Jon Hicks - Jank (Page 2)

19 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Extremely Online Beef People

Plus: the idealogical opposite of Rivers Cuomo

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.

It is once again time for Total Playtime, which this week sees Alice, Brendy and myself gather to pick over the major news topics of the moment: AI-based hardware shortages, the ongoing mishaps of Highguard, and the political implications of asking a lot of people to make cat noises. I must warn you that this is preceded by a lengthy preamble on parents injuring themselves, the absolute bullshit that is being middle-aged, and Big Pharma's devious attempts to distract you from the altogether more affordable health solutions of Medium Bee.

Total Playtime 29: Extremely Online Beef People

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These matters dealt with, we can move on the major issues. First up: the insatiable demand for vibe coding, fake girlfriends and plagiarism is sucking all the RAM out of the market and that problem is spreading from PCs to consoles and also everything else, because everything has a memory chip in it now because how can it possibly show you targeted advertising without one. The

17 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood novel doesn't understand how books work

A stabbing pain

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers, and we’re also surfacing entries of Text Adventure, their video game book club.

This was the first book in the Text Adventure series, chosen according to the rigorous selection criteria of “what books do I own already,” and having completed the first season I am confident it is the worst. Its almost mesmerising awfulness is derived from a baffling commitment to including the entire plot of the game, which means it has to cram in five years of Ezio’s rebuilding the Guild of Assassins along with significant chunks of Rome. Nothing is excised, everything is present, including the clumsily staged tutorial VO.

Text Adventure: Assassins Creed Brotherhood by Oliver Bowden

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This is comically antithetical to good storytelling: quite apart from the fact there’s enough plot here to support a five-part series, key parts of the narrative machinery are missing entirely. Characters are introduced and then murdered immediately, people take time out from plot beats to recount stealth mechanics

14 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Shooters, State of Play and Highguard

Plus: "excessive makeout scenes"

It’s Valentine’s Day, so let us slip into something more comfortable - like a look back at this week’s headlines.

At Jank Towers, Graham wished that games culture was more like book culture, although discovered in the process that the photography is harder than you think. I played Quarantine Zone: The Last Post and found it to be a deadening amount of busywork, and Car Service Together which was a more satisfying amount of busywork until I found out what Brendy was doing. Our members-only Discord now has a #jontys-garage channel and I wish to make clear that I had no hand in its creation.

Brendy also went back to the newly-denumbered Overwatch to see if it had indeed been reborn, and exclusively revealed that it’s still Overwatch. Finally, a games media outlet brave enough to say “it’s good, if you like that sort of thing”. He also rejoiced in the return of Samurai Gunn 2 and joined Nate and myself on Total Playtime to pick some game characters to be our life coaches.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, Discord said that it wasn’t going to force everybody to verify their age to use

13 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

Let game designers guide us

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 a Premium instalment for paying subscribers, which means we can abandon our already tenuous grasp on current events and succumb to the intoxication of high concept. This week: as the world lurches into self-improvement at the start of the year, which videogame characters would we choose to coach us into living better?

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

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You can see the picks of Brendy, Nate and myself below, and you can listen to the episode to hear our reasoning. Alice was away this week, but wished to make clear that she considered our answers poorly- thought-out and also that her choices would be Aloy off of Horizon Zero Dawn, Officer Dooley from The Darkside Detective, and that posh one off of Final Fantasy XV.

Fitness

Jonty: Ezio from Assassn's Creed

Brendy: Kiryu Kazuma from Yakuza

Nate: Schelemeus from Hades II

Motivation

Jonty: Skelly off from Hades

Brendy: ~~Little Lion from Skin Deep~~ GLaDOS from Portal

12 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check makes me feel dead inside

Sorry mate, we're full

The seed at the heart of this game is the same as Papers, Please: you're manning a checkpoint and deciding who to let in. In this case, it’s for a zombie epidemic, so the checking is of symptoms and luggage rather than paperwork, and it’s all in full 3D, and the act of checking is merely the first step in what turns out to be a lot of different tasks and challenges which feel like they have been steadily layered on top of something that would have been more engaging had it been simpler. Instead, you get a busywork lifesim that’s surprisingly short on character, at least for the handful of hours I played it.

It all begins with triaging each person through the door. Your choices aren’t simply pass or reject; you have to send people to the safety of camp, the quarantine zone or the incinerator. In what turns out to be an early symptom - pun not intended - of the game’s problems, this is a choice with no emotional weight whatsoever. Occasionally you’ll get a fleeting word of thanks or uncertainty as they’re escorted to the killing chamber,

07 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: BG3TV, indefinite Overwatch, types of quest

Last week in PC gaming

It’s Saturday, which means it’s time to review the week in PC gaming. Chez Jank, Brendy completed his mountain-climbing adventure by being eaten by the developer of Cairn, before killing all his squad members in Menace, reviewing TR-49 and proposing some additional Types of Quest. Graham found the perfect Speed Racer game but can’t play it, and a perfect PICO-8 that he can’t stop playing. The minds at Total Playtime decreed that the Splinter Cell novel and Split Fiction are both bad.

Beyond these walls, we learned that there's a Baldur's Gate 3 TV show in the works, although Larian are not involved which is another little data point on why they're sticking with their own IP for their next game. It's being made by Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, which I prefer to think of as Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin because that was much better television.

i think in the name of fairness the producers of the baldur's gate tv show should demand that tv writers do at least a year of running around in circles doing unpaid writing tests before they're allowed to write for the show
— Bruno Dias (@brunodias.bsky.

05 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Bugpunk

In which people become very cross about Split Fiction

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.

It’s Thursday, so that means a new episode of Total Playtime, and as part of our current partnership I am compelled to bring it to your attention. This week’s episode, after an extended aside about shrimp (real; either annoying or delicious) and ahead of a discussion of Silt Striders (not real; valuable public infrastructure), is anchored by the news that progress has been made on the Split Fiction movie, which Alice cited as a transparent segue into her talking about the fact that she has been playing Split Fiction and is extremely furious about it.

Total Playtime Episode 28: Bugpunk

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I will not attempt to summarise her argument but the topline is that the characters, narrative and game itself are all bad in ways seemingly calculated to enrage. Some of these views are shared by Graham and, to a degree, Brendy - I have not played the game so I will not judge, but that’s okay because Alice offers judgment

03 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The first Splinter Cell novel makes Sam Fisher into a neocon Alan Partridge

I thought this guy was supposed to be stealthy

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, Alice, Nate and I were joined by the delightful Johnny Chiodini to read the first book based on Sam Fisher, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell by David Michaels. Nate fell at the first hurdle by erroneously reading the second novelisation, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda, which speaks to the professionalism of the Total Playtime operation and why we felt it aligned with a website called Jank.

The practical impact of this error was limited, as both books are archetypal hoo-rah Clancyverse publications of the mid-2000s, when the US-lead invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were still fresh. Both books were best-sellers, neither of them are any good, and the first is notable for capturing the spirit of the game in a startlingly negative way.

Text Adventure: Johnny Chiodini's Raymond