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By 2005, Konami had made three TMNT beat-em-ups based on the 2003 animated series, which is the kind of commitment usually reserved for tax filings or long-term relationships. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare landed that November on GameCube, PS2, Xbox, and Nintendo DS as the trilogy’s closer, and Konami sent it off in style by giving it the series’ first E10+ rating, as if four years of shell-based violence had finally crossed some invisible threshold of Too Much.

The game loosely adapts the show’s third season across four “Episodes,” which means the Triceratons invade Earth, Agent Bishop kidnaps Splinter for reasons that presumably made sense to somebody in a government facility somewhere, and Shredder shows back up to remind everyone that retirement isn’t really a thing that happens to ninja warlords. Along the way you can pour experience points into skill scrolls, transform into a Dino Turtle or an Ultimate Turtle depending on the mood, and, if you clear the first Episode, unlock a modified version of the 1991 arcade classic Turtles in Time, which is Konami’s way of saying “here’s the good one, in case this one doesn’t land.”

Joining me to sort the Triceratons from the Foot Ninjas is Pierce Lydon of Spawnography, the podcast where he and George Marston work through Todd McFarlane’s entire Spawn mythology one hellish arc at a time. Pierce has already survived one trip through the Play Comics gauntlet with me on Spawn in the Demon’s Hand, so they know exactly what they signed up for this time: showing up, being extremely knowledgeable, and getting talked into yet another licensed beat-em-up nobody asked for.

So grab a ninja scroll, pick a turtle, any turtle, and let’s find out whether Mutant Nightmare sent Konami’s turtle trilogy out on a high note, or whether the Triceratons should’ve just stayed home.

In 1986, King Features looked at its stable of unrelated newspaper strip heroes and decided the responsible thing to do was throw them all in a blender. Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, and the Phantom. A spaceman, a stage hypnotist, and a guy who lives in a skull-shaped cave and inherited his job from his dad got drafted into a single Saturday morning cartoon called Defenders of the Earth on the apparent theory that if the Avengers could do a team-up, so could three guys who had never met before that year and shared nothing except a syndicate contract.

Then, because nothing from the ’80s was allowed to stay just a cartoon, Defenders of the Earth became a video game in 1990, courtesy of Enigma Variations, for the exact kind of home computer that made you type a magic incantation and wait: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga, and, for the three people on Earth who owned one, the SAM Coupé. You play Flash, sneaking through Ming’s castle dodging security cameras, occasionally calling in Mandrake or the Phantom to open doors, because apparently that’s what magic and jungle-honed strength were for in these days.

Helping make sense of this glorious pile of licensed heroes is Ryan Estrada, who’s written comics for Star Trek, Popeye, Garfield, and, fittingly, Flash Gordon itself, having contributed to Papercutz’s newer Flash Gordon Adventures line. Ryan’s also built a reputation for tucking real hidden puzzles and messages directly into his comic pages, in plain sight, daring anyone paying close enough attention to find them. Which feels like exactly the right skillset for an episode about a security system that apparently only a few specific comic strip disciplines can defeat.

So track down a joystick you no longer own, adjust to a universe where Flash Gordon answers to a management structure that includes a professional hypnotist, and let’s find out whether the Defenders of the Earth earned their game, or whether Earth would’ve been just fine handling Ming on its own.

Garfield has spent I don’t want to think about how long being terrified for our entertainment, and somehow this is only the second time we’ve noticed. Today we’re looking at two occasions Jim Davis’s laziest creation got shoved into a horror plot he absolutely did not sign up for: Garfield’s Nightmare on the Nintendo DS and Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt, the Flash game that lived on Garfield.com back when “Flash game that lived on a dot-com” was still a sentence people said out loud.

Helping us make sense of not one but two instances of “cat, but afraid” is Dee Parson from Supr Dee, the syndicated cartoonist behind Rosebuds. A guy who, by his own account, actually learned to read on Garfield comics, which means this episode is less “guest booking” and more “the student returns to grade the source material’s video game output.”

So lock the pantry, keep an eye on the Scare-O-Meter, and let’s find out if either of these games earned the right to scare a cat who once ate an entire sandwich made of other sandwiches.