Jank Mail: Mixed Takes

It’s been a slow week on Jank because Brendy still away raising a newborn, although he still somehow found time to write about the book-tidying game that is all he can handle playing right now. He also pitched invertebrate against excessively-vertebrate in this week’s Character Select, Xenomorph vs. Octodad. Total Playtime recording was thwarted by illness and travel and also Brendy’s offspring, so please enjoy a back-catalogue banger on innovation in product placement. Graham played an incremental game that’s also a platformer and that’s it, that’s the name and the post. He also played Mixtape and said it was good.

Out there on the internet, lots of other people had opinions about Mixtape and there was Discourse. Nathan summarised it over on Aftermath but the even shorter version is that some people liked it, some people hated it, and people who dedicate their lives to shrieking on the internet took the existence of either viewpoint as emphatic proof of whatever they believed beforehand. 

The next big release was Subnautica 2 which came out in Early Access and is a huge hit, which means that the Krafton CEO almost certainly has to honour the $250M bonus payment he tried to ChatGPT his way out of. Let me be the last to say “lol” and perhaps the first to suggest that that money is going to be spent funding the launch of a new independent studio that definitely won’t sell itself to Krafton. The game is emphatically not finished because Unknown Worlds made that mistake before and wants to keep the players more involved this time.

The new game from Black Ops veteran David Vonderhaar is like “if David Lynch made shooters”  which sounds like a pretty solid excuse for really cutting corners on QA. It’s being made by the same collective as Casey Hudon’s post-KOTOR Star Wars game, which seems to be an ex-NetEase guy funding all the games that NetEase binned off, and the vibes for both are heavily tilted towards smaller teams and shorter development times so we’ll see how that one goes. 

Elsewhere in Veterans, Ken Levine doesn’t care for photorealism. Forza Horizon 6’s Cherry blossom trees are indestructible out of respect. Amazon compelled game developers to cram AI into everything and then laid them off, and those things are neither related nor in any way exclusive to game development. In the process the Lord of the Rings MMO has been cancelled although we are promised a “a compelling new game experience that does justice to Tolkien's world”, so please look forward to whatever a Tolkeinesque monthly subscription is.

Sega cancelled its mysterious Super Game, a title about which we knew nothing except it contained “Global”, “Online”, “Community” and “IP utilisation”, all which suggests it probably didn’t get much further except a series of increasingly desperate PowerPoint presentations about “Fortnite, but you can play as Kazuma Kiryu or Big The Cat”. This is a single entry in a run of annual financial reports admitting that spending ten years and millions of dollars trying to make the next Fortnite was a bad idea, while Capcom notched up nine years of making bank from largely doing the opposite. Tune in two years from now when we get to see similar admissions about mass layoffs.

Terrible director Uwe Boll is back and working on a knockoff House of the Dead sequel called Castle of the Dead. He is keeping the plot secret but has confirmed it will be “set in a castle” so I’m not sure how much plot is left to reveal. Arc Raiders is switching from monthly updates to six-monthly updates so they can contain more things to do and more elaborate demands from Scrappy. Discord Nitro now includes a version of Game Pass and Game Pass now includes the ability to give you Discord Orbs, a product name that sits right on the boundary between “macguffin in mid-tier animated series” and “euphemism for medical ailment”.  

Sundry other things: there’s going to be a Wordle game show in which players compete “to solve five-letter word puzzles in a high-energy, collaborative environment” and I think I would genuinely prefer a MrBeast knockoff in which the environment is combative and potentially fatal. You should not plan on getting Dead Space 4. Bungie is “exploring” new game modes to make Marathon more appealing to people who don’t enjoy being repeatedly murdered. Bold move, let's see if it works out for them.

Let the community play us out. ScarlettB has the tagline for Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library.

Turnspit Dog is hoping that incremental games like IGTAP can achieve more.

I_have_no_nose_but_I_must_sneeze considers Graham's unilateral rebrand of What You Could Play This Weekend.

That’s it for this week. Go and play some PC games, if you have the time.