Jon Hicks - Jank

10 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Payphone Go is good old-fashioned internet nonsense

Gotta phone 'em all

One of the many things that the social media age has robbed from us is an abundance of daft play-ish projects, invariably cooked up by some developer in San Francisco, of the sort that used to be announced on Boing Boing and written about in Wired magazine. Back in the early 2000s such things came along with pleasing regularity, in part because they were rationed out through blog posts and magazine articles rather than dropped into the firehose of social media.

Nowadays San Francisco is the global source for dead-eyed AI boosterism, Cory Doctrow is posting through it on social media with everybody else, and Wired is focused on documenting contemporary warfare and the rise of the surveillance state. It was more fun when all this was Flickr and Feedburner, which is one of the foundational beliefs that lead us to launch Jank in the first place.

This is why I was delighted to come across Payphone Go. Its origin is pure early-2000s SF nonsense: somebody realised that there's a public record of the 2,203 payphones still remaining in California, and has built a natty and totally superfluous tool which enables you to "claim" each one by calling it.

07 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Capcom, Highguard and an unplayable classic

This week in PC gaming

Another week draws to a close, which means another collection of articles appeared on this fine website. Graham expressed the history of PC gaming in two delivery games, told his son The Parable Of Molyneux and stayed up late coding a dark mode for the website. I got a Warhammer expert to retcon kawaii Space Marines into the Warhammer 40k canon, and Brendy listed the best salesman in PC games, motivated by his disdain for Leon Kennedy’s James Bond-ass product placement. On Total Playtime we chatted a bit about the Next Fest demos we'd played, none of which cracked the top ten so our hipster status endures.

Beyond these delicately yellow-tinted walls, there was some good game news: Marathon is doing well, Slay The Spire 2 is doing amazingly, Resident Evil 9 is doing even better and is also a PC game now, because Capcom is increasingly a PC publisher. Chun-Li, welcome to the resistance. In bad game news Highguard threw in the towel and is shutting down, although the remains of the dev team crunched out a final update for the sendoff. When the lights go out it will have lasted 46 days in total, which is 31

06 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Phil Spencer Xbox Explosion

Two men, one pod

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week's episode is unsusually quiet and on-topic, because both Alice and Nate were away and that really cuts down the level of free-form improv and extended complaining about people on the internet. It fell to Brendy and myself to hold the fort, which does at least mean it's an all-Jank show to merit this post.

Total Playtime: The Phil Spencer Xbox Explosion

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The lead talking point was Phil Spencer's departure from Xbox, in which I attempt to present him positively and Brendan counter-argues that executives should not be treated like humans. Humanity is further cited in discussion of the entity wearing Videogamer.com's skin pumping out AI-written articles, including a Resident Evil review which briefly appeared on Metacritic. Brendy has already made clear our view on AI-written reviews, which the article in question handily backed up by being extremely dull and offering no useful insight.

Having a games writer phographed wearing a shirt and suit jacket, rather than a black T-shirt and

05 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

This video of kawaii Space Marines is canon, actually

There is no peace amongst the stars, but there is twirling

I know very little about Warhammer 40,000. I know it chiefly as a very expensive way to sit in a shop and move little figurines around on a Saturday, which in my youth I had neither the income nor self-confidence to try. I have a number of friends and colleagues who understand it on a foundational level, though, and they assure me that one of the benefits of the setting is that by lining up enough of the vast number of bizarre and bombastic parameters by which it operates, and squinting at them with sufficient determination, you can assemble a robust enough headcanon to justify pretty much any scenario you can imagine.

The best example of this I have been presented with is the fan reaction to the 2023’s Boltgun, which gave Warhammer 40k the boomer shooter treatment. In it, Space Marine protagonist Malum Caedo carves an implausibly bloody swathe through continental quantities of opponents while shouting instead of breathing. This is, I was assured, emphatically in line with the job description of the genetically enhanced warriors of the Adeptus Astartes - but even the most hardbitten tabletop Space Marine player would need an implausible number of perfect

28 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Next Fest, Xbox next, Saints No

Plus: your chance to live in Unreal Tournament

The week, and February, is over. What did we learn? We played a bunch of Next Fest demos and so did everybody else until Marathon came out. Brendy commends Airframe Ultra and partially understands Spacefleet: Heat Death, and I revealed that Beyond Words sure is what it looks like. Sin Vega took a late trip to Beatdown City and Brendy continued to develop our #brand by asking some developers to share their best jank.

Out in the wider games industry, the end of Phil Spencer’s reign at Xbox remained a topic of spirited discussion. The takes spanned the usual games community spectrum from “farewell to our saviour” to “good riddance, loser”, alongside a suspiciously comprehensive savaging of Sarah Bond. The most obsequious take was rewarded with an interview with new broom Asha Sharma, in which she reaffirmed a commitment to Xbox without saying what that actually means.

Sharma is at least being commendably transparent about not having Spencer’s gaming chops, which by all accounts would be very difficult without blocking out three days a week for Achievement farming, and says she needs to “learn about the ‘why’” of previous decisions, which is the sort of thing

27 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

Dead reckoning

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week's Patreon episode is another demonstration of our fearless defiance of editorial convention, as we not only run our big quiz of the year in February, but do so by traversing the Egyptian underworld and resolving the gaming-related trials of Anubis.

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

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Thrill as Nate breaks out the voice changer, Alice upgrades her eagle, Brendy challenges Nate on the single worst topic imaginable and we face a surfeit of burning snakes. Truly no other podcast combines questions about sales figures and GTA trailers with an extremely in-depth knowledge of ancient Egyptian belief systems. Which, not to be dismissive of other cultures, are remarkably complicated and a real hassle to navigate when you're simply trying to escape the grip of the underworld.

Plus: asking Shaq what a basketball is, "an enigmatic and barely understandable point in the journey", and the return of a beloved RPS regular. You can listen to the podcast right here on this page, and

25 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Beyond Words is Scrabble given the Balatro treatment

Spell is other people

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

The Beyond Words demo comes with a prominent but confusing pedigree: it proudly states it’s “from the makers of Goldeneye and Timesplitters” but bears absolutely no relation to either, rendering the association moot to the point of negativity. It’s like emphasising Babe 2: Pig In The City is “from the maker of Mad Max: Fury Road”: factually accurate, and doubtless both benefit from the same hard-won expertise, but you wouldn’t want to leave die-hard fans of either together without supervision.

There is no shooting, sci-fi or even synth music here: it’s Scrabble, and specifically Scrabble given the Balatro roguelike treatment, to an almost embarrassing degree of fidelity. You’re rewarded for placing longer words and using more annoying letters in the standard Scrabble style, but everything after that is overpoweringly reminiscent of LocalThunk’s creation.

You have a set of power cards granting buffs and multipliers, consumable boost cards that level up scores, and a store window at the end of each round to purchase more of both, using coins accumulated according to your remaining

21 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Phil out, VR and sequels

Plus: Molyneux is doing it again

Welcome to Jank Mail, our rundown of the week in PC gaming and Jank in particular. I like to start with the latter because we are of course the true arbiters of what matters, but today I have no choice but to start with IGN’s reveal that Big Phil is out at Xbox, along with his presumed successor Sarah Bond, prompting a lot of late-night discourse and Microsoft rushing out the PR plan that was supposed to kick in next week.

I’m a bit down about it: Xbox has been a state of perpetual struggle in the last decade and lots of people have well-developed reasons to hate Spencer's guts, but in my encounters he was always a nice guy who consumed and cared about the products his business made. This made him a very rare breed in the executive class, who routinely regard both their output and their audience as budget line items. His replacement is a jar-grown exec who previously headed Microsoft’s AI output so the discourse outlook isn’t wonderful, although she said games are art in her intro message so at least that’s one argument we can stop having.

What else