Jank Mail: Playing politics

It was a quiet week on Jank and Brendy couldn’t be having that, so he transferred a conversational pipebomb from the Discord to the homepage by asking if a game can be so bad it's good. He then left the comments section to argue about Daikatana while he embarked on a predictably unpredictable political career in Moves of the Diamond Hand. Graham defended the clones and the Total Playtime crew shared our experiences reviewing Half-Life 3, which is the sort of thing that can only be done with financial backing so thanks once again to all who back Total Playtime and Jank and make it possible. 

Beyond Jank, Game Pass is cheaper now and will only contain old Calls of Duty, because it turns out that cost a lot of money and didn’t achieve very much. Microsoft Gaming is just called Xbox again as part of a wide-ranging manifesto that can be read as inspirational or sinister depending on your mood, but calls for “a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable” which I’m sure any gaming-focused subreddit will be delighted to help with.

More like Build A Docket Boy, amiright. Elsewhere in deeply awkward work environments, Krafton vs the Subnautica devs is still going and the Early Access release date is now the subject of a court motion so maybe don’t plan your weekend around it. There are still jobs in games media, but there’s only one left so move quickly. 

The writer of Hades 2 says that changing the ending because people hated it is canon, actually, which is a great excuse that I’m sure Bioware wish they could have used for Mass Effect 3. For now they wish you to know that they’re still making Mass Effect 5, please stop asking. Let us move along from the stale sloganeering of Fus Ro Dah and defeat dragons in the marketplace of ideas.

The DLC for Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 adds gunplay and bullet time which is definitely going to fix everything. The Tarkov guy says that ARC Raiders is for casuals and his new game will be the most painful which is bold for a non-Soulslike but let’s see how it goes. Australia wants Steam, Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite to think of the children which implies every other game gets a free pass. Dude from Disco might be dude from Fawlty Towers.

The talent involved is making me think that the Elden Ring movie might actually be good but the only possible justification for Battlefield: The Movie is a squad doing comedy physics pratfalls; if they’re going to make it a Serious Film About Soldiers then they should just slap the theme music on literally any of the ones that games already copied the setpieces from. I suppose even the ghost of Bad Company would offer a stronger narrative foundation than any of the current crop of film adaptations of Roblox games, although if they get a YouTuber involved it’ll probably work out anyway. We wanted games to be part of the culture and this is what it cost us.

Let us close with some choice cuts from the comment section. Cpt_freakout argued for clones as cultural outreach:

Arren offered up some vintage magazines as additional reading material. 

Kiwilolo knows the rules. 

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