Brendan Caldwell - Jank (Page 3)

08 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Wall Week

Wall-e review

There's a reason for this but it's not a good one

The world of Wall-e (2008) is covered in half-pipes and quarter pipes, as if designed by a committee of Thrasher magazine photographers. It is a wasteland of human detritus and dead buildings, many of which have helpfully collapsed into useful ramps and handy pathways lined by traffic cones. The afterearth of Wall-e is functionally indistinguishable from the post-apocalypse of The Last Of Us, insofar as it is a landscape of signposting and affordances. Finding an old children's toy in the dust of a failed civilisation offers a poignant moment. Good thing they sparkle to make sure you spot them.

Why am I reviewing Wall-e, a licensed Disney tie-in from the year of our dirt 2008? Well, I've been informed we're doing Wall-e week at Jank and I thought: "Weird, but okay".

To quickly enlighten you. This is a gentle children's platformer full of set pieces loosely adopted from the film. It has racing levels, gentle box-slinging puzzles, and bright diode collectioneering. There is an insufferable looping calypso track that will make you want to perforate your own eardrums. In one level you may spend a grand total of 120 seconds guiding the floating iPod called Eva away from a sandstorm while blasting incoming obstacles with lasers. In another you will be hoovering up a hundred gizmos to unlock a door. Honey, we're videogamesing. Its best levels showcase the sediment layers of game design practices over the preceding decades that have compacted to produce, finally, a semi-competent movie tie-in for nine year olds. Its worst levels are a kind of shitty Sonic.

You recharge your health in sunbeams and throw cubes a lot.

I did not play Wall-e when it first graced the most bargainous of buckets at your local Gamestop in 2008, which has since transformed into a pawn shop that BUYS YOUR GOLD TODAY. I cannot meaningfully review it in the context of its own time - a year in which I concede Left 4 Dead, BioShock, Portal, Burnout Paradise and Mass Effect may have overshadowed it. All the flesh components of my cerebellum have long since become infected with a kind of psychic mold from the intervening history of pandemics, financial collapses, and news stories about gorillas from Cincinnati being shot in the head.

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06 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Wall Week

Pay up, dirtbags

We're finally putting up the paywall

Stand and deliver, word scrounger. When we launched Jank back in the primordial days of, let's see, January, we promised the first month would be free to everyone - all posts readable, no registration needed. Then we forgot to put up the paywall for five consecutive months. That is a 400% increase in the number of free words you were originally promised. You will not get this incredible combo of value and absent-mindedness from any other PC games blog.

But the sun is setting on those glory days. A writer must eat. If we continue to give away all our favourite nouns and verbs for zero British pounds then we will starve before we even play all the videogames. And then what will you read? Rock Paper Shotgun? Don't make me laugh. No. I am sorry. The paywall must go up. So, in a publicity exercise carefully designed to disguise all discontent resulting from this decision, we therefore announce a special week of themed features. This is Wall Week.

Wall Week will make sense when you see what we are writing about. Bricks. Plaster. Robots? Whatever. We don't need to rationalise our off-the-wall celebration of

29 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

I love the command line

Open article.txt

I love typing weird words in the dark. The command line interface is an archaic curiosity to some, or a desperate measure - an obsidian prompt invoked by troubleshooting articles when something on your PC has gone terribly wrong. But for me it's an invitation to an invisible realm of circuitry and verbs. I thank the cybergods that plenty of game developers have a similar fascination.

For example, Duskers 2.0 was announced during the summer games dump, a long overdue sequel where the simple typing of instructions to glitching robots is the only weapon you have against an alien bestiary of unseen threats. The command line, when done well, is enough to hang a whole sci-fi horror universe upon. It's like groping around in a dark room, with language as your only limb.

"The command line allowed us to make Duskers so much more atmospheric," says Tim Keenan, founder of Misfits Attic. "It forced the player to 'speak' to the drones in their language, reinforcing the idea that you are alone and the drones you're talking to are cold tech that require you to conform your speech and thoughts to their way of communicating.

26 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

Quake is 30 and the mappers have gone mad

Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map

Quake is timeless. But also, technically, it is 30 years old. This eldritch ur-game is the beast rumbling beneath the skin of every first-person shooter you have ever played, and if you know what's good for you, you will sacrifice a small farm animal in honour of its anniversary this week, or maybe just an avocado. I don't want to get you in trouble.

Nobody is making a greater fuss over the birthday of the first proper 3D shooter than its diehard mappers. Even in a normal month, you'd see a steady flow of new singleplayer maps frothing to the surface, thanks to the game's immortal modding and mapping scene. Maybe a collaborative jam would plonk 10-20 maps in your lap at once. But this month is wild. Since the "Q30" festival of mapmaking began, there have been over 100 new levels. And the absolute monsters of mappery are not even finished. Here's a handy roundup of what has come out so far.

Quake 30th Anniversary 1024 jam

Every jam has a theme or a gimmick to challenge the mapmongers. In this case they had to create a map that would fit

24 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Blueprints is dead, and so is my unfinished game about cats

Goodbye to the only way I know to code

Coding is hard. Show me lines of C# and I will curl into a ball and weep. I have tried many times to learn a programming language and every time I only get as far as learning about arrays before my entire neocortex dribbles out of my nose like a rejected milkshake. But that was not the case with Blueprints. Unreal Engine's visual scripting noodles let you sorta-code entire game systems using dinky little wires and pleasing flow charts. Finally, I can make the game I have always dreamt of: a broken walking sim about collecting bodega cats that will get two downloads on Itch.io.

Except now all my grand dreams are being swept away. Unreal Engine is retiring the relatively accessible Blueprints in favour of a bizarre, vaguely culty coding language called "Verse" that Epic is calling a "system for building metaverse experiences." Still going on about the metaverse, I see. Fantastic.

To understand the minor upheaval that is going on in the world of Unreal developers, you need only hear about the most recent State Of Unreal address, in which the company showed off plans for Unreal Engine 6. The decisions announced in this

19 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I have crashed a plane into Google HQ, oh well

What a terrible accident

Google have released a flight sim. Or, to be more accurate, they've made an experimental Google Earth-based flight sim into a toy you can play in a web browser. The view is taken over with the glowing green lines of a classic flight HUD. You control pitch and yaw with arrow keys (but it works better with your mouse) and heave your thrust up 'n' down with the PageUp and PageDown keys. It is as if you are flying a plane. Wow.

You can visit incredible places in Google's sky bus, such as Mountain View, California. A beautiful municipality, home to many large technology corpor– hang on, something is... oh no, would you look at that. We're losing altitude, the Aerogoog is plummeting. Mayday? I think we say mayday. We're on a collision course with – oh my, what are the chances – somebody should do something, oh heavens, what terrible luck.

The tumbling of my virtual airtube into the headquarters of the world's biggest magic phonebook may cause some alarm among sensitive readers. Please, do not be afraid. Crashing planes in flight simulators is one of the simplest and most ancient joys of PC gaming.

18 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

The Data Center is where dreams go to die

Join my professional network on 192.168.0.1/24

I suppose it's time to reconcile my love for engineering marvels with the world's collective nosedive into technofeudalist hell. Okay. I can do that. Just as I find fighter jets impossibly cool, but do not actually want them used to explode people, I think data centres are impressive, but I do not like to see them sucking the world dry like a parasitic force beyond any ordinary human citizen's control. And since I am broken in the brain, the only way I know how to settle conflicting emotions like this is to play a videogame.

Data Center (US spelling) is about being a technician in charge of a data centre (UK spelling) and making sure all the wires go into the correct holes. On arrival to this new virtual workplace I find a radio on a nearby desk. I turn the radio on. It plays a sound I shall not classify as music. I turn the radio off. Time to get to work in a very compelling sort of hell.

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

This is an early access job sim all about

11 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Let us discover a new world

With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City

I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.

In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?

"The best thing a game can do to create a