Graham Smith - Jank (Page 5)

14 May 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

An incremental game that's also a platformer

I became interested in incremental games last year thanks to work like To The Core and the Gnorp Apologue. These aren't strictly idle games, because they are active and playing with skill makes the big numbers get bigger quicker. I've come to think of them as supplements to my regular entertainment diet; they are the most efficient way of getting my daily recommended dosage of videogames, if not always the most edifying.

An Incremental Game That's Also A Platformer is both the name of the game I played this week and an accurate description, but lets use its preferred acronym: IGTAP. In IGTAP, you complete platforming course to earn resources which can then be spent to buy a clone. The clone repeats your fastest time around the course, earning you resources without you having to complete the circuit yourself. If you have played incremental games and you have played platformers and you are like me, your brain just shuddered like a stretching kitten.

Clones don't earn as much resources as you do, at first, and so you complete the circuit yourself a few more times. You unlock a few more clones, increase the base resource reward,

11 May 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

I enjoyed Mixtape and therefore it's good

Finding truth amid nostalgia

The music video for 1998's All I Need by French electronica duo Air features a young couple skateboarding in the suburbs of California, mixed with interview clips of the pair trying, and mostly failing, to explain their feelings for each other. A YouTube upload of the video has become a shrine to the era for a particular type of person. "This song just sums up the vibe of the '90s," says one commenter. "I miss those days so much and feel sorry for this generation that didn't get to experience this type of life, free from all the social media bullshit."

Mixtape, released last week, is clearly inspired by the '80s movies of John Hughes, especially Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but it may as well be an adaptation of that music video and the aching nostalgia of its comment section.

Click through to YouTube to read the comments. They're nice.

It's Stacey Rockford's last day in town, the summer after the end of high school, and she and her friends Van and Cass are determined to make the most of it. That means securing booze to bring to that night's big beach party

10 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to good words about videogames from across the web

Good morning, videogames. We did it. We made it through the first week of Brendy's paternity leave and Jank did not immediately crumble. Sure, you might save some empathy for Brendy and his partner, exhausted as they no doubt are, but Jonty and I are the true casualties here. We are the Timon and Pumbaa of Jank, our trio's down to two, and the blog won't fill itself. Let's lift the log of the internet and see if we can find some slimy yet satisfying writing about videogames underneath.

I remember following the Nakatomi Plaza mod for Half-Life way back when, but had completely forgotten that it got turned into a full retail game, and had never connected that its developers went on to make the modern MechWarriors. Rick Lane tells the story for PC Gamer, which includes plenty of twists and turns.

Holtslander, however, says that he called Fox Interactive, and that the plan was not to persuade them to let the modders make a Die Hard game, but simply to allow them to use the assets they'd created to make something else. "I got connected to somebody there and I started my

08 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

We've invented commenting on the internet, so come try it

Pour one out for Brendy who, if you were paying attention, you know has now entered the hinterland of fatherhood. He is already filling Jank's team and subscriber-only Discord servers with tales of projectile pooping and photos of gamer onesies. It will be some weeks before he's able to resume his regularly scheduled videogaming, and so lets do it in his honour.

Here's three games you could play this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A huge purple lizard with a shell and crystal back blasters a laser from its tongue.

Alabaster Dawn

CrossCode was a masterclass in gamefeel and its developers have just released their new game in Early Access. Alabaster Dawn is another action-RPG with a heavy emphasis on exploration, and an art style that uses 3D to deliver the smoothest SNES graphics you've ever seen.

A large man crouches and shoots as a man in a long coat runs, holding two guns. Everything is pixel art.

Huntdown: Overtime

A 2D roguelite blaster in a grim cyberpunk world and a prequel to the original Huntdown, Overtime also launched in Early Access this week. This is the cyberpunk of 2000AD and Verhoeven rather than of Gibson, marked more by back alley brickwork and blood spray than gleaming chrome, so take a look if you want to gib a pixel art man.

A tree-lined road that three people are skateboarding along. Golden hour light filters through the leaves.

Mixtape

I am sick to

07 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Abiotic Factor is Pokémon Pokopia for a different flavour of '90s childhood

Revisit the Black Mesa region and build happy habitats for the sciencemons that live there

I'm a minor Pokémon fan compared to many of my peers, but Pokopia, its recent spin-off, has swallowed dozens of hours of my time. It contains none of the typical monster battling and instead lets players build a world the pokémon would want to live in. This requires completing an almost fractal todo list, in which every task breaks into half a dozen other tasks, until suddenly you've spent three hours tidying, planting, and building. It's hard to put the game down when any action feels like progress and there is always another drip of dopamine just a few seconds away.

I was thinking about the near-inevitable wave of PC games inspired by Pokopia that will follow in the years to come, and also wondering what other game worlds might benefit from the Pokopia treatment: that is, a rich, survival-lite experience about constructing and repairing a world we initially explored through a different lens. The answer I came up with might surprise you if you didn't read the headline of this article.

Here was my impression of Abiotic Factor when people were discussing it around its original release in 2024: it's a

03 May 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty

01 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

It's another long weekend here in the UK, which means more time than ever for either playing videogames or thinking about how you could have been playing videogames if only you'd made significantly different life choices.

In either case, there remains time for talking about what you're playing this weekend with your fellow commenters, on Jank, the only website that permits such things.

Bus Bound

I have a real soft spot for driving simulators - as distinct from racing sims - that let you pootle around a city while obeying traffic laws and exploring side streets. Bus Bound offers that alongside another weakness of mine: a management layer in which you're setting down the bus routes yourself to efficiently meet the needs of the population. It doesn't look to have the atmosphere of OMSI's 1980s East Berlin (what does), but I'm tempted to board.

Forbidden Solitaire

A "card-slashing horror game about unearthing the contents of a cryptic 1995 CD-ROM that should have never existed." I have no particular nostalgia for '90s CD-based horror games, but I did play a lot of Windows 95 Solitaire, and this is from Grey Alien Games, the

29 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

On a long enough timeline, every game is a PC game

If an old game is forgotten, abandoned, unplayable, then it's ours

A few weeks ago, I saw someone, somewhere, mention Scud Race, a Sega racing game I had never played. I hadn't played it because it was one of Sega's Model 3 racers and, unlike Daytona 2 or Sega Rally 2, it was never ported from its origins in an arcade machine to a home console. If I wanted to play it today, I'd have to pay £1600 for a second-hand machine, hire a crane to hoist it into my second floor apartment, and make my child give way by moving his bed into the refuse room downstairs.

Except, not really, obviously, because I could always just emulate it.

Ninety minutes later:

Emulation is a delicate subject, or at least it ought to be. I want developers to be fairly compensated for their work, and that means I want people to support game development by paying for games. I also love games consoles and want manufacturers to be able to produce and experiment with hardware at scale. Yet I also believe that games ought to be played, and this is the only practical way to play Scud Race in 2026.

Supermodel is a long in-development open