Jank Mail: Triple highs

Another week has passed, which was good in parts, and one of the good things was a new Jank list. Brendy and Graham put their heads together to work out their favourite multiplayer maps, which is a pretty extensive rundown considering it should only be Q3DM17, and there are some good additional proposals in the comments. 

I reached back into Total Playtime’s Text Adventure archive to reveal that the Mass Effect Andromeda novel doesn’t have the narrative restrictions of so many other gaming books but still found its own way to be not very good. Total Playtime itself turned one-ish and celebrated by answering listener questions. Aged veteran Jim Rossignol explained why the slightly less aged Hunt Showdown is still the extraction shooter to beat and Brendy’s inaugural Living in Sim turned into a bad time driving a truck in South America.  

The gaming world had large had a fairly quiet week. There was a decent news dump from the reliably good Triple-I showcase: it introduced an extremely messed-up farming sim and told us that Warren Spector’s new thieving game is out next month, the developer of 1000xRESIST is making a game about CAPTCHAs and the creators of one of the bigger not-Pokémon games are making a not-Palworld. Samson, which looks like a not-GTA, released and was discovered to be really not GTA. Also not GTA: whatever hackers stole from Rockstar, although they're holding it to ransom anyway.  

We learned that State of Decay 3 doesn’t have zombie animals, which is yet another proof point that cinematic reveal trailers don’t signify anything beyond the project being greenlit, and that Starfield is still getting updates so maybe it’ll land that No Man's Sky-esque redemption arc after all. No Man's Sky, meanwhile, has added Pokémon-style creature battles. This is exactly what colonisers of future planets would do when boredom sets in and don’t let those goody two-shoes Artemis II folk persuade you otherwise. 

Peak developer Landfall has turned to evil. Rust 2 is not a thing (although s&box is, and could be an interesting platform in its own right). Lucas Pope is not talking about his new game because he doesn’t want AI to steal it and it might not be any good anyway, which are both solid reasons that you could use to get out of doing basically anything. Blockchain gaming still exists, barely, and so does the Neill Blomkamp Web3 game which is going just as great as everything else in Web3.

The games industry in general is also not going great so group of indie studios are banding together for support, which could help matters. There’s a rumour that Epic is making an extraction shooter with Disney characters which almost certainly won’t. Players have learned that killing all the enemies in Crimson Desert makes the game too boring. Much to consider, although it definitely won’t be. Playstation is deleting PC from its contacts list so the breakup is definitely happening, and Bethesda’s Pete Hines has got to the pointed-remarks-on-social-media stage of the him/Xbox breakup that already happened.

Let us conclude the week with some more highlights from the collective wisdom of the Jank membership. UNCgolf is brave enough to speak their truth about Mass Effect Andromeda:

RickyParaphenalia endorsed getting lost after it was recommended in The Lie-In:

Rory Caldwell demands I suffer more from Brendy’s approach to sim games 

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