Abject Suffering 685: Sonic R

Dream TV is a game so obscure that even we have never heard of it, with a premise that was stale when they made it. Two kids are sucked into the TV! Ah! And the platforming is very, very bad. It’s overall uninspiring, so we talk about some horrifying social interactions that make us seriously consider our relationship to being trivia monsters, or “The Person Who Corrects People and Takes Away All of the Fun.”

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?This is a premium episode. Want to hear the whole thing? Back us on patreon.com/duckfeedtv!

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.