Graham Smith - Jank (Page 3)

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

08 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s core

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

WYSPTW or wapwapwapwap for short

Videogames are intensifying! The first week of March has delivered more games I want to play than any other so far this year, and I haven't finished with all the Next Fest demos I want to play yet. Please, please slow down, we are but three sickly men with a small blog.

Here are just some of the games you should be playing this weekend, but remember to tell us all the other games you are playing in the comments below.

A crowded pier dense with shops, a bar, a ship, and dozens of people, rendered in a colourful orthographic style. — Oh, it's a fucking wonderland, is it? Delightful as shit, are we?

Lost And Found Co.

I played the demo of Lost And Found Co. several years ago and had checked in on it intermittently since. Its release this week was still a total surprise. This is a Where's Wally-style hidden object adventure that excites me, mainly, for the warmth and detail of its art style. Sooner or later I'll be queuing up some podcasts and spending hours finding miscellany in its Hergécore dioramas.

Two adventurers stand by a chest. "Not a mimic", reads a sign above it. — This isn't by one of the original Disco Elysium developers, mercifully.

Esoteric Ebb

What if you took many of the RPG systems and writerly flourishes of Disco Elysium and applied them back towards a more

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Jank business

We now have a dark mode

You asked and we delivered

We didn't know what the response would be when we launched Jank, except for one undoubtable fact: people were going to ask for a dark mode. Sure enough, you did, and so now we have one. Head down to the footer and you'll find a toggle to travel into what I am affectionately calling the After Eight zone.

Or perhaps you don't have to. The site should respect whatever dark mode setting you already have set within your browser, so it may well already be dark without you needing to press the switch. Either way, you can select whichever you prefer and the site will remember between sessions.

Oh! Since you clicked through to the full post, you don't even have to scroll down to the footer. You can just click the button here. Don't tell the others:

🌙 ☀️

If you have any feedback on how dark mode looks, please let us know in the comments. I prefer my sites to be bright like lightly spoiled snow, so I may not know precisely what you desire from the dark web. Is it contrasty enough? Does our reddish-orange accent colour work on a darker background better than I fear? You be the

04 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Questions

What game most disappointed you?

Sometimes I think I'd prefer if games never came out

My son is really pumped about Pokémon Pokopia (out this Thursday) and Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream (out next month), so much so that he recently told me he wasn't watching videos about either in case they made him less excited. He doesn't want to risk losing the hype. He's nine years old and already wise enough to know that sometimes YouTube videos lie to him or use misleading titles, but I really think if I do my job he'll be yelling at journalists for giving low scores to games he hasn't played by the time he's a teenager. The cycle must continue.

We're not there yet. Pokémon Pokopia reviews dropped earlier this week and so I got to tell him that journalists seem to love it. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave it 9/10 and it's currently the highest rated Pokémon game on Metacritic. Still, he's worried about being disappointed. What if he plays it and doesn't like it, he asked, on the walk to school. So I got to impart some important fatherly wisdom. I got to tell him about Peter Molyneux.

I've never been as excited for any game was I was for Black & White. I had

02 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Deadline Delivery and Deep Snow Delivery are the past and present of videogames

But both of them are its future

I initially dismissed Deadline Delivery as a mere trifle. It is a time attack driving game in which you, a monkey, must deliver three parcels before a timer runs out. You must therefore make those deliveries without slowing down, throwing the parcels from your vehicle within designated glowing circles. If the timer does run out, your truck explodes, and the monkey goes spinning through the air. You'll need to repeat and refine each short track to earn the medals that unlock future tracks, but this is no chore. Restarts are instant and it feels great to experimentally boost and power-slides until you discover the perfect racing line to take you over ramps and around oncoming traffic and shave seconds off your time.

Crazy Taxi is an obvious reference point, but Deadline Delivery also reminds me of an earlier period in PC gaming, when these kinds of light and (whisper it) casual games seemed like an integral part of the nascent indie game scene. Flashbang Studios were the masters of this stuff, I think, with games like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Minotaur China Shop and Time Donkey. (I swear I'm not making these up.) There was always an animal, always

01 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I have been bone tired all week in a way that I couldn't shake until Friday morning, when I employed the best remedy for such a feeling: I got a haircut. Properly restored, I've been on top of everything ever since. Let's celebrate with some words worth reading this Sunday morning.

I've complained many times that business analysis, or some amateur impression of it, too often replaces arts and culture conversations around videogames among both journalists and the game-playing public. Mikhail Klimentov therefore gets the top spot this week for writing a thing I already agree with on that theme. Not everything is Concord:

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about