Abject Suffering

Who would have guessed that this comedy podcast episode nominally about a Shrek party game would have turned into a sober rumination on body image issues?

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You might be surprised to learn that we don’t hate Sonic R. It controls awkwardly and was clearly rushed out the door, but the idea of a Sonic racing game isn’t inherently bad. They even made some fun explorable courses to go along with it. But you don’t know about that, you just know about the bizarre soundtrack.

Ubisoft looked at Nintendogs and decided “hey, we could mess that up.” The result was the Petz series, where you adopt an animal and train it to fight for you, but not in a Pokémon way. Some talk about cat fur coat patterns determining personalities turns to a more existential talk of easy and superficial ways people use things like astrology and the MBTI to put themselves into boxes.

Shinobi for the PlayStation 2 isn’t a bad game. In fact, Kaye knows that she’s bringing a backdoor WOFF! pick to the show. However, it’s janky and it’s overly difficult because it’s from an era before character action was solved. When we run out of stuff to say about Shinobi, we start brainstorming business ideas to make use of a loophole to get infinite free wood chips… or at least how to use them to inflict them on your enemies.

Road Rash is a weird series because it was once very popular, and now you don’t hear about it. At all. And even the worst version of it, the hideous N64 game, isn’t all that terrible. There’s just something fun about jumping bikes and whipping people with chains. All this hog talk gets us talking about the appeal of motorcycle culture, and Gary’s encounter with an old gearhead at the store. “If it doesn’t have chrome, it’s not a car.”

Magic Boy is another stilted puzzle platformer with that Amiga stink on it. You are some kind of magical boy, and it’s up to you to stun and basement escaped magical animals so even worse things don’t happen. What really matters is that Gary threw a pool party recently, and we got to cavort.

In the DS/Wii/Kinect shovelware bonanza, nothing was off limits, including a Guy Fieri show that was just "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" for dummies. Featuring finicky touch screen control versions of bizarre physical challenges, Minute to Win It for the DS is the bottom of the crop. We also talk about the inscrutable musical act that is Puddles' Pity Party.

Super Morph is a PAL-only puzzle platformer that’s actually pretty neat. A young boy’s neglectful uncle put him into a matter transporter, and now the boy is trapped in flux between different states of matter. He must solve puzzles to find the gears that will fix the machine so he can return to his normal, human form. There are so many 16-bit PAL-only games we never got!

We also discuss the appeal of going dead weight, asking nicely to see airport jail, establishing situational awareness, acquiring paydata, and the rejection of the Order of the Triad Venture Bros. spinoff.

Some intellectual properties are like PFAS. Once introduced to the environment, they will never go away, just sitting and warping whatever they touch. The Hannah-Barbera archives are a superfund site of these, and no property has stuck around like Scooby-Doo. Night of 100 Frights has the distinction of being a very faithfully created 3D version of something that wasn’t great in the first place, attached to rote 3D platformer gameplay.

We also discuss exercise games, Scooby-Doo honoring the victims of 9/11, and mourning Dolly Parton and Tim Curry.

They made a fun Pong game for the PlayStation. ANYWAY, did you know that we both got Covid-19 in Las Vegas? Let’s rank the symptoms!

DJ Boy is a beat-em-up on roller skates. Roller blades? No, skates. The most hip-hop conveyance imaginable. That’s because this is a game steeped in a very removed Japanese understanding of US hip hop culture, which comes with some extremely uncomfortable racial depictions. Also, it’s time to hear about Kaye’s dental woes instead of Gary’s!

Balan Wonderworld is so infamous that sometimes you wonder if it could actually ever be that bad. Chat, it’s very bad. It ranks right behind chronically mistreating his workers on the list of worst things Yuji Naka has ever done. It’s so bad that we remain on topic for the whole episode.

Portal didn’t invent the story about the banal cruelty of corporate super science, but it sure did it better than Whiplash. You play a weasel who has a rabbit chained to you, hopping and bopping to try to escape from a laboratory. And while it promises sweet grappling hook action, all it delivers is disappointment. We also talk about Gary’s evolving battle with, and respect for, the Tree of Heaven.

We understand why you all voted for Flix and Chill 2: Millennials in our episode poll. Look at that title. Little did you know that it’s also a viciously uninteresting adventure game in the guise of a dating sim. Millennials are strange birds, we are led to believe. Also, Kaye invents a fun new game to play with your friends.

The Powerpuff Girls was a fine cartoon. It hit a lot of people at the right age, and its groovy 90s aesthetic was instantly iconic. So it probably deserved a better game than this, a very sloppy brawler and asset hunt. We also talk about the differing legacies of Nicktoons and Cartoon Network classics, how sometimes a cat is a cartoon in real life, and ways to integrate a Venture Bros.-ass TV phone into your daily life.

Riddick Bowe Boxing, known as “Chavez” in some regions, is actually a very good boxing game for the Super Nintendo. So we return to the old topics of boxing in general, how quick and brutal real fights can be, Kaye’s dwindling number of pockets for pocket sand, and the bizarreness of “free use” pornography.

Everyone knows the Rugrats, the hideous Nickelodeon babies who taught us about Passover. Well, they also traveled through time, at least on the GameBoy. And it didn’t turn out very good for anybody. Maybe they should have stopped David Crosby from writing a very creepy song.

Everybody get up, it’s time to talk about the Space Jam video game now. And it’s just a weak NBA Jam byproduct, with zero cartoony wackiness to be found. We also talk about the Space Jam sequel and how it was the height of cynical corporate IP management.

Phix is a furby who got magnet powers, and this entire game is an exploration of how to execute on that premise as sorely as possible. But one of the bosses is a big titty Medusa monster, so we discuss whether or not we could find love if one of our arms was a snake.

Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is a game that is so infamous that we’re shocked we haven’t covered it yet. It’s a terrible basketball game about a terrible man, and there’s always fun to be had when talking about hoops. But a conversation about a lying Lyft driver leads us to the incredible discovery of Dark Vibes Mobwave Become a Mob Boss Rainy Night Mood Narration.