Jank Mail: Blinx awakening

Graham went camping and lived, and he’s so drunk on success that now he’s going on holiday. His parting words were some games you can play this weekend. Brendy remains but is all tuckered out after his consideration of megastructures:

The same human absence is there in Nier Automata's peopleless ruins, in Stray's domed and sunless city. I don't know if these are big enough qualify as megastructures, but they certainly feel like them. On the other hand, I barely count the Dyson Spheres and habitat craft of Stellaris as megastructures. Not only are there too many people hanging around, but the perspective is all wrong. In Hypogea and Metal Garden you are a small being looking up, but in Stellaris you are a god looking down. For a megastructure to truly hit, the sense of scale must land on you like a ton of cement from above and beyond. For something to feel big, you have to first feel tiny. 

Jeremy Peel considered the megastructure, or at least magnificent structure, of Boiling Point, which means I have to mention the song that plays during the installation process and nowhere else in the game. This was 2005, remember, so money was spent on writing the song, commissioning the musicians and getting them into a recording studio; none of this AI nonsense. We used to be a (fictitious; broken) country. 

Nic Ruben reviewed Sol Cesto, a game which I was not aware of but now want to play: 

I love how bloody dungeony this all is. Everything is either elusive, expensive, a bit shit in ways you can imagine a fickle god getting a mild chuckle out of, or is some variety of monkey's paw, bottle imp, or that time Beat Saber added 3D stages but only for Imagine Dragons.  

In this week's Total Playtime we got the whole gang together to consider Playstation killing discs, Peter Serafinowicz being in Elden Ring, and Alice's calm and considered responses to people disagreeing with her Dungeon Crawler Carl review.

Outside our walls, Zenimax Online joined id in proclaiming that the crushing layoffs are fine actually because the studio is the same size it was several years ago, when games were smaller and took fewer people to make. We separately learned that the person who took over running the studio after the previous person was fired, was fired, and while the survivors are doing their best to keep the lights on it is not looking great over there. 

The Bethesda worker’s union claimed that last week’s announcement of some new Fallout games to release at some unspecified point in the future took place at the same time a number of unionised workers were told their jobs were ending right now. Noted source of credibility A Spokesperson said that the layoffs will not affect Elder Scrolls 6 or the Oblivion remake and also they weren’t being forced to say everything was fine, which seems like something somebody being forced to say everything is fine would say. Realising that it was losing the discourse battle, Microsoft leapt into action and announced ad-supported game streaming and Blinx: Time Sweeper for PC, so you can tell they’ve got their top minds working on this.

Technology news: you can now get free games in your Amazon Prime as part of Amazon’s grand unification of everything that unites Fallout games. Fallout TV show and drop-shipped Fallout merch into a single terrifying panopticon. The new version of Unity has a revolutionary new feature that means it doesn’t break things made in the previous version of Unity. Games are bad because of fear. The post-Burnout people are making another post-Burnout game but with a new studio and Patreon funding. 

There is now an online archive of the charmingly standard-definition early days of E3, although it peters out around the turn of the millennium so there’s no chance of seeing me in any of the footage and that’s why I feel safe in linking to it. The EU said it is totally fine for Saudia Arabia to own EA but some US states have paused Paramount owning Warner Bros.  

Zero Parades didn’t sell all that well and you know what that means. Thick as Thieves also didn’t sell so it’s not getting any more updates. CliffyB got sober and now he wants to make games again but not PvP ones, a lesson that more publishers should learn and Bethesda apparently already has. Hasbro’s commitment to making big expensive videogames has gone the way of all attempts at making big expensive videogames. Vichy GTA Wiki was accused of plagiarising Noble GTA Wiki.

Let's take it to the comments. Hypertexthero wants games for change in last week's Lie-In:

Qorgyle added to the pantheon of "bugs that make you want to play the game" with their memories of Boiling Point:

Sarfrin appreciates literature, as experienced in the Sol Cesto review.

That's all for this week. Go and play some PC games.