Jank Mail: Beetle hats

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 by the Stellar Blade people which is about as close as it gets to a happy ending for “big-name developer launched own studio in the last five years but didn’t immediately ship a cult indie title”. ProbablyMonsters is spending the money it got from flogging Concord on developing a bunch of Xbox360-ass action games, which honestly feels almost fresh compared to yet another doomed service title, although they won’t really recapture the magic unless they hire 50 Cent. 

The conspiracy of “sabotage” that somehow got everybody to say that MindsEye is not very good will be incorporated into upcoming DLC and I’m going to say that’s the only place it will ever be taken seriously. State of Decay 3 is still happening and it could happen to you if you sign up for the alpha. An indie publisher is launching an indie game subscription service which could be quite interesting if they can persuade enough people to chuck some of their back catalogue into it although “revenue share based on playtime” is not winning people over. 

The Long Dark is not getting any longer but it is getting a co-op sequel and “other things in the IP” that will continue to evangelise Canada as “a vast and beautiful country, [and] much of it can kill you.” Shots fired, Australia. One of the Disco Elysium “spiritual successors” is out next month so let’s all be sure to ask Alice what she thinks about a “cynical imitator wearing Disco Elysium’s skin”.

Landfall pointed out that it can’t ship free updates to Peak forever, on X/Twitter, which seems to have attracted the warmth of response the platform is famous for because they ended up deleting it. In a rare win, social media did manage to be Good, Actually this week by prompting a lot of useful game dev tips on BlueSky which Edwin summarised on RPS. For other game dev tips, Bertie likes Inkle’s book of essays by game writers about game writing, here’s a good source of NPC barks, and here’s the director of a Sims clone admitting that making a Sims game is really hard, something that EA has consistently demonstrated for several years now. 

Warren Spector’s not-a-Thief game doesn’t have PvP multiplayer any more, which I’m fine with because I just want the single-player imsim juice and we’ll get a hit of that at the triple-i show this week. Mike Bithell launched a newsletter to announce his next game in, which is a damning but not entirely unreasonable judgement on the state of games media. Return to the old days by listening to GDC 1989, which is an actual cassette recording and not currently a retro-graphic adventure game, although it can surely only be a matter of time.

To round things out, allow me to highlight some of this week’s comments from our highly discerning Jank readers, who you can find under every article and also on our Discord. 

Sin Vega is a firm advocate of wonder in Lucid Blocks:

agingdanform just wants all to get along in Brendy's sim column:

David Underwood shares our concerns when playing Marathon:

That’s your lot for this week. Go play some PC games.