Jank (Page 10)

26 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

Quake is 30 and the mappers have gone mad

Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map

Quake is timeless. But also, technically, it is 30 years old. This eldritch ur-game is the beast rumbling beneath the skin of every first-person shooter you have ever played, and if you know what's good for you, you will sacrifice a small farm animal in honour of its anniversary this week, or maybe just an avocado. I don't want to get you in trouble.

Nobody is making a greater fuss over the birthday of the first proper 3D shooter than its diehard mappers. Even in a normal month, you'd see a steady flow of new singleplayer maps frothing to the surface, thanks to the game's immortal modding and mapping scene. Maybe a collaborative jam would plonk 10-20 maps in your lap at once. But this month is wild. Since the "Q30" festival of mapmaking began, there have been over 100 new levels. And the absolute monsters of mappery are not even finished. Here's a handy roundup of what has come out so far.

Quake 30th Anniversary 1024 jam

Every jam has a theme or a gimmick to challenge the mapmongers. In this case they had to create a map that would fit

25 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Mr Beast’s Beef Lumps

Dad men talking

Total Playtime is a weekly podcast about PC games, formerly funded by Patreon and now part of Jank. This is a free episode, but premium episodes are published every other week and are only available to paying subscribers. You can join them over here.

The prodigal dad returns! Yes, Brendy finally got enough sleep to return to podcasting with his newly minted As A Father Of A Daughter viewpoint, meaning that we are now tied in a dead heat between parents and what I’ll generously call “free spirits”.

There was too much news this week, to the point where we even snuck in some commentary about Kier Starmer. It’s only brief, though, as we move on to considering the social media ban and the associated elevated risk of teens becoming cool hackers, the head of AI who thinks generative AI is bullshit, and what was at the time the latest bad news for Xbox although characteristically they’ve pulled some more out since.

Plus: the Steam Machine, Nate’s narc child, and please don’t touch my grass. Please ask your doctor if having a baby is right for you. Thanks to all the Patreon and

25 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Podcast

Total Playtime is now part of Jank

One subscription, two great sources of PC gaming nonsense

When we launched Jank (nearly six months ago!), we sweetened the deal by offering our paying subscribers access to premium episodes of the Total Playtime podcast. Likewise, those wise and handsome folk who already backed Total Playtime's Patreon were granted entry into the grand (and empty) halls that lie beyond Jank's paywall.

This ouroboros of mutual support cannot continue. The snakes have finished digesting each other. Total Playtime is a permanent part of Jank now and included in your subscription.

If you're a paying Jank supporter, we love you, and we now have a better mechanism for giving you access to Total Playtime episodes. Premium episodes get their own paywalled article, such as last week's episode, within which you'll find an embedded player and a widget offering you the new ability to subscribe to the podcast, with premium episodes included, in your podcast player of choice. If you're currently signed in to Jank, that same widget may appear below, tailored to your present level of access.

If you're a Jank reader but not yet a paying supporter, we love you in a slightly more aloof way, and you'll continue to get fortnightly

25 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Don't pre-order games

They never run out of megabytes at the megabyte store

The videogame industry wants you to buy games before they're released because it makes it easier for them to project their future earnings, and because they want your money before you find out whether a game is good or not.

Don't do it. They won't run out of copies, I promise.

Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 go live today. It's one of the most anticipated entertainment properties ever, in any medium, and I can understand wanting to give in to that excitement, and to participate in some way with what feels like a cultural moment of real significance.

You don't have to do that by giving them $80 today for a videogame you can't play until November 19th.

Book some days off work. Replay the previous games in the series. Watch some video essays about them. Create a zine about Franklin's dog. All of these are methods of participating in the moment that don't cost you $80 for a videogame you can't play yet.

To be clear, my anti-pre-order stance is not related to Grand Theft Auto 6 specifically.

I've seen the pattern play out

24 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The device I want Valve to make

What if the Steam Deck was smaller and less powerful?

If you want a more powerful Steam Deck designed solely for playing games on your television, good news. On Monday, Valve revealed prices for the Steam Machine, a companion cube designed to bring PC gaming into your living room. All of the reviews pretty much agree: they're cool, small, quiet machines that offer a gateway to the platform, but feel too expensive because everything is too expensive now.

That's great and I've added my name to the waiting list. Now Valve should make what I really want: a less powerful Steam Deck that's still handheld but half the size.

I've owned a Steam Deck since launch and I like it a lot. I don't take for granted how wonderful it is to be able to play PC games on the go - or in my case, while lying in bed or on the couch - and it's great that it's powerful enough to play a surprising number of the games on Steam. I could run Elden Ring on that thing, or Resident Evil Requiem, or with the right settings even multiplayer shooters like Arc Raiders.

I could watch No Country For Old Men on

24 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Blueprints is dead, and so is my unfinished game about cats

Goodbye to the only way I know to code

Coding is hard. Show me lines of C# and I will curl into a ball and weep. I have tried many times to learn a programming language and every time I only get as far as learning about arrays before my entire neocortex dribbles out of my nose like a rejected milkshake. But that was not the case with Blueprints. Unreal Engine's visual scripting noodles let you sorta-code entire game systems using dinky little wires and pleasing flow charts. Finally, I can make the game I have always dreamt of: a broken walking sim about collecting bodega cats that will get two downloads on Itch.io.

Except now all my grand dreams are being swept away. Unreal Engine is retiring the relatively accessible Blueprints in favour of a bizarre, vaguely culty coding language called "Verse" that Epic is calling a "system for building metaverse experiences." Still going on about the metaverse, I see. Fantastic.

To understand the minor upheaval that is going on in the world of Unreal developers, you need only hear about the most recent State Of Unreal address, in which the company showed off plans for Unreal Engine 6. The decisions announced in this

22 Jun 2026 By Jeremy Peel Feature

Saying goodbye isn't easy

How do you let go of game characters you adore - especially when developers won't let you

Your final session with a game rarely registers as such. A new release turns your head and eventually you notice that months have gone by since you last pressed the big green button on Steam. By which point, any muscle memory has atrophied, or been muddled by different sets of keyboard shortcuts. Playing that game again will be difficult and, really, how good was it in the first place? This is the most common kind of gaming goodbye: an apathetic drift towards other distractions.

But there's another type: the goodbye to the game you've fallen in love with, in which the characters are fond companions and trustworthy accomplices. At a certain point, the rhythms of their conversation tapped their way into your brain, becoming a song you're happy to have stuck in your head. A welcome and soothing accompaniment to everyday life. Bidding adieu to characters like that takes careful management.

On the one hand, you value their company, and don't want to part too soon. On the other, they deserve proper closure, and that typically comes with the developer-mandated ending to the game in question. Spend too much time mopping up side-quests and

21 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Holidays of Wrath

Wish you were here, and possibly armed

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week’s Patreon episode is both late and with slightly tricky audio, for which I sincerely apologise. The latter is a mystery and the former is just a straight up failure of organisation, showing that we’re just too burned out and need a holiday which by lucky hap is the subject of the episode. Another masterful segue there, all part of the Total Playtime Experience. Along with being late. Ahem.

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