Graham Smith - Jank (Page 3)

04 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Modders have turned one of racing's most hardcore sims into a Speed Racer game

And I'm crashing out at the first corner over and over.

I love Speed Racer, the Wachowski's kaleidoscopic family film which depicts a form of racing that's both a transcendent act of self-expression and an absurd, Wacky Races-style gauntlet around the coolest Hot Wheels track you've ever seen. The film was accompanied at the time by Speed Racer: The Videogame, a middling tie-in for the Wii. It deserved better.

Enter Assetto Corsa. The 2014 racing game is a staggeringly detailed simulation of real cars and racetracks, but it's also home to a vibrant modding community. Which I discovered when YouTube offered up a video titled "Insane Speed Racer mod" and didn't disappoint.

The copyrighted soundtrack isn't present in the mod, to be clear.

I love arcade racing games, but sims tend to be beyond my tolerance (unless they're about delivering freight across Europe). I have therefore never previously had any interest in playing Assetto Corsa until I saw the video above, at which point I immediately got it on Steam.

If you're now considering doing the same, I should warn you: all my dreams did not come true.

For a start, there is no "Speed Racer mod", as the YouTube video title suggests. There are instead two different mods: a T-180

01 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. As Football Manager is to Championship Manager, so The Lie-In is to its predecessor. Which is to say, sure, we no longer own the rights to the name, but the database and engine are still right here. Let's gather up some links worth reading from across the past week of t'internet.

Mothership is a new reader-supported website aiming to be something like "Teen Vogue, but for games". It's queer and women-owned, independent, aims to create an inclusive community, and will publish "writing and perspectives that specifically focus on gender and identity as they relate to games." You should read it and subscribe if you can. To highlight a specific article, I enjoyed Nicole Carpenter on why Gunpla is for the girls:

Gunpla, like lots of other stay-at-home hobbies, saw an international boost during the COVID-19 pandemic's lockdown restrictions. Not only were more people — including women — building models, but they were also livestreaming their processes and watching others do the same. That new group of enthusiasts continued to grow with the 2022 release of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, which included the main series' first female, queer protagonist.

The Bathysphere, the wonderful newsletter from Christian Donlan,

30 Jan 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The weekend approacheth, which means a long languorous release from work for some, and brief stolen moments of respite for those with young children (hi). Either way, you may choose, as we do, to fill your downtime with videogames.

Here's what you should - or at least, could - be playing. Tell us what you actually are in the comments.

A person dives while swinging a sword as the player fires akimbo pistols at them. — Best take your keys out your pockets before you land on them mate.

Out Of Action

This cyberpunk first-person shooter seems less like the live service hero shooters of the moment, and more like the Half-Life mods of my youth. A bit Action Half-Life, a bit NeoTokyo, as you bumslide, back-dive and bullet dodge in PvP shootouts. It's also got an offline mode and promises "deep progression", so not strictly retro, but one for the lovers of ghosts and/or shells.

MIO: Memories In Orbit

I've become a metroidvania guy in recent years, which is unfortunate because most of the genre's best entries are behemoths that take 30 hours or more to finish. MIO, which released a little over a week ago, is getting lots of praise but apparently won't take me

29 Jan 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Big Hops review: great veggie-powered movement before it gets lost in the weeds

There's still so few 3D platformers this good on PC

No genre is as unforgiving as the 3D platformer. It's not just that you inevitably invite comparisons to some of the best games ever made (all of them starring Mario). It's that the basic elements of the genre - precision platforming, expressive movement, a camera generous enough to show it all - are only ever an inch away from plunging the player into miserable frustration.

So it is with Big Hops, which is a hop, skip and a jump from Mario Odyssey and yet, in its worst moments, feels more like a big oops.

The Big Hops release trailer.

You play as Hop, a little green frog who lives in a forest with his mother and sister. Through an encounter with Diss, a kind of ambiguous trickster genie, he is whisked away to the void, a purple dimension of floating islands with topsy-turvy gravity reminiscent of Mario Galaxy. The void, in turn, connects to other worlds, and Hop must venture through a desert, tropical islands and deep mines to figure out Diss's motivation and collect parts for an airship (reminiscent of Mario Odyssey) that can take him home.

'There are basically no 3D platformers on PC that feel as good

27 Jan 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Sektori is a finely crafted adrenaline machine and I am a tiny baby

If I was a better person, maybe I’d want to play this brilliant shmup more.

Sektori is deeply unfashionable. It isn’t stacked with layer upon layer of meta-progression, unlocks, and permanent upgrades drip-fed to you incrementally over hours. Death does not send you back to a glowing neon house to fill with glowing neon furniture, or an entire neon village inhabited by sexy neon people who tell you about your sad neon backstory.

It is, instead, pure videogame. Sektori is an arcade shmup in the (neon) vein of Robotron in which you are beset upon by (neon) shapes that kill you if they touch you. Death presents you with nothing more than a score and an invitation to try again.

The trailer alone gets my heart rate pumping.

That’s not to say it’s solely a retro throwback. That paragraph above also perfectly describes Geometry Wars, an obvious aesthetic inspiration, but Sektori has broader inspirations and plenty of ideas of its own. The arena changes shape during play. You have a dash move which destroys enemies, and which can be instantly recharged if you use it to collect tokens. There are four different types of token, which advance you along an upgrade track, or give you a temporary increase in fire rate,

27 Jan 2026 By Graham Smith News

Welcome to Jank

It's safer here.

I've been writing about PC games professionally since 2005, a time when popular opinion was that the platform was dying. The popular opinion was wrong, of course. Then and now, PC gaming is where the future is. It's where indie developers and modders are free to experiment, where experimental browser games can rub shoulders with mega-budget blockbusters, and where new genres are born.

Welcome to Jank, a new reader-supported website about PC games.

We're starting this site because we want to do the kind of work that's hard to maintain on a traditional ad-funded games website.

We should know. Jank is founded by Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and me, Graham Smith. Between us, we have nearly 60 years experience writing about games, from running magazines like PC Gamer and Official Xbox Magazine to websites like Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer. We know first-hand that even ad-funded websites with the best of intentions need to constantly chase traffic growth just to maintain stasis.

You know half of this story already. Browsing the modern web means wrasslin' with notification popups, adverts that cover the articles and follow you down the page, auto-playing videos, affiliate links, sponsored content, and more.

Perhaps