Jank Mail: It's EAver

It’s been another week in PC gaming, plus an extra day because I had some family business so apologies for the late running. Jeremy Peel kicked things off by explaining that Microsoft has always been a problem for PC gaming so we should not expect it to change now. Yes, they gave us DirectX, but they also gave us Games For Windows Live. 

It was never clear what value GFWL offered players. Nobody wanted its achievements, Gamerscore or messaging functionality, since the social hubs of PC gamers existed elsewhere. The much-vaunted crossplay between Windows and Xbox 360 barely materialised. And of course, it was the home to plenty of clumsy DRM, a role that sealed its fate in the court of public opinion. GFWL was there to police players rather than to help them.

Graham somehow curated good game writing without even being here. Upon his return he reviewed Emuurom and wants you to know that while it contains vast and complex depths you can still enjoy it for much simpler reasons. 

If you love Animal Well and Blue Prince, I think Emuurom could be your new favourite game. Someone less dummy than me might therefore write a more straightforwardly enthusiastic review of it, but I suspect that review would make me not want to play it. That would be a shame. I'm reminded of the way people sometimes talk about classic works of literature by focusing on why they are clever and important, until you read them for yourself and realise no one ever told you they are also entertaining, propulsive, funny. 

In this week’s Total Playtime, Nate got excited by how carefully Arrowhead have blended Warhammer fascism with Helldivers 2 facism in a way that’s canonically plausible for both, which is the sort of exclusive insight you can only get by listening to Total Playtime. Brendy wrote 1,200 words about how Sir We Have An Orc Problem channels the very best of Flash-based tower defence games and he didn’t paywall it but that’s why you should support Jank anyway. 

I sometimes like to think that I am better than the psi-hooks game designers shuck into my brainmeat, and that I cannot be driven to play things compulsively. Not me, surely, not after everything I have seen. Your little game-making tricks won't work on me. But I went back and replayed each level of this simple-ass tower defence game just to get all the bonus achievements. I never do this. Sir, it is I who have the orc problem. 

We’re starting a new season of Text Adventure, our videogame book club, which means I’m summarising the lessons of the first season. The crowning one is that the best book was the one that predated the game and thus didn’t have to have anything to do with it, which is unfortunate. Season Two seeks to find better examples, although it’s also going to include a Dungeon Crawler Carl book because Alice has demanded a control group. 

What news from the wider world of PC gaming? Xboxes are really expensive now, but in a couple of years you’ll be able to play Xbox 360 games on your PC so really you won’t be missing much. Capcom made the bad guy in the new Onimusha horny on purpose, so they deserve everything that the fan artists are going to throw at them and on him. 

EA is now owned by the Saudi government and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, which the CEO greeted as “one of the most exciting and transformative moments our industry has ever seen” and everybody else greeted by flipping over the “layoffs” hourglass. Bloomberg reported in March that the company was being pretty upfront about the major cost savings they will need to make in order to service the record-breaking debt it’s now carrying. It’s already a pretty efficient machine over there, but you have to suspect that $170m of savings means some mass outsourcing and ditching Bioware before they spend another few million on the next Mass Effect so let us see what transpires. 

Elsewhere in business, Devolver has decided it doesn’t want to be a public company any more because it’s a lot of hassle and expense that gets in the way of making videogames, which you’d have thought they might have guessed before going public. Graphing Andrew Wilson’s salary vs the average EA salary requires a much taller chart than you are expecting. The bundle to help laid-off game devs has raised $130,000 and is still going so you can still add to it. 

You can get your first look at GTA by watching an extended trailer on Netflix, which feels a bit like paid gatekeeping but you used to have to buy magazines to find out this sort of thing and they didn’t even have decent video. If you don’t have Netflix you can watch it for free six hours later on official channels or around 40 seconds after broadcast on unofficial channels, and it’s all happening during but not at Gamescom which is a very Rockstar flex.

House House are patching the Predator out of Big Walk, the cowards. You can tell the age of Space Marines by the pitch of their voices. The boss of Stellar Blade said that people should appreciate their very obviously AI music video because humans made the character, which is another little tell for the ongoing hard landing of AI use in games developed in Asia. 

The joke Steam game that cost $200 very briefly made $1,343,400 but nearly everybody refunded it so it’s not as much of a reward for terrible behaviour as it could have been, although the creator’s still in line for $1,400 less processing fees and that’s still too much of of an encouragement.

There was also “media news”, which is a synonym for “layoffs”. This time it’s Restart, funded by Walmart until one day it decided not to, which has been the fate of every corporation-backed media outlet I’ve ever heard of. The companies will not save us, which is why you should support Jank and other independent media outlets. 

Let us learn from the great minds in the comments section. Addie expresses the advantages of the first Witcher book.

signolo and Blair had a maths conversation having read Brendy's orc problem.

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