Graham Smith - Jank (Page 2)

27 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The half-term holidays have arrived, which in my neck of the woods means all the kids are off school for the next two weeks. This is going to do wonders for my progress in Pokémon Pokopia, and serious damage to my progress in manshooter Marathon. I'm OK with this.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend, although tell us what is providing you with sweet relief in the comments below.

Water flows through stone aqueducts in a green pastoral hillside. — Beavers and Romans differ mostly by their chosen materials.

Nova Roma

Last week, both Going Medieval and Timberborn left Early Access, but here's another citybuilder entering it - and another which offers new ways to drown your population. Nova Roma is about constructing, well, Rome, and doing so in a manner that please the Gods as well as your citizens. Expect aqueducts and lots of games journalists using "wasn't built in a day" straplines.

A TV/VCR combo displaying the league table on teletext. Derby have 12 points. — I'd like to force an American to play this.

Nutmeg!

I collected football stickers in the '90s, spent pocket money on issues of Match and Shoot, read sports scores on Ceefax and played Subutteo in my mate's loft. Nutmeg! might be a game for me, specifically. It's a football management game based around deckbuilding

22 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world factory armed

20 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The sun is shining in Brighton, which means my appetite for going outside has returned and my appetite for playing games has greatly dimmed. Luckily I have no available friends nearby this weekend, and so I shall be inside playing videogames anyway.

What of you, our attractive and popular readers? Tell us if and what you're playing in the comments below.

Beavers on ziplines, some of which are robots, float over farms full of lush crops. — I hope these beavers have union protections.

Timberborn

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and water physics, allowing you to construct vast, hydroelectrically-powered cities of lumber with your populace of beavers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the art and tutorial, adds tools to automate the operation of your city, and smooths the creation of mods. Top stuff.

Some peasants cross a bridge to enter through a stone gate and into a city surrounded by trees and a wooden fence. — Pencils were so big in medieval times.

Going Medieval

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and deep citizenry management, allowing you to construct vast cities of stone with your populace of needy settlers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the tutorial, adds new endgame objectives among other content, and smooths the management of your many workers. Top stuff.

Lots of baseball player headshots littered in formation across a baseball field. — Pure videogames.

Out

18 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Lost And Found Co. review (of the YouTube videos I watched alongside it)

It could have lost the plot, and maybe I have

Lost And Found Co. is Where's Wally with a mouse pointer. You peer into orthographic worlds and you long to live within them: bustling city streets filled with colourful stores, buskers, and cute cats; a cluttered house that looks like it's fallen out of the pages of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Tokyo Style; a park, a jungle, a swamp, a convenience store, an island bar, a cat cafe.

The game's objective is that you find a given list of items in each location to bring notoriety back to a shrine goddess and win a popularity contest against an evil corporate president. My objective, however, is to dissociate of an evening while watching YouTube videos on a second screen. So let's appraise Lost And Found Co. in how it enables my goals.

Video 1: Episode 43 by Quest For The Best

I haven't watched this anime and never will.

Second screens have been a commonplace part of PC gaming for decades, and today people refer to certain releases as "podcast games". It's certainly always been a regular part of how I play games. I used to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent television while playing Counter-Strike betas; now I watch video

15 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into

13 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Give me your comments, I need them to live

This week felt like a merciful relief when compared to the machinegun of new releases at the beginning of March. Still, perhaps your hunger is not yet sated. Perhaps you wish for more new games, games about mending teapots, making spells, and murdering monsters.

What a coincidence, here are some games that meet those specific criteria. Let us know what you are playing in the comments down below.

How about a cosy back-to-basic life sim but it's about moving away from streaming services in favour of neatly maintaining the tags on your locally stored mp3 collection?

Piece By Piece

Repair items for animal folk by jigsawing them back together, then use the money you make to decorate your shop. There's some obvious Animal Crossing inspiration here (the fonts, the UI, the character designs), but gardening and painting aside, it seems much more focused on the soothing loop of shop management.

What a magnificent beast. Let's kill it.

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

I've never managed to get into a Monster Hunter game, but the Stories spin-off series seems like my most likely route in at this point. Twisted Reflection looks like it moves a little closer to the main

11 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Project TurboBlast's vehicles have wheels, but it's an antigrav racer in spirit

You know where you stand with a name like TurboBlast

It's difficult to find arcade racers where the handling isn't either mundane by dint of hewing too closely to ancient inspirations, or too fussy or difficult by dint of having been designed by sickos who are much better at these games than I am.

Project TurboBlast hits a sweet spot, judging by its demo, from its on-the-nose name to its F-Zero-on-wheels boost-happy racing style. "Don't blink," the announcer yells at the beginning of each final lap, and I don't think I did.

The music is great in this trailer, too.

Let me clarify "F-Zero-on-wheels". TurboBlast's tracks are wide, twisty, often suspended above an abyss, and covered in glowing boost pads, like every antigrav racer you've ever played including the likes of WipeOut. Your actual vehicles are on wheels, however, both cars or bikes, and you'll need to drift around every corner like in a Mario Kart or a Victory Heat Rally, one of the better arcade racers from recent years.

TurboBlast really is all about managing your turboblast. Aside from the boosts littered across the track, you have a slowly re-filling boost meter that can be used to build speed at any time. If you empty that bar, your vehicle

10 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith News

Sprawl Zero wants to take the FPS back to 2005

Some of us never left

I'm not a big fan of using modern internet phrases when writing about games. You know what I mean: "Hollow Knight's vibes are immaculate" or "I'm Balatro pilled", that sort of thing. It dates your writing within about fifteen minutes, and it pales in comparison to the power of original language you chose yourself.

Anyway first-person shooter Sprawl Zero appears to be Ravenmaxxing.

"Y2K is back" says a loading bar at the start of the trailer, and then "Reloading 2005" just before the liquid drum-and-bass drops for a combat montage of catching bullets, bum-sliding, and throwing physics barrels at enemies. At several points the player punches a man so hard they burst. This is a game made by people who I'd bet have seen Ghost In The Shell, Akira and probably at least one OVA, and who have played not only Raven Software's Singularity, but probably also Ritual's Sin and Monolith's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. They have probably seen The Matrix more times than they can count.

All of which is excellent. We've had several years now of "boomer shooter" renaissance, with developers trying to recreate the Id Software glory days of Doom and Quake. That's been good, but I'm