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’

This week on Jank, Graham found that The Witch’s Bakery offered nothing new and yet everything he needed, and that Blood Dungeon was a welcome addition to his sixteen-year history of Messhof games. Brendy crashed a Google plane into Google’s HQ and he’d do it again, you hear? He also brought back Living in Sim with a look at The Data Center, which is as soothing a distraction as you’d expect but does not reckon with the AI usage it both enacts and implies. I played Bad Magpie and found that it advances the bad-bird canon.

This week not on Jank the big news is, once again, Xbox fucked it. Widely-reported and conspicuously not officially-commented-upon stories reported that Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory are all on the chopping block, as part of a widespread bloodletting which was foreshadowed by the announcement of the Great Reset and the departure of the boss of Xbox Game Studios, who presumably peaced out rather than spend months reciting bullet points in severance meetings. This comes a mere week after a lavish fan hoedown which included a reveal of Ninja Theory’s new game,

There was no Jank Mail last week, for which I apologise: I was in LA for the annual trailer spectacular once called E3, and now being consumed by Geoff Keighley’s glossy rival Summer Game Fest, which incorporates both his own showcase and the adjoining ones that he freely attaches the brand to. I learned many things, and one of them was that it’s not possible for me to attend everything and write any meaningful digest of the contents, so I’m going to bless you with a jumbo roundup today. 

Let’s start with what Jank did. Brendy found a game that lets you kick orcs off a cliff and it only costs £7 (total, not per orc). He also sort of reviewed Subnautica 2 by asking game developers how to create a feeling of discovery. Total Playtime planned a videogames zoo, Character Select pitted the Thumper Beetle against the Skifree Yeti and I became increasingly worried that Gabe Newell’s new yacht is the setup for a horror film. Graham was won over by The Adventures of Elliott, before heroically watching most of the showcases and picking out 12 games that give him hope for the