Jank (Page 2)

01 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Gabe Newell’s new yacht enables him to host LAN parties on the set of an immersive sim

A troubling look into a different world

In my life I have attended perhaps five LAN parties in total, and one of those doesn’t really count because it was just lugging my 486 over to a friend’s house so we could play Quake deathmatch. Two people is not enough for a LAN party, in the same way that it’s not enough for an orgy: you need enough people for it to feel like a crowd, and coincidentally they also have to be OK with being sweaty and very close to people in a domestic setting that wasn’t really designed for it. (Also, everybody brought something alarmingly large and brightly coloured from home.)

Nowadays LAN parties feel somewhat anachronistic, replaced by the internet: there are still larger-scale events like Epic.Lan or bring-your-own corners of PAX, but bringing PCs together in one place feels like a dated relic of a former age. I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover that Gabe Newell has included LAN parties in the spec for his latest $500m megayacht, built by the firm he recently purchased and kitted out to serve his marine research enterprise.

People playing Counter-Strike in a large conference room in a luxury yacht with full-length windows on either side. — A LAN party, at sea. (Image credit: Oceanco/Guillaume Plisson)

31 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to good words about videogames

Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of

30 May 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Get Decked

This week in PC gaming

This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.

He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.

This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the

29 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

If you had infinite time and money, obviously

It's one of those weeks where several long-anticipated videogames all release at the same time, and yet still that's just the tip of the iceberg of the interesting games that released this week. Me? I'll probably just be playing that great game that's about to be removed from sale.

You? Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A red map pin, but dropped for real in a grassy field. — An educational game urging players to think carefully about the impact of dropping map pins upon local communities.

Map Map: A Game About Maps

I love maps, and videogame maps, and I have a lot of fondness for the stripped-back sexy-as-it-sounds orienteering sim Virtual-O. Map Map is similarly about orienting yourself in a world using landmaps, but here you do so to make the map itself, with a much more playful presentation.

A man cuddles a baby, in a children's bedroom, while another kid crawls on their bed and a third is cuddled by a woman. — Brendan, yesterday.

Paralives

I confess, when Paralives was first shown over five years ago, I figured it was a game that would either never come out or would be bad when it did. A wildly ambitious indie Sims? Sure, it already had a cool character creator, but the rest of the game would surely fall down just as every

28 May 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Hot Ones

Zero Parades and zero chill

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 Alice and I gathered in hot rooms to have hot takes on the main news stories of the week, chiefly the end of Destiny (and perhaps the employment of many of its developers) and the start of the Disco Elysium sequels. We also attempted to understand the Warhammer Skulls Showcase without Nate to guide us, which didn't get very far but we are quite taken with playing as Skaven.

We have also upgraded the podcast hosting so you should be able to subscribe to the feed in this page. Please let us know if it doesn't work.

We've also been playing some games, reading some books, and watching daft videos on the internet, all of which we have curated for our discerning audience. You can get still more of this rare insight by backing the show on Patreon (or subscribing to Jank) which gets you two extra episodes a month, and means you join the hallowed ranks of those who

28 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

One of the best arcade racers is about to disappear

Coast 2 Toast

I haven't read Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, but I believe I can make a water tight counter-argument in my new book proposal, If The Videogame Industry Doesn't Exist, How Come I Hate It So Much?.

From June 1st, Horizon Chase Turbo, its predecessor and all DLC will be delisted from all storefronts, preventing people from buying one of the best arcade racers of the past decade.

We're used to racing games being delisted because they often contain licensed cars and those licenses expire. The Horizon games do not contain any licensed cars, however.

We're also sadly used to racing games becoming unplayable, because they were 'always online' in some nebulous way and their servers are switched off. Horizon Chase Turbo's only online component was leaderboards, however, which were already disabled back in 2023. What's happening now wouldn't fall afoul of the Stop Killing Games movement, because owners will still be able to play the game.

"Couch multiplayer is back." Aaaaand it's gone again.

In short, Horizon Chase Turbo remaining available to purchase via digital storefronts wouldn't cost its developers anything.

The announcement that the

27 May 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Character Select

Dog vs Cat

Let endless battle endure

Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Some mysteries deserve never to be revealed.

Ah, now we're suckin' diesel. It is a conflict that has raged for as long as humanity has had a gristly bit of mammoth salami they did not want to eat. Who will get the scraps: man's best friend, or best frenemy? One is known for boundless enthusiasm, strength, loyalty, and also for going "bee-woop-dee-boop" while battering gasmasked dorks. The other is known for putting small dead rodents in your slippers, and rescuing an entire city of robots from an endless night. This will be a tragic fight, because in another world, at another time, Dog and Cat would have been inseparable pals. But not here and not now. This is Dog from Half-Life 2 versus the Cat from Stray. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!

The case for Dog from Half-Life 2

He can lift a car and he can throw a car. That's got to count for a lot. He once jumped on top of an alien tripod and tore the top of its skull

26 May 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Mon Bazou is sort of about cars but mostly about being Canadian

Poutine in the hours in the garage

Car fandom has existed for as long as cars have, but mine is a specific affliction that I feel has only recently collectively transitioned from “secret shame” to “fandom” thanks to, of course, the internet. Not for me the impossible expense of classic Ferraris or modern F1 cars; my people flock to OG Ford Capris and idiosyncratic Citroens that were either never sold in the UK or rusted away to nothing within ten years of purchase. There are, I must regretfully tell you, more than dozens of us.

A key symptom of this disease is the ambition, rarely paired with the requisite skill, to fish some dust-covered ruin out of a shed and restore it to running order, something I’ve seen games nod to yet never successfully capture. I was thus instantly compelled by the Mon Bazou key art, which shows a 1990s BMW (E36 316 coupe, my car brain says) with a mismatched door and a wheel missing; getting it running and ready for low-stakes street-racing is the headline objective in what turns out to be a crude but easygoing simulation of smalltown Canadian life in 2005.

Screenshot showing the player looking at a Windows XP desktop PC, with on-screen text saying "Come on, ya need to sit down to play video games" and the option to Save. — We did not have standing desks back