Jank Mail: Executive dysfunction

It's been another week on Jank, and a surprisingly soggy one. Brendy celebrated the particularly alluring appeal of watersports walking simulator Pools: 

Have you ever noticed how nervousness and excitement are the same feeling? I mean bodily, when you stop and examine what's going on in your belly and on your skin and to your breathing. It's all the same response: something is about to happen. Pools makes me feel that way. For this reason, you could chalk the game up as a damp squib - after three hours of anticipation, nothing does happen. But it doesn't matter to me. Just to live in that feeling of butterfly belly and to walk through this soggy maze wondering what's around the next corner is enough. 

 He also commended Sandcastles, a game which offers everything the title promises: 

I have fond memories of battling the tide with sand as a kid, trying to keep a fort from crumbling, piling up new walls like the sea is an invading army, and secretly revelling in the collapsing facades, relishing my losing fight. Is this what Dwarf Fortress is like for Nate? Sandcastle captures that feeling with the clean virtual precision of an excellent toy. I played it on a busy day and felt a little lighter for it. 

Jay Castello reviewed Fields of Mistria, which offers narcotic farming simulation: 

During the low-tension cycle of the daily tasks, there’s plenty of time for thinking about both the (inherent?) political tensions of the farming simulator and the issues I have with this one in particular (more on both of those later). And yet I keep falling for just one more day. And even when I do decide I want to do something more thoughtful, give me a few hours and I’ll think, damn, breaking a few hundred more rocks with a pickaxe sounds really good right now, actually.  

Every time I see this game name my brain puts forth a half-formed 2010-era shitpost about a toxic social media farming sim called Fields of Misandry, which I’m writing down here as an act of exorcism.

In this week’s subscriber-only episode of Total Playtime, Nate quizzed Alice and Brendy about Dwarf Fortress, resulting in something that sounds like high-concept fiction but is simply a series of factual statements about Dwarf Fortress. Alice also confirmed the lineup for the next season of our book club Text Adventure, and Graham rolled out full-article RSS for paying subscribers, which is a feel-good move for all parties:

I can be flippant about not needing your clicks because we don't have adverts, but really what feels good is, because Jank is supported by its readers, the business incentive is simply to do things our readers like. Some of our readers like RSS, so we can spend the time and money to properly support RSS. That's great. 

Outside Jank, feel-good energy was in short supply. Saber Interactive emphatically took a shot at Randy Pitchford in their “zany” Uber simulator because Gearbox allegedly took a shot at Embracer in Borderlands 4, which might be the first public defence of Embracer I’ve seen from anybody who isn’t Lars Wingefors. Any good vibes from this were instantly vaporised by the original writer claiming she was fired and replaced with ChatGPT, which Saber denied formally and the Saber CEO denied far less formally in a response that almost makes you miss triple-filtered corpo-speak. This eventually resulted in an updated AI disclosure for the game; other communications have now ceased but recrimination continues. 

This week’s layoffs: CD Projekt, the Invincible VS team and Netflix. The latter closed two studios including Night School, creators of Oxenfree and the horror game that was celebrated by Netflix’s co-CEO last month as a success powering “increased conviction in our future growth,” although in the same breath he also said they would “calibrate and refine our level of investment here”, which in hindsight was a warning and almost makes me miss the Saber guy’s candour. No such hedging at Twitch, which is going to use streams to train AI under an opt-out model because “nobody would opt in.” A rare example of saying the quiet part out loud.

Did this mean Microsoft got a week’s break from being in the stocks? Lol of course not. Asha Sharma watched somebody playing Elder Scrolls 6 while protestors erected a giant inflatable rat outside which is one of those little Arrested Development tableaux that I cherish when it happens in real life. She also teased an eight-letter suffix so we all get to guess what that might be, although it’s probably quite dull. 

Meanwhile one of the remaining id employees went on the record to say that the Xbox top brass don’t understand art and it’s impossible to make Doom (2016) with the remaining staff, which is clearly a sincerely held opinion but also the sort of thing that usually results in the swift loss of one additional headcount. In “good” news Blizzard is Xbox’s top-performing studio. 

In actual good news, Big Walk is a big hit and canonically Australian. It also got a publishing deal off the back of a screenshot and a one-page pitch about “hanging out”, which was a positive publisher story offset by the discovery that Thimbleweed Park 2 is being funded by a single rich guy who likes Thimbleweed Park because all the publisher deals were dreadful. A  rare win for philanthropy. Take-Two followed up its cancellation of a “new core IP” by opening a new “AAA sports studio” so we’ll call that a draw.

Amazon is getting out of MMO publishing but nothing’s getting closed or cancelled. The original Halo devs do not care for the remake because it slapped in some shiny high-definition textures rather than honouring the original design direction, and that’s kind of hard to see as anything other than a totemic example of Microsoft’s current brand stewardship. Dawn of War 4 is delayed although only to December. 

The Y2K retro advances with news that The Lost Wild has Alien Isolation talent and Alien Isolation-esque vintage tech, replacing a single murderous alien and a bunch of CRTs with a series of murderous dinosaurs and some iMacs. Sam Barlow’s has got in on the act with a game about horrifying 90s precognition. The Falconeer guy is not afraid of GTA 6.

What news from the comment section? DodoSandwich has an archetypal report from AAA fandom on last week's Jank Mail.

Kiwilolo reckons that walking simulators can't help but horrify in Brendan's paen to Pools.

agingdanform brings a professional appreciation to Sandcastles.

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