This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.

He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.

This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the

This week on Jank, Graham used The Lie-In to get in one more round of Mixtape discourse, which is now over and need never be spoken of again. The first Disco Elysium sequel came out and Nic reviewed it. Titanium Court came out already but Alice has reviewed it now, so it’s official. Both reviews are qualified endorsements, which are secretly the best kind of endorsement. 

On Total Playtime, we came up with the worst merch ideas we could think of and made the mistake of inviting suggestions on the topic, so now I have people emailing me about Disco Elysium Funko Pops. This week’s Character Select pitted Stardew Valley against The Flood, which paired nicely with our definitive judgement of the best grenade in videogames.

Outside these ruthlessly uncommercial walls, a new financial year has dawned so the publishers are all announcing what happened in the  last one. Take-Two did great because people love NBA and spending money in GTA Online, Ubisoft did badly because that’s just what it does these days and Embracer did badly because of everything it’s ever done since its inception. It’s going to solve this

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