Jank Mail: Summer sums

Another week has passed in glorious Jank, which means that (thanks to the generous backing of our supporters) we have survived six months and written, yikes, over 200 articles. Brendy summarised some highlights but really it's all good and we added still more this week, starting with Nic Rueben's delight at ZeroSpace’s shameless appropriation of both Starcraft and Mass Effect:  

And yet, like, there is something here, flittering about the halls of its hilariously brazen necropolis of zombie inspirations like a moth caught in a packet of moth-flavoured crisps. Do I dare call that something soul? 

He certainly can, it's our site and there is nobody to stop it. As further proof, for this month’s Living in Sim Brendy had a great time in a filthy astrology lab:

Eventually, I discover an asteroid, a planet, and a white dwarf. A few weaker signals dissolve before I can even readjust the satellites to look at them. My bosses are not impressed and they routinely pay me less than my daily wage because I have not fulfilled their exact orders in the emails. You are supposed to go outside and hike or bike to the satellites to gather hashes (special codes) from the distant servers. I do not have time for this. The kitchen is a tip and the creepy mannequins in the basement need to be moved to some place where I will never encounter them ever again. 

For this week’s subscriber-only edition of Total Playtime we discussed the lost art of pitching for the maybe ten people who will ever do it again, and accidentally caught the earliest moments of Alice’s exposure to Dungeon Crawler Carl. As we approach the next season of our videogame book club Text Adventure I am summarising the lessons of the first season, which include the absolutely batshit negligent-parenting origin story of Five Nights At Freddy’s. And of course Graham curated the best writing on games this week. 

Out there in the wider world there wasn’t much in the way of big gaming news because it’s high summer and everybody is on holiday apart from the poor souls who have to toil on quarterly earnings reports. Microsoft took time out from firing thousands of people to say that Xbox brought in $1.7 billion less than it did last year, which ain’t great, but the firm overall still posted a profit of $40 billion which prompted the biggest share price increase in history, so they can emphatically afford to be a bit more chill about it. 

Asha Sharma said that Xbox is all going to be fine and will be reaching half a billion people a day by 2027 in one of her increasingly famous memos, although this one actually got leaked rather than publicly published so perhaps we're into a new messaging phase here. Separately the company responded to the news that the newly cut-loose Double Fine had to lay off 23 people by saying it is “looking forward to what they create next” which is one of those nothing statements that was worse than actually saying nothing. 

Elsewhere in downers, nobody is going to stop EA being bought by the Saudi investment fund, which means that the world’s biggest sports games are now positioned to be a major marketing channel for Saudi soft power. If we have to look for silver linings then there’s a chance it’ll start selling off old IP to pay for the record-breaking debt it’s about to be saddled with, so maybe we get a new Syndicate, and the absence of public disclosure requirements means we won’t suffer the psychic damage of knowing that the CEO got paid $38,600,000 this year to oversee a variety of layoffs and a generative AI rollout. 

In happier workplace news you can now play Morrowind in your web browser until the IT department gets wise to it, so move quickly and you can pick Ebonheart clean by September. Mike Bithell’s latest is a bite-size and bite-based “immersive slim” and while I hate the portmanteau I did like Skin Deep so I have to grudgingly support it. Tencent canned its cyberpunk Japanese GTA after spending six years and millions of dollars because it was “janky”, which we have no choice but to take personally.

If you own some Ubisoft games on Xbox you can now play them on PC for free, for unclear reasons of corporate partnership. Sony confirmed that it has noted people are angry about it dropping discs but it’s going to do it anyway. Necrosoft Games lead the creation of this huge Itch bundle to support recently laid-off game developers, so get on that. Guilllermo Del Toro wants checkpoints in Dead Cells. 

Cyan’s rejected pitch for a new Myst game looks a lot better than I remember Myst being, so it’s a shame it didn’t get picked up. The Odyssey movie made lots of people play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The Residents Evil will continue forever. Ubisoft is shutting down its NFT tactics game after discovering that even removing NFTs did not encourage people to play it. Here’s a very detailed explanation of how Type Help was turned into The Incident At Galley House. 

What happened in the comments this week? Cpt_freakout yearned for the era of That Popular Game But It’s Star Trek (Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (2000)).

JimJamJimajesty saw some flaws in Microsoft's current strategy.

Vacuity thought we should bring some real old-timey medieval religious shame to What You Could Play This Weekend.

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