Abject Suffering

City Connection is a fun arcade maze chase that takes place in a world where everything's the same, but cars jump for some reason? So we talk about the dangers of being so competitive that you scream about Bingo, and also cap things off with a vexatious Burger King anecdote.

First off, it's podcast malpractice that we didn't make this entire episode about the video for the KISS song "Psycho Circus". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWIW6Ti0PbE) That's on us. We weren't even that distracted by the ho-hum Lithtech shooter that is KISS colon Psycho Circus colon The Nightmare Child. We just got very wrapped up in the concept of KISS itself, which basically amounts to Insane Clown Posse for boomers. This is also part two of our inadvertent duology of "Our Carnival Isn't Like the Carnival You Grew Up With, It's a Little Dark and Twisted!" games.

The image of a person with an eyeball for a head is very good. That's the nice thing we'll say about the Residents. But Bad Day on the Midway underlines some fundamental problems we have with them, since it's unpleasant to look at and listen to, and not to a very interesting artistic result. You poke around a demented carnival amusement park learning about mentally ill people, killers, and racists... and then it just ends, regardless of how you play. More power to you if you're down with the Residents' style, but we certainly draw the line here.

Who is Seymour, and where is he going? What does he want when he gets there? We can only answer one of these questions, but we barely care. Seymour catfished us, saying it was a game about a little potato man, only for us to learn that it's actually another horrible Dizzy game with the serial numebrs filed off.

Simon the Sorcerer is a rude teen who likes boobs, doesn't know what's happening around him, and never stops talking. This, his improbable second adventure, draws him back into the fantasy world because he can't stay out of containers designated for clothing. Is there zero joy to be had in a Simon the Sorcerer game? We don't know. But this one just never... stops... talking. Why should a joke ever end? It can just keep going. That's what we call value.

It's time to do a mini-WOFF! about one of the funniest games we've played recently: The Looker. It's a candid and scathing parody of The Witness, taking place on a very similar island, and having you use a pen to solve placemat mazes while listening to faux-deep audio recordings. We stay on topic throughout this one and spoil quite a bit, so consider going and playing The Looker for yourself (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/). It's free and it's about 90 minutes long.

This week's episode is about Hidden Agenda, a really neat DOS game that is both too serious and too good to joke much about. It's a strategy game where you run a fictional post-revolutionary Central American country, making decisions that steer its development and inevitably piss off the people around you. So instead we talk about Gary's recent solo PRGE, and give some extremely belated takes on the Silent Hill announcements. We recorded this a while ago.

It's a shame when a great idea is wasted on a terrible execution. That's what happened with Michigan: Report from Hell. You play as a television camera man who is out with a team covering mysterious and violent incidents in Chicago as a strange fog rolls in. You shape the events through what you choose to film. Great idea, right? Too nothing about it holds together, leaving us with a clunky and awkward PS2 survival horror game that should have been great.

If I was a kid and I got a Muppet game where I couldn't play as Kermit, I'd be pissed. That's the world that Muppet Monster Adventure forces on us, one where people know who Robin the Frog is. The good Muppets have been kidnapped by an evil monster, and it's up to Robin to rescue them, maybe? This is a bog standard licensed platformer, and it's not especially terrible as those go.

Clive Barker's most famous forray into video games is 2001's Undying, but that wasn't his first attempt. Before that, we learned all about the Nightbreed. It's unclear what a Nightbreed is, how you become one, or what they even do, but this Interactive Movie adventure game does its best to get you up to speed, terrible checkpointing and all.

Listen, it's not great when the way you earn points in a game is to find a lady and have vigorous sex with her before she disappears. That's what happens in Dan Dolme, a game about a man with a large penis whose girlfriend goes missing and he must find her and engage with her sexually. But the whole presentation is so surreal that it's hard to condemn it too much, at least from our point of view. If you want to argue that, we're fine, but please understand that this is a game where in order to proceed you must learn how to double jump off of your own piss.

You had to be around in the early '00s to know exactly how hard Razor scooters were being pushed on us. These were collapsable metal scooters meant for radical teens to ride to class. And they made a game about them, a not entirely terrible Tony Hawk clone. So we spend some time talking about the gimmick shoes that were foisted on us as kids.

People love incremental and idle games. Kole's ambivalent. Gary hates them. Somehow this turned into an extremely on-topic mini-WOFF! about the genre at large, with Cookie Clicker as the starting off point. Welcome to Hell!

Say what you will about stop motion animation, there's an undeniable degree of difficulty associated with it that makes it a little more impressive than CGI emulating the clay sculpture style. This is the core hubris of the "Wallace and Gromit " people hooking up with Dreamworks to make "Flushed Away", a story about a posh surface rat getting flushed down the toilet to fight a frog king. And then they made a game about it. And then we mostly talked about Jackass, and a bizarre YouTube channel called "Max TV" (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX3tM-sW2NpWvy-xpmicGRA/featured).

Better late than never, right? Even if it's 21 years too late. 1986 saw the release of "An American Tail", a Don Bluth-animated film about a family of mice that fled Russia to head to America... 1986 being, of course, one of the last times that an optimistic story about immigration could be told in America. Then, in 2007, some weirdos decided to make a licensed game about it. One that even manages to make Monkey Ball mechanics un-fun!

Nyah, see? Myah. That's mobster talk, because we're talking about a pair of ZX Spectrum games which concern themselves with various illegal dealings in 1919. The roaring teens! Establish protection rackets, run hooch, pinch nanners, flip gatorboys, if it's illegal you can do it all. As long as it fits within the "Lemonade Stand" format.

Rise of the Dragon is a perfectly serviceable first person adventure game, held back by some misguided action sequences and a predictable plot. Cyber drugs? You're kidding me! So once we dispense with the formalities, Gary regales us with a tale of his return to the All-American Magic Show. Sometimes you CAN step in the same river twice.

WiiWare is an untapped market for us, and Gary brought in a doozie: a game about eating a lot in a very short amount of time. And you know what? It's not that terrible. It would at least have kept us entertained for a night in our dirtbag early twenties. So listen in and hear us talk about competitive eating, and learn a little more about Gary's horrible childhood.

Dragonfable is the long-forgotten followup to Adventure Quest, and somehow it still runs, and somehow you can still play it. Cribbing heavily from the hyper self-aware diction of webcomics in the mid-2000s, this is a repetitive, grindy RPG that's perfectly at home on this show.

Gilligan's Island is a hell named after its devil. The incompetent first mate of the S.S. Minnow bumbles about with an efficiency that cannot be accidental, ensuring that the island's flawed inhabitants will never again see another shore. Gilligan's Island is also a corny 60s television show which, for some reason, got an NES game made of it in 1990. It contains multitudes.