[PREVIEW] Exquisite Suffering 199: The Phantom 2040

In this final premium episode of Abject Suffering, we talk about the legendary kusoge “Death Crimson”, a barely-functional light gun shooter that qualifies as genuine outsider art. We also get kind of wistful about urban exploration and talking to our past selves.

Reign of Fire is the kind of movie you can’t make anymore, and that’s a good thing. It’s the perfect storm of post-9/11 militarism, and post-Lord of the Rings fantasy bandwagon chasing, with a pre-Batman Christian Bale and a pre-McConaughssaince Matthew McConnaughey. While a game about shooting dragons with guns should have a pretty high entertainment floor, this one absolutely biffs it by making you enact some of the worst vehicle combat to date.

If you weren’t there, you might not understand that there was a small movement to market the Nintendo DS as a kind of PDA, with utility software being sold as games. This also included self improvement games like Brain Age. Hot on this trend, Ubisoft went all in with a line of “My Coach” games, with none being more baffling than “My Stop Smoking Coach”. It’s admirable to want to help people end a dangerous addiction, but this product shows that a game is not the ideal way to try to do that.

Wisdom Tree is an interesting company that makes very bad games about the Bible, but you kinda have to give them credit for reverse engineering Nintendo hardware. This GameBoy game, The 20 Lost Levels of Joshua, is attached to a GameBoy version of the NIV Bible, and it’s hard to tell which side of the cart is more riveting.

Beyblade is like Digimon but it's about spinning tops. It's as dumb as it sounds.

Watch out! It’s the Phantom! Don’t let him… do whatever he does. Nobody knows, except maybe the people in the near future of 2040. But even they are kind of scratching their heads about this one.

She's big, sure, but does she know how to collate a print job? Nobody every considers what the giant girl's job prospects are.

I earnestly, honest to glob, don't ever remember submitting this game. But it does sound like something I would do. --GwenSniping is one of the most fun activities in a video game, and probably one of the least fun things to do in real life. That didn’t stop the sniper game boom in the 2000s, which included the budget PS2 title The Sniper 2… a game whose sole redeeming factor is its terrible cutscenes. You can only get so much mileage out of talking about sniping, so we turn to discussing the recent revelation that Tim Pool and other right wing commentators are imbecilic traitors!

It would be really hard for me not to just go grab a velociraptor when somebody asks me to speak to the manager.

There's a doll who leads a life of dangerTo everyone she meets she stays a strangerWith every move she makes another chance she takesOdds are she won't live to see tomorrow