Jank Mail: Controlling

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 of Greedfall fell because of greed, according to the staff union, but they would say that. Add “opening fire on the President” to the voluminous list of things that don’t market your indie game. The Monument Valley developer described the notion of full-time employment in game development as “romantic” and they’re probably right but they shouldn’t say it. You can try a chunk of Warren Spector’s new stealth game for a fiver but be warned that there may be Additional Monetisation later on. 

Build A Rocket Boy actually put out the promised DLC mission about the alleged saboteurs and it turns out it’s a hastily-rebadged Hitman crossover and also terrible. Alien Isolation 2 still has that save system, which is good, but might be on a planet, which may not be. It appears that Gabe Newell was chummy with Elon Musk and perhaps still is, which would be disappointing if true but not altogether surprising given his income level. 

Ubisoft is continuing to lose senior Assassin’s Creed developers, which would be more worrying if it didn’t have a 19-year reserve of them (aside: next year Assassin's Creed will be 20 years old; I am in this picture and do not like it). OG Fallout Guy Tim Cain is going to quit YouTube and it isn’t because of AdSense revenue or allegations of harassment so maybe he was never cut out to be a YouTuber anyway. The Gamestop guy wants to buy eBay, which probably won’t happen, but you can get a sense of why that's bad by referring to the relevant chapter of This Is Financial Advice.

Let the commenters take us home. TM successfully identified the Bournemouth x Mass Effect crossover in Brendy’s ode to videogame pubs. 

Scarlett B recalled Pokémon's role in the class struggle in Graham's adventure in emulation.

Faldrath further developed the theory of Molyneux-as-musician.

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