Jank Mail: Get Decked

This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.

He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.

This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the man cannot help but Post so what are you going to do.

Moving smoothly on to (currently) fictional dystopias, the Skulls Showcase sure did have a bunch of skulls in. Highlights included a release date and a lot of DLC promises for Dawn of War 4, a Chaos Gate sequel, and a side-scrolling platformer in which you play as a Skaven. There is also going to be Space Marines x Helldivers 2 crossover, which doesn’t seem to pose any challenges for either canon and might even make Helldivers 2 players happy which is not currently the case.

We learned that this year’s Call of Duty is Modern Warfare Again but this time it’s in Korea. This is actually sort of innovative to the degree that many of the promo images have some discernable differences from every other Call of Duty promo image, although you’d still be hard pressed to tell them all apart. There is also an extraction mode because what would even be the point otherwise. CD Project RED announced a final Geralt adventure for the Witcher 3, which is novel, but it seemingly did it because it was accidentally revealed by an update on a store page, which is not. CDPR keeping the old E3 traditions alive over here. 

Unsurprising news roundup: Fable was delayed to February, so lock in for some Valentines-based marketing skits, but at least it won't launch in the shadow of GTA 6. Dishonored was born of a prototype for Thief 4. Rockstar is compelling the shutdown the multiplayer servers it doesn’t own. Subnautica 2 sales update: lol. Games media continues to deteriorate, please back Jank so that we may survive in the wasteland.

In other media news, the company that owns GameSpot is going to own the company that publishes Balatro. Let’s hope that it value-engineers its way to a profitable sell-off before it has to start working out Revenue-Accretive Synergies between the company that publishes games and the site that reviews them. The Pope came out against AI, which is not really gaming news but does feel like flavour text in a sci-fi strategy game. The new Bond game came out and was good, and IO has patched out the Americanisms which is also good.

Star Citizen hit a billion dollars pledged, in part by offering a $5,000 spaceship that does not yet exist for a game that is not yet released. I'm sure nothing will go wrong. Chris Roberts would also like you to know that single-player celeb-fest Squadron 42 is in the “closing stages” of development which means it might yet release while all its cast members are still alive. The new Unreal Engine was revealed in a teaser for Rocket League instead of the debut of a console-exclusive shooter and abandoning these proud traditions is why the industry is in the mess it’s in. 

EVE’s partnership with DeepMind is currently looking at fixing its cruft-addled codebase and making NPC quest-gives feel “more alive”. These are both things that developers are already using AI for, to good and negligible effect respectively, but maybe DeepMind is good enough to break the concussed-chatbot glass ceiling for the latter. The creator of Sonic the Hedgehog was feted as “literally the most miserable person I ever worked with”. Never Post investigated why everything runs Doom. 

We close as always with some comment highlights. jonespaulr embraced the metaphor of Graham’s ode to tinkering.

Scarlett B has the right instincts for the Cat vs Dog battle.

Faldrath is setting an example in two separate ways by telling us what he's playing this weekend.

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