Jon Hicks - Jank

17 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Alien Isolation Sequels

Yet more selfless ideation for the industry's benefit

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a rare two-header, as Nate and I convened to workshop some future games in the Alien Isolation franchise, as a service to Creative Assembly once they’ve finished the second one. The results are… surprisingly plausible pitch ideas, although I foresee some real hassle getting the rights squared away.

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11 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: X-termination

This week in PC gaming

We are approaching the end of Wall Week, our celebration of carefully created barriers to mark the erection of our own. Graham mused on how a youth spent making Half-Life maps taught him the sheer miraculousness of any game being released. Due to a communication error, Brendy reviewed Wall-E. I mused on the PS360’s waist-high era, we published the definitive list of the best walls in games, and Jeremy Peel considered how Dunwall’s walls set you free.

Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter.

Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect.

The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games

10 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Call the Waspman

Ding dong the wasps are dead

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced through the munificence of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.

This week we started recording mere hours after Xbox started firing people, so we didn’t have the full despair reserves to draw on but we managed to discuss it anyway. We also mourned the loss of the corporeal, as represented by Sony’s announcement they’re ceasing disc production, and celebrated the spiritual, as represented by Alice’s potentially magical waspman. You can listen below or find us on Transistor.

This episode also contains an exclusive tease of an upcoming Jank article, and it’s right at the start so you don’t even have to keep listening – although of course you should because there’s so much to learn here about Nate discovering horny Marvel artwork. Plus: getting vouched for by a non-naughty priest, drinking a pint of wasps, piracy for the greater good, wholesome role models for 40-year-old men

07 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Wall Week

All this used to be waist-high

The signature wall of the PS360 era

I was, entirely by accident, one of the people hit by the very first wave of low, rectangular walls that resembled toppled refrigerators and swept through videogames in the late 2000s. Most people encountered them along with the cast of Gears of War, who also resembled refrigerators, lumbering towards equally cumbersome enemies with a view to chainsawing their chest cavity open. But the walls originated in a lower-profile PS2 game called Kill Switch, which Namco published in 2003 and I was given to review on PC in 2004.

This was back in the era when Playstation was the mass-market platform and PC would get indifferently produced non-upscaled ports up to a year after initial release, arriving with dismal graphics and peculiar keyboard mapping well after any wider excitement had peaked. Kill Switch looked just as rough as all the other VGA transplants and I'd never heard of it, but I was very taken with the cover system, in which your third-person army man could be stuck to walls and fire round or over cover to take down the swarms of other army men. You could even blindfire, which was cool and exciting.

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04 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Necrosis Week

This week in PC gaming

It’s been a quiet seven days on Jank, befitting the summer months. In a token sop to world events Graham extolled the virtues of watching the World Cup in first-person care of the BBC’s interactive replays, enabling you to experience first-hand whatever it is that people are mad at Ronaldo for. Brendy chatted with some devs to understand his love of the command line, with reference to both Duskers 2.0 and foundational PC fandom text Hackers (1995).

The newly-integrated Total Playtime considered the dark art of game reviews, and we didn’t even get round to scoring or being extremely mean about Starfield but we did reveal Nate’s games journalism origin story so that’s your subscription value right there. And What You Could Play has once again provided three recommendations from Graham and many more from our excellent commenters.

Beyond these fetching yellow walls it has been Necrosis Week at Xbox, the die-off starting with extremities like IO’s fantasy game and then racing up towards more significant limbs like Arkane and Undead Labs, which are marked for as-yet-uncertain surgery on Monday. The company cheerily asserts that it’

02 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Under Review

We are all made of stars

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and sometimes Brendan although he was still on paternity leave when we recorded this one. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a backer-only episode, which in the recording we still describe as for Patreons because we hadn’t agreed the Jank union yet. The subject is the internet’s favourite source of eternal argument: game reviews. How do they happen, how can they be wrong, and what lessons have we learned from them? The answers are, in order: hastily, no, and very few. Join myself, Alice and Nate to work this out at length.

This episode includes some more-than-usually ropey audio from me (sorry, we think we’ve fixed this but we have a few more episodes to get through) Nate’s games journalism origin story, and a massive picture of Brendy (figurative). Plus: a dead man’s Fallout 76 shoes, how long you have to play a game for, and somehow nothing about actual scoring which you’d have thought would have taken up most of the runtime. This is in itself a valuable lesson about not judging something based on its presumed contents, but we also get in some bitching about review embargoes so in many respects this is exactly what you’re expecting.

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27 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Everything is expensive

This week in PC gaming

The big Jank news this week is that we officially have formally merged with Total Playtime, which means that (a) we have an official podcast but (b) it’s one that has been here the whole time. A warm welcome to the Total Playtime Patreon backers who have joined us on the site and in the Discord - if you have not moved your Patreon subscription over, you have two weeks to do so.

Graham dedicated this week to iconoclasm, marking the debut of the Steam Machine with a demand that Valve make the Steam Deck smaller, less powerful and cheaper, and the brouhaha over the ability to pre-order GTA 6 to share his core belief that you should not pre-order games. Brendy highlighted some of the hundred-plus new Quake maps that have been created to mark the game’s 30th anniversary, and mourned the death of his unfinished cat game, thanks to Epic’s decision to give up on the Blueprints coding platform.

On the newly-integrated Total Playtime, Brendy returned from the parenting wilderness to opine on the news of the week, including what was then the most recent Microsoft calamity, AI again, and Nate’

25 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Mr Beast’s Beef Lumps

Dad men talking

Total Playtime is a weekly podcast about PC games, formerly funded by Patreon and now part of Jank. This is a free episode, but premium episodes are published every other week and are only available to paying subscribers. You can join them over here.

The prodigal dad returns! Yes, Brendy finally got enough sleep to return to podcasting with his newly minted As A Father Of A Daughter viewpoint, meaning that we are now tied in a dead heat between parents and what I’ll generously call “free spirits”.

There was too much news this week, to the point where we even snuck in some commentary about Kier Starmer. It’s only brief, though, as we move on to considering the social media ban and the associated elevated risk of teens becoming cool hackers, the head of AI who thinks generative AI is bullshit, and what was at the time the latest bad news for Xbox although characteristically they’ve pulled some more out since.

Plus: the Steam Machine, Nate’s narc child, and please don’t touch my grass. Please ask your doctor if having a baby is right for you. Thanks to all the Patreon and