology for the purposes of this podcast. We're not proud, and we never said we weren't hypocrites. We also never promised to do things like "actually talk about the game we're supposed to talk about". That's your bad. You assumed that.

Squares. Circles. Tetrahedrons. The stately geodesic dome. Icosahedrons. Cubes. Hypercubes. Sentient cubes. BALLZ.

How does a person feel when they stare into the smoldering, waiting eyes of their creation? When it clambers for your attention... wanting love, wanting validation... wanthing to feel something, ANYTHING. That's how God feels about you ever day. God loves you. To death.

Special Guest: Brayton Cameron.

Not everyone knows the creation myth for anime. One day in a peaceful village in Japan, a truck carrying a surplus of decimal places from the war overturned, spilling extra zeroes and permanently altering the population. What was once 20 was soon 20,000. And so on, and so on, in kind. That's why everything in anime is predicated on shouting ridiculously high numbers... because the creators had no other choice.