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

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