Jon Hicks

It’s been a slow week on Jank because Brendy still away raising a newborn, although he still somehow found time to write about the book-tidying game that is all he can handle playing right now. He also pitched invertebrate against excessively-vertebrate in this week’s Character Select, Xenomorph vs. Octodad. Total Playtime recording was thwarted by illness and travel and also Brendy’s offspring, so please enjoy a back-catalogue banger on innovation in product placement. Graham played an incremental game that’s also a platformer and that’s it, that’s the name and the post. He also played Mixtape and said it was good.

Out there on the internet, lots of other people had opinions about Mixtape and there was Discourse. Nathan summarised it over on Aftermath but the even shorter version is that some people liked it, some people hated it, and people who dedicate their lives to shrieking on the internet took the existence of either viewpoint as emphatic proof of whatever they believed beforehand. 

The next big release was Subnautica 2 which came out in Early Access and is a huge hit, which means that the Krafton CEO almost certainly has

This week in Jank, the big news is that Brendy launched Character Select, our new series pitting game characters in a fight to the death as decreed by the comment section. The debut bout is chemically-dependent cops, with Max Payne facing off against Harry DuBois, and the reaction has been extremely impressive.

Other things: Graham belatedly discovered that Abiotic Factor is less like DayZ and more like Pokémon Pokopia. Jeremy Peel joined our illustrious freelance roster to praise Marathon’s med drones. On Total Playtime, Nate compelled Alice and myself to pick out our preferred Gaming Pope attire, because our internal lore is already at that level after only a year of broadcasting. 

Out in the wider PC gaming world, the Steam Controller sold out instantly and if you want one you need to get in line. Microsoft ditched the gaming Copilot integration which nobody liked or wanted, which I hope other companies will consider inspirational. The GameStop CEO attempted to buy eBay despite not having enough money or apparently any understanding of why that would be worth having and is now trying to meme his way out of it, which would be the most embarassing CEO move

Another week has passed! We made it; good work everybody. Here on Jank, Graham gloried in the fact that emulation means that every game comes to PC eventually and proposed Peter Molyneux: Pop Star, the Disney Channel Original Movie that will never grace this timeline.

Brendy raised a virtual glass to virtual pubs, and I confirmed that Samson is both too limited and too janky to be compared to GTA 4 but I did it anyway. Take that, narrative convention. Brendy and Alice couldn’t make it to the podcast recording so Nate and I considered Microsoft’s latest strategy pivot and the number of ETs required to defeat Joe Rogan. 

Out there in the wider world, Valve dished out Steam Controllers to reviewers and almost all of them said it’s great, with only some minor technical dissent. Available on Monday, and probably beyond because it doesn’t have RAM in it. Paste Games, which was briefly Endless Mode and AV Club, and eternally the first byline for a vast swathe of US games writers, was shut down which is another reason to fund independent games media. 

Elsewhere, Subnautica 2 is actually happening despite everything. The developer