Jon Hicks

It was a quiet week on Jank and Brendy couldn’t be having that, so he transferred a conversational pipebomb from the Discord to the homepage by asking if a game can be so bad it's good. He then left the comments section to argue about Daikatana while he embarked on a predictably unpredictable political career in Moves of the Diamond Hand. Graham defended the clones and the Total Playtime crew shared our experiences reviewing Half-Life 3, which is the sort of thing that can only be done with financial backing so thanks once again to all who back Total Playtime and Jank and make it possible. 

Beyond Jank, Game Pass is cheaper now and will only contain old Calls of Duty, because it turns out that cost a lot of money and didn’t achieve very much. Microsoft Gaming is just called Xbox again as part of a wide-ranging manifesto that can be read as inspirational or sinister depending on your mood, but calls for “a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable” which I’m sure any gaming-focused subreddit will be delighted to help with.

More like Build A Docket Boy, amiright.

Jank this week had an unplanned theme of "solitude". It began with Graham and Brendy outlining the best first-person single-player PC game levels, which is the sort of overly-specific list we can do round these SEO-free parts, but it was all for nothing because they didn’t include a single Arkane level. This is what happens when I’m too busy to contribute to the lists; I have failed you, the reader, and will do better in future. 

Nic Ruben stayed solo to tour single-player extraction shooters, Graham was pursued by a giant centipede, and Brendy reviewed Anthology of a Killer two years after it released, which is another thing we can do when there is nobody to stop us. Thanks to all who’ve backed the site and enabled this. On Total Playtime we discussed vintage sexualisation controversies, recent Microsoft controversies, and the very real although regrettably long-odds prospect of a Duck Tales extraction shooter.  

Out there in the wider world, after Rockstar got hacked and was remarkably “yeah whatever” the hackers released the data early, revealing to a scandalised world how much money GTA Online allegedly makes and how

Another week has passed, which was good in parts, and one of the good things was a new Jank list. Brendy and Graham put their heads together to work out their favourite multiplayer maps, which is a pretty extensive rundown considering it should only be Q3DM17, and there are some good additional proposals in the comments. 

I reached back into Total Playtime’s Text Adventure archive to reveal that the Mass Effect Andromeda novel doesn’t have the narrative restrictions of so many other gaming books but still found its own way to be not very good. Total Playtime itself turned one-ish and celebrated by answering listener questions. Aged veteran Jim Rossignol explained why the slightly less aged Hunt Showdown is still the extraction shooter to beat and Brendy’s inaugural Living in Sim turned into a bad time driving a truck in South America.  

The gaming world had large had a fairly quiet week. There was a decent news dump from the reliably good Triple-I showcase: it introduced an extremely messed-up farming sim and told us that Warren Spector’s new thieving game is out next month, the developer of 1000xRESIST is making

Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast. 

Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure. 

In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought