Graham Smith - Jank (Page 6)

28 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Peter Molyneux is a pop star

The developer has constructed a mythic persona, but Masters Of Albion sees him still waiting to embrace it

Back in 2023, Peter Molyneux began talking to press for the first time about his new game, Masters Of Albion, which released into Early Access last week. "The only thing I can say", he told GameReactor, "is that, firstly, this game is the first game really that I've coded, been a coder on since since Black & White." In 2017, Molyneux was talking to press about his previous game, Legacy. "I was in the hotel this morning, I was having breakfast, I was coding Legacy, and I had an idea. Within an hour, I was actually playing with the thing," he told Glixel. The year before, Molyneux was discussing the newly released Godus Wars with Eurogamer, and the fallout of an infamous interview he had done with Rock Paper Shotgun. "After a couple of days I came up with this simple strategy: I would just be a coder and a designer." He lists a few of the things in Godus Wars he personally coded. "I did some coding on The Trail as well," he says at the end of the interview.

So Masters Of Albion is the first game that Molyneux has coded, or been a coder on, since

26 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. Sometimes, especially in the quiet weeks, I'll include articles in The Lie-In that aren't exemplary works of prose, but which I still hope have some broader worthwhile point or which might generate an interesting discussion. All the same, let's see if I can manage to avoid accidentally linking to something AI-generated this week, eh?

Abram Buehner laments people playing Tomodachi Life for the benefit of the algorithm rather than for their friends. I'm not sure I believe there's any wrong way to play Nintendo's madlibs 'em up, but this is about a subculture that otherwise hasn't come across my social media feed.

That didn’t go over well. The breathless replies argued that to put your real friends into the game was to cross a social boundary, to subject them to the vulgar, wild sandbox of Living the Dream. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, since the actual replies were more along the lines of “I’m not putting my IRL friends into the yaoi simulator lmao.” To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked

24 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

What a pushy, presumptive title this post has. Who are we to tell you what you should play? We are but mere servants, providing a bucket for you to fill with your own independent selections.

Shovel the chum, friends. Fill our bucket for it is empty without you.

"So yeah. As part of my deal, I won't actually be appearing in this game," says a character on the phone. I do not know what else is going on here. — I have no idea what's going on in this screenshot. Art.

Titanium Court

"A surreal strategy game for clowns and criminals." The IGF Grand Prize winner, 2026. This year's Blue Prince or Animal Well. The game your smartest and smuggest game-playing friend will be raving about all year. A game that's brave enough to make jokes out of its Steam screenshots. Doomed to be critically beloved and commercially underperforming. Art.

A pot with green arms and legs emotes on a glowing platform. — Look at that little guy! Simple and coherent and expressive.

Kiln

Double Fine in their silly, frivolous mode, producing a team-based multiplayer brawler in which you sculpt pottery and then, optionally, steer those pots into battle against others. The abilities of your character are determined by how you've crafted your beautiful porcelain bodies - and in the game. I love the art style that fits the pottery with doodled appendages and expressive faces.

A gun is fired at an enemy in a dungeon crawler that looks like a library and has cards at the bottom of the screen. — This game is going

21 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Defence of the clones

From GridWars to Clone Hero, copying software isn't always evil - and can be worth celebrating

I browse the Nintendo eshop from time to time, checking on new releases. The games on there that make me feel the grubbiest aren't the hentai jigsaws; those, at least, are honest. It's the clones. "Peak: The Adventure Begins", for example, seems designed specifically to be mistaken for Peak, the co-op climbing game currently unavailable on the Switch. It feels like a trick, and from the screenshots it looks like a poor imitation.

I don't always feel that way about clones, however. In 2005, the Xbox 360 was released, and with it Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. It was an unlikely killer app. Originally a minigame playable during loading screens in Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 2, Retro Evolved turned the twin-stick shooter into a standalone game available via the brand new Xbox Live Arcade, and its rippling neon and frenetic combat sold the promise of HD gaming a lot better than Kameo: Elements Of Power.

At the time, everyone around me was score-chasing in Retro Evolved. I worked on a PC games magazine and we coveted the game.

Enter Canadian developer Marco Incitti, who used game making software Blitz Basic to create GridWars, a

19 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this

17 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

I've got family visiting, which means I likely won't spend much or any time gaming this weekend. You might be lonesome, however, and what better salve for familial loneliness than a Dad game, of which we've got three flavours this week: a '90s throwback management sim; a blockbuster about showing a surrogate daughter the wonders of the world; and a game about golf.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, Dad game or otherwise.

Some folks with torches in a medieval town hold leaflets and look confused. — I hope Sintopia is funny, but it might just be sarcastic. Like yer da.

Sintopia

This looks to be inspired by the Bullfrog greats of old, in that it places you in charge of Hell Incorporated. You construct the underworld to turn a profit by punishing souls, while simultaneously using God game-style powers in a pastoral overworld to keep your machinery fed with new sinful denizens. This also means its cheeky sense of humour might cause me to groan myself into the afterlife, but I appreciate that it's not just another 1:1 Dungeon Keeper successor.

A robot gets blasted with electricity as the player, young girl on his back, watches. — No horror but plenty of conflict in Capcom's latest. Like yer da.

Pragmata

Capcom's latest third-person action thingy, and therefore

14 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Climb down a hole, pursued by a centipede

Idols Of Ash is about the mastery of space and the horror of time

Spiders don't bother me at all, but centipedes? Centipedes glisten. Centipedes look like worms wearing a crab exoskeleton. Centipedes, wet slick and scurrying, are the perfect organism for sluicing inside small holes and pipes like Eugene Victor Tooms - and as a human being I contain an unfortunate number of small holes and pipes.

Luckily I never need to encounter the giant centipede pursuing me in Idols Of Ash. As long as I can perfectly descend into an impossibly deep well and navigate forgotten caves and crumbling megastructures using nothing but a grappling hook, I'll be just fine. Just fine!

Uh oh.

Idols Of Ash costs $3 from Itch.io and I completed it in an hour or so, much of which was spent clumsily falling to my death. You could go play it in lieu of reading this post, and you should.

Despite my clumsiness and dislike of chitinous arthropods, Idols Of Ash is surprisingly generous. Your health bar is substantial, you can fall further than you expect without taking damage, and there are glowing health pickups and a handful of checkpoints to mark your journey downwards. If you do fall further than you would ordinarily survive, your

12 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. The Brighton marathon is taking place today. I'm not running in it, but I will be doing something much harder: crossing the road while it takes place. Before I'm trampled to death by thousands of angry people in shorts, let's consider some of the best writing about games from across the week.

For Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen asked a flock of developers how pausing works in their games.

“In most of the Vlambeer games and Minit / Disc Room,” said developer Jan Willem Nijman, “I take a screenshot (with the UI disabled), then either jump to a completely different empty room or deactivate everything... with that screenshot as the background, [and] on unpause jump back [to the game]. Sometimes there’s a 1-frame delay because that screenshot needs the UI disabled.”

Ashley Day wrote about the experience of going back to Super Mario 64, 30 years later, to finally get those 50 bonus stars.

I’ve known for years that your reward for doing so is to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle and receive 100 extra lives from him, but I always thought that was a bit pointless. After all, why would