Jank Mail - Let's review

It’s reviews season on Jank, as we issue considered judgement on the abundance of new games. Marsh kicked it off with Gears of War E-day, from the perspective of somebody whose career began when the series did:

What's changed is my personal ability to compartmentalise—or, perhaps, to kid myself that it was ever some wholly separate, harmless fantasy. Across 20 years, social media and the discourse that trails it has mangled together private, public, work, leisure, entertainment and news—of which a good portion is open-mouthed horror—such that it has toxified even the simple pleasure of smashing open a monster's head like a cantaloupe.  Oh, that we lived in a simpler world, where the murder of a subhuman race of unthinking beasts could be so cleanly boxed as fantasy with no troubling intersection with the current moment at all.  

Khee Hoon Chan commended experiencing Lovecraft’s open racism through the eyes of a selection of flightless birds in Penguin Colony:

There’s a surreality to seeing all these through a penguin’s perspective, one who’s mostly immune to the conflict. These scenes are beguiling because their horror is so placid, even tranquil, with the eeriness rooted in the detachment of these sights. Seeing a man bleed out in front of you onto the porcelain snow, for instance, naturally would be creepy and unsettling, but seeing it as a penguin adds a deal of disinterest to the scene. It’s an approach to horror that struck me as quintessentially Lovecraftian, parallel to the dread of cosmic indifference in his stories.  

Graham delighted in battling Temu-titled F1 racers in New Star GP:

I'm not sure there's a genre name that fits New Star GP. "Simcade" suggests it's much more of a simulation than it really is. Arcadulation gets closer, but let's not injure ourselves. New Star GP is fundamentally still as colourful and approachable as any other arcade racer, it's just one that's built layers of character and systemic consequence into every decision you make in its career mode. 

Jay Costello found that Planet Zoo 2 tries to have its animal conservation and not eat it:

Back in the zoos, education is an absolutely required feature, which involves laboriously putting half a dozen or more signs in front of every exhibit. But the promise that zoos can do something beneficial by teaching the public and contributing to conservation is undermined when the game itself winces at the most bare bones circle of life information that underpins those two goals. 

We don't just do games, though. Graham simply has to tell you about his new chair, which accepts him for who he is rather than what medical professionals direct him to be:

I sit like a gremlin and talk to no one most days. I alternate from near-vertical with feet on my desk, to one leg tucked under my butt, then the other, to fully cross-legged, then back again. No lumbar support is realistically barring my lum in any of these positions. 

Our latest literary recommendations come from the writer of Space Marine 2, Ashley Cooper:

I finally started reading Harrow the Ninth while I was on vacation a couple weeks ago. It's the second book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series. The pitch for the first book, Gideon the Ninth, is "lesbian necromancers in space" and it delivers on every word in that sentence. 

This week’s What You Could Play includes the usual crop of excellent reader suggestions alongside some good recommendations for tea, and this week’s free-to-all Total Playtime considered the return of both Bobby Kotick and Daniel Mullins. 

Beyond Jank the abiding conversation topic was [deep sigh] AI, starting with the news that Epic delayed what sounds like “Overwatch with Disney/Marvel characters” and directed its staff to use more AI to finish it. It then released a new game launcher, which is good, but made a point of saying it was vibe-coded which made people cross. The announcement included the claim that it launches faster than Steam, the shine of which was removed when Steam rolled out a new update the following day that allegedly runs faster, although that’s accepting the word of somebody on X which as a rule you should avoid.

Elsewhere in The CEO Really Likes It So Now It's Everybody's Problem, the recent rush of people using AI tools to decompile games in order to create copyright-infringing ports and mashups was cited by Asha Sharma as a justification for the launch of a new team to “explore new technology”. She didn’t say it’s just about AI and indeed the company assured me that it’s not, but everybody assumed it was anyway due to the extremely X-infused nature of the announcement and X, to labour this point, is not an audience you should base decisions on.  

Konami, of all places, said that AI is not going to replace people in game creation which is nice to hear even if it’s not entirely factually accurate, as may be inferred from the new Battlefield skins giving the player five pistols and a shoulder patch saying SECUTY. NVIDIA is allegedly stopping production of the 5090 because it makes more money doing AI chips and there’s no competition for the lower-powered cards, so AI continues to make things worse regardless of your level of engagement.

In happier news the internet got extremely excited about the little crocodile guy in Galactic Racer so let’s see how far that goes. Garry Newman is making S&box free-to-play and human-curated because a “Netflix for games doesn't work” and he worked that out inside of six months and without laying off any people so he’s got the edge on Xbox. It’s also moving to Steam Workshop and binning off the claymation-type avatars, RIP to unsettling Kerbal-type figures. You will be unsurprised to hear that the Dwarf Fortress guy is the happiest man in gaming except if you ask him about generative AI. I do not have that life but I aspire to it.

Rockstar released both a GTA trailer and a series of awkward comments about its ongoing litigation with its ex-employees, both of which are now building to a near-simultaneous release date, like Barbenheimer if the “-heimer” bit was alleged union busting. Bloomberg did a big feature on GTA 6 containing insights like a meticulous discussion of sandwich crafting, a staff of 4,711, and commitment that it won’t take them eight years to release their next game. The PC release of GTA 6 is “slated” for the first three months of 2027 and I am going to really emphasise the quotation marks there. The GTA6 leaker came back for one last porn-powered rugpull and it failed so they’re giving up. 

The latest “spiritual successor to Disco Elysium” has been announced via a 500-page book addressing the a blueprint for creating socialist art under capitalism, which also makes it the most spiritual successor to Disco Elysium. Meanwhile in the franchise mines, Ubisoft’s layoff addiction continued, resulting in Trials developer RedLynx being shut down, and the marketing boss for Call of Duty got a bit salty that indie games get better reviews simply because they don’t get made by teams of 4,500 people with nine-figure budgets. Science cannot make violins small enough to appropriately commemorate this.

Add another point to the scoreboard for Creative Assembly vs Its Own Players, which is a shame because the home team was doing a bit better lately. The GTA box art looks like that because of 9/11. Jagex succumbed to Runescape NIMBYism because their audience is too old and Riot killed League Classic because their audience isn’t old enough.

There’s a new baby Xbox controller for the gamer with the on-the-go lifestyle and/or tiny hands. The DayZ guy released his own game engine because he doesn’t trust Epic or Unity, which is hard to argue with given how things have been going. Your new independent media outlet is the developer-focused Vertical Slice; it’s free until November 2nd. Oral-history home Design Room cut their rates, too, please support independent media.

What do our readers have to say? Andy Jones endorses Yakuza as therapy:

It also has the single most hillarous mini-game I've seen in any of the series so far with the movie "whack-a-mole"; whenever I need a lift, I can just head over there and hit some sheep. 

Bumster succumbed to Jank’s resolutely uncommercial marketing strategy:

Came for the game review, stayed for the devastating embrace of fleeting mortality 

Sarfrin appreciates public service journalism:

As soon as I finish the game about being a robot spider that can't go out in the sun I'll be playing this game about being multiple penguins following Nazis who get murdered by eldritch horrors. Thanks Jank! 

Zorgulon with the good chair pun:

Working 90–135°, what a way to make a living 

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