Jank Mail: Help us solve a mysterious disappearance

Headphones howling, keyboards clanking, nails scraping on the inside of your computer screen. Hello, these are the sounds of a haunted newsletter crawling out of your inbox like that girl with the hair from out the telly. Jonty is missing this week - he vanished in the early hours of the morning, last seen working on an old Mazda in his garage, speaking to an unknown visitor wearing his ribs on the outside. If you are this man, please get in touch. Jonty has utterly disappeared, leaving behind only a spinning hub cap in a pool of... what is that? "Motor oil"? Car blood. It's car blood. 

Like a good final girl, I will collect the scattered notes he left behind and try to reconstruct the newsletter. The notes are frayed at the edges, random glyphs and characters in a script I don't recognise, possibly WingDings. Was he trying to warn us about something? "The videogames," he has scrawled on one sticky note slapped onto the wing mirror of a rusty BMW, "they are good... but also... they are.......... BAD." What could it possibly mean?

On Jank here's what we got up to.

We were visited by Steve Hogarty, who reviewed lo-fi car rambling game Over The Hill. Steve continues to be the funniest games journalist in the world, and you can tell that HACK Yahtzee Croshaw I said so. I wish there were more Steves.

Are cars natural? I think they could be, in these isolated moments of calm, with the engine turned off and the great cosmos twinkling above. The rocks lend us their precious metals. The ground gives up its petroleum ooze. The cow volunteers her skin. The forest its polished walnut dashboards. Why, a 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser is as natural as a summer breeze or a newborn fawn – there’s a non-zero chance one could accidentally be assembled during a particularly hectic landslide. 

Permaban is a fake OS sim that recreates the hell of early internet forums, perhaps too well. "While I appreciate its dedication to period-specific verisimilitude," wrote Jon, "the foundational experience is just not something I want to experience again." Very fair.

The goal is to moderate a dying web forum. The year is 2007 and so is the desktop and most of the jokes, which means gags about browser toolbars, popup windows and MicroShaft of the sort that had them ROFLing in the aisles of AOL messageboards. You are presented with waves of comments, potentially across multiple forums, and have to quickly decide if they should be warned, banned or ignored, with reference to a set of rules that can change with each new wave. 

Nic asked Titanium Court developer AP Thompson what is on his bookshelf. I think it's an incredibly personal question, very rude. But he always seems to get away with it. 

"Last year I tried to convince all my friends to read Hell is a World Without You by Jason Kirk, a very funny, very heartfelt coming-of-age story about a kid fully enmeshed in the US megachurch ecosystem in the early 2000s. Alas, the only friend who actually took me up on reading it was my mom and only after I got her a copy for her birthday. She actually didn't like it very much." 

On Total Playtime we eulogised shuttered developer BioWare. And I did the same in a list article where I laid bare both the best and worst of BioWare's games over the years. 

With the decline and passing of Bioware, a sad truth is revealed: blockbuster videogames have become like power tools, oven dishes, mattresses, chocolate, and countless other consumer goods. It's not just you. They simply do not make 'em like they used to anymore.  

Outside of Jank, a whirlwind of shit continues to batter the walls of our encampment. If you must go out there, take an umbrella. Here's what I can spot from the safety of my watchtower. 

• Since the big news was the shuttering of BioWare, we media vultures have been picking those bones and chronicling the reaction. Former writers on the cancelled Mass Effect are understandably infuriated and the voice actors are annoyed too. A cinematic trailer for the cancelled Mass Effect Universe was leaked, prompting a fan group to hire an ad screen in Times Square in a likely fruitless effort to #hashtag #save #Mass #Effect. One of the original founders called this year's buyout by private equity "the final nail in the coffin" but, let's be honest, you didn't have to be a founding member of the company to know that.
• Patrick Stewart died at 86 years old. The famous actor was known as much for his theatre work and love of Shakespeare as he was for his commitment to entertaining roles in sci-fi movies and TV. Aside from being the best Star Trek captain in the series' history (don't argue with me Janeway stans) he was hired to play emperor Uriel Septum in the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion originally released back in 2006. As many are commenting it's just sad for the world to lose Dolly Parton and Patrick Stewart mere months apart. 
• The Chinese stock markets are reportedly crashing as the floppy AI bubble glides like a hostile alien being over the global economy. In fact, it looks like the Asian markets have been slowly nosediving for a while now and... nobody noticed? I don't know. We're in the strange position that many ordinary people are desperate for a respective and devastating crash in the United States, just to put this whole sordid chapter in late stage capitalism to rest. Pensions be damned. I want a new graphics card! Burst, bitch. BURST. 
• Sony bought the movie rights for Mouthwashing. The sci-fi horror probably looks to Hollywood like low-hanging fruit ripe for adaptation, considering the success of Backrooms. Karyn Kusama, director of Destroyer, has been touted to direct the flick. She also directed the TV show Yellowjackets, so she has form in telling stories about stranded people who succumb to terrible crimes. Hmmmm. I like Mouthwashing a lot. I wonder who will play Swansea, the best alcoholic in games.

There was loooooooads more news. But I do not have Jonty's constitution for hyperlinks, nor his eerily reactive antennae that picks up on every floating mote of cyber-knowledge. Not to poke the wound, but he is our Shadow Broker. Scanning the feeds and filtering the data at a villainous rate. I'm just the guy who walks into a dark, suspiciously empty garage alone looking for --

What was that noise? Something clattered. Hmm. Probably just the stock exchange collapsing, never mind. Remember, if you've enjoyed any of Jank's stuff this week, please share and shout about it on social media and in person to real human friends. We continue to march slowly through our subscriber goals. I desperately want to once again have a full-time job writing about games for a very low amount of money.

Okay, I have to go. That sound is getting louder. Oh Jonty, it's you, you're back! Wait. Why's your face like that? Jonty? Put down that sharp windscreen wiper. Somebody send help. HELP. SUBSCRIBE TO JANK. HELP.