Jon Hicks - Jank

27 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Permaban recreates the worst of gaming forums

The torments of the banned

Web forums are one of those things that just quietly passed out of popular view without anybody really noticing, like politicians experiencing shame or Nissan Prairies. 25 years ago they were the chief discourse zone for videogames as a hobby: NeoGAF was the most regularly cited due to its collection of occasionally well-informed industry folk, but every games media brand had its own, notionally created as a place to foster community but invariably in a state of perpetual conflict as members squabbled with both each other and the writers of the work they were ostensibly there to appreciate.

They nevertheless reflected the editorial tone of their origins. I was once delighted to witness the stridently tabloid CVG forum be temporarily evicted for a server upgrade, only to set up in a corner of the more cerebral Eurogamer forum like the gobby kids from the ropey comprehensive temporarily assigned to the grammar school, to largely the same effect; forums that originated from Edge, PC Gamer or the sprawling Ziff Davis portfolio similarly had their own distinct house style. All of them eventually succumbed to schisms that begat rival forums, like cell division, with only the sturdiest lasting long-term.

24 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Bye-bye, Bioware

This week in PC gaming

This week on Jank, the reviews kept coming, as our pitiless judgement was applied to still more new PC games. Sin was left largely cold by the whale-based space exploration of Beyond These Stars:

The planets' lack of significance is compounded by the fiddly micromanagement needed to transfer resources from whale to planet, and although it's cool that you can run these planetary towns independently at any time (even before unlocking fast travel gates between them), they suffer from the same problem as the post-apocalypse city builders of recent years: they split your focus so much that the only workable approach is to either make them tiny and perfectly stable, or milk them dry as rapidly as possible.

Marsh had a surprisingly good time with Hellraiser: Revival, which turned out to be more sophisticated than its teenage schlock suggested:

That Revival even gestures towards this sort of deep discussion surprised me, given that the game initially appears to be liberally doused in the Axe Body Spray stank of puerile lockerroom fantasy. Its lurid depictions of sex clubs or even private sex have an edgy absurdity to them, even before you account for the cultists and transdimensional

22 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Bernard Matthews of the Halo Extended Universe

Culinary misadventures

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

A special subscriber episode this week, as Nate became fascinated by the inexplicable Xbox partnership with McDonalds and insisted that we sample it, only to be thwarted at the last minute by his local branch running out of Master Chief-branded McNuggets. Thus: an episode in which Brendy and I are both in the grip of early-onset post-McDonalds regret while Nate sits giddily excited while his wife treks across the West Midlands looking for a branch that still has them in stock.

Will she succeed before we finish recording? Does any of this stuff qualify as “food” as recognised by any scientific authority? And do any of them earn anything approximating a recommendation? Listen in to find out.

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20 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

The Archives of Trevosa are a good place to spend a few hours

Comes with some history

The number of games is now so high, and the usefulness of search tools so low, that it’s no longer possible to conduct casual historical research. Any attempt to track the genesis of any given genre will yield only a breezy AI summary of a YouTube video on the topic that will on closer inspection have been created by somebody with an unsettling interest in phrenology, or a series of insipid best-of articles crafted exclusively to chase the final dregs of search traffic, grimly reproducing the same tired list of titles while reciting Key Search Terms like acolytes completing their rituals even as the meteorite breaks through the upper atmosphere.

I am therefore forced to rely on my own very limited experience and say that Her Story pioneered the current trend in deduction games, and The Return of the Obra Dinn set the high water mark. I nevertheless cherish The Roottrees Are Dead, which opted for a clumsy 1990s desktop as its means of discovery, a method I still consider perfect for the form: a mix of conceptually omniscient but practically limited that’s entirely period-correct.

i don't think the latter question is ever

17 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail - Let's review

This week in PC gaming

It’s reviews season on Jank, as we issue considered judgement on the abundance of new games. Marsh kicked it off with Gears of War E-day, from the perspective of somebody whose career began when the series did:

What's changed is my personal ability to compartmentalise—or, perhaps, to kid myself that it was ever some wholly separate, harmless fantasy. Across 20 years, social media and the discourse that trails it has mangled together private, public, work, leisure, entertainment and news—of which a good portion is open-mouthed horror—such that it has toxified even the simple pleasure of smashing open a monster's head like a cantaloupe. Oh, that we lived in a simpler world, where the murder of a subhuman race of unthinking beasts could be so cleanly boxed as fantasy with no troubling intersection with the current moment at all.

Khee Hoon Chan commended experiencing Lovecraft’s open racism through the eyes of a selection of flightless birds in Penguin Colony:

There’s a surreality to seeing all these through a penguin’s perspective, one who’s mostly immune to the conflict. These scenes are beguiling because their horror is so

16 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Literacy Was Too High a Price to Pay

Somehow, Kotick returned

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by 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.

It’s another bijou two-hander this week, as Alice and I meet to pick over the remains of another week in PC gaming and get the latest updates on her dog and her neighbours, both of whom are making annoying noises.

Annoying noises in gaming, meanwhile, come from the resurfacing of the GTA leaks guy (let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) and the newfound union of Warner Bros and Paramount into a new games/movies behemoth. The latter now includes Bobby Kotick, about whom we have nothing bad to say. There’s also a bit of AI chat and some game recommendations, which tops up our quota just enough to merit another run of highly self-indulgent subscriber episodes plucked from the cauldron of Nate’s brain.

If you’d like to experience those subscriber episodes (along with Discord access to both

10 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: The wrong sort of corridors

This week in PC gaming

It's Saturday, so let us take stock of a week in Jank. Sin Vega reviewed Thousand Hells, an RPG that forces you to build your team based on vibes rather than numerical stats:

Thousand Hells is sometimes annoying. But it's a price paid for those moments in between, where you have no sure solutions, but some options that, when you stop taking them literally, get you imagining. Maybe "Fyarg is poetic" could help them identify patterns in the stonework? What if "stealthy" could work figuratively, convincing a judge with an unexpected argument? Hidden factors can make a poor choice work anyway, but NPCs too are interpreting, and like Six Ages, sometimes reward a counter-intuitive approach. And so occasionally you'll be fleeing from monsters, and swear aloud after drawing "Oromal is a virtuoso", but then hover over it for a moment, and think "Actually... what if..?".

For this week's Living in Sim, Brendy abandoned the quests in Nivalis and became an avuncular unemployed person, which improved the game considerably.

Nivalis may be summarised as Cyberpunk 2077 without the violence. But there is another way to think of it. It is Bernband with an itinerary. For Bernband

09 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Text Adventure: Bioshock - Rapture, by John Shirley

That sinking feeling

Total Playtime is Jank's podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

It is time once again for our book group to gather and discuss another videogame-based tome. Our choice this month is Bioshock - Rapture by John Shirley, and our guest is Johnny Chiodini, who previously joined us last season to discover how terrible the first Splinter Cell novel was.

This book is much better, I am pleased to say both for our sake and Johnny's. It covers the fifteen years leading up to the start of the first game, introducing the characters that appear in both that and its sequel, through a series of short chapters that hop between them as they gradually realise that trapping themselves in a libertarian millionaire's undersea colony while injecting themselves with extracts of radioactive slug may perhaps have been a bad idea.

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