They finally invented Ayn Rand's Battlefield. Wardogs is the sort of huge multiplayer team battler you are familiar with, except now you have a bank balance. You earn a wad of cash with every kill, revive, heal, drop-off, or bit of construction work. Destroy a sandbag for a meagre $14. Blow up a vehicle to pocket a cool $300. Kill a person - that's $2,250. You then use that cash to buy weapons, armour, ammo, and vehicles. The profit motive drives everything.
"You have to spend money to make money," says a gruff NPC vendor, expounding the game's philosophy. Well, fuck you, shop with a mouth. We will not spend a single dollar. Instead, the Jank writers have instigated the ultimate test of tightfistedness. Which of us can make the most money in Wardogs without spending anything? Let's find out.
The rules
Our goal for this challenge is to earn as much cash as possible. We must spend $0. We are allowed five lives, and we are going in cold. That means we have not played the game before, except to do the tutorial. Less Wardogging, more Rawdogging, if you will.
This will not be easy. Even a hammer to build sandbags, or a wrench to fix vehicles can cost 50 warbucks. Reliable firearms are much dearer. Spawning a fighter jet is out of the question. Every player starts with $10,000 when they buy the game. We're not allowed to use any of it. Let's see how we get on.
"Ostranauts, Graham, is I think a very Jank-y kind of game", I said, very differently to that and before I needed to fit it into an intro. This came from dabbling with much earlier versions, and from knowing that Graham loved Neo Scavenger, Blue Bottle Games's earlier survival game about undignified scrabbling and lusting after carrier bags. And that Brendy is a space boy, and Jonty touches cars. Throw in my love of salvage and you get a game about bumbling around space in a ship assembled by hand, one reclaimed component at a time. You get Ostranauts.
You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.
Incoming transmission, sir! It says "neeeeeooooooww".
It is a project game. I have a goal, and I see other possibilities on the way to meeting that goal. Some of those are incorporated into the project, others distract me and become the day's entertainment before I try again tomorrow. Others still become another project and oh my god what day is it. What year?
Good morning, videogames. I normally write this article on a Saturday night after my kid has gone to bed, but he was at a sleepover at a friend's house yesterday. This slight change in routine was enough to completely throw me off. I spent the night playing games and only remembered The Lie-In when I went to bed at 2am. Consider this tardy issue of The Lie-In as bleary-eyed and emotionally fragile as my 10-year-old normally is after staying up all night with four friends, yet still full of links worth reading.
There are a million little ways in which the social contract is eroded by social media mega-sites. Laura Michet writes about "self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth"; how a failure to signal that you've learned the rules, or that you know there are rules to learn, makes it harder to extend trust and respect.
In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with,
Another week has passed and we managed to fit two reviews into it, because that's the sort of thing you can do when you are powered by reader support rather than advertising. Brendy pondered the single innovative thing and the hundreds of non-innovative things in Sprawl Zero.
This isn't to say I had a bad time. I enjoy throwing chunks of concrete and rebar at the legs of my enemies. That's a good weekend. But I was never truly surprised. That's why I'm not worried about spoiling the plot for you, because if you've played any other shooter in the last 20 years, it basically spoils itself.
Meanwhile Nic judged Blood of the Dawnwalker, a good game that is nevertheless aiming higher than it can reach.
You could argue that just having the option to abstain from drinking humans and gorge on rats allows you to roleplay in ways that reflect your own morality, but I'd say that pales to how thematically incoherent and jarring it feels for Coen's vampirism - which he frequently laments to the point of tears - to mean functionally nothing to the player besides a happy power boost
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.
This week’s episode is another gameshow special, with the return of our old nemesis Games Satan. He has dragged us down to the plains of Hades (Alice is calling in from the Field of Reeds according to established Total Playtime canon) to pitch cursed game ideas. The person with the best pitch may escape from hell, but we have a fixed budget: a mere fifteen Hell dollars, which must be spent on one choice from each of the following categories:
Theme
$5: Total free choice
$4: Medieval fantasy, International Sports, Neo-Noir, Pirates; Victoriana
$3: Pigs, Lunch, Podcast for Binmen, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Falklands War
$2: US tax system, Enoch Powell, Shouting at animals, Cigarettes, Your own deepest insecurities IRL
We're not a Nintendo site, which means I have no reason to tell you that I like weird wet Link from this week's Nintendo Direct about the Ocarina Of Time remake. I think it's healthy for games critics to be sceptical of nostalgia-bait revivals of beloved games, but also that such cynicism needs to be married with aesthetic principles that offer stalwart support to the grotesque. Plus, I badly want that new Kirby.
Alas, here are three actually-on-PC games you could be playing this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments, whatever platform it's on.
Rogue 64 was a topdown roguelike released for Commodore 64 back in 2021, and Roguecraft was its Amiga-bound successor with fancier graphics in 2024. Roguecraft DX is the inevitable PC port. It's a pocket-sized dungeon crawler with quick runs, handsome pixel art, and the "craft" in the title is a reference to Lovecraft rather than to item crafting. It otherwise seems fairly traditional, but roguelikes that play it straight aren't as common as they once were.
You cannot reload in Sprawl Zero. Instead, you mindwarp a fallen gun straight to your hand, unload all the bullets into a cyborg guard, then javelin the hollowed weapon at his colleague's skull. You then brainsnatch that victim's rifle into your fingers while it's still falling from his dead hands, and you do it all again.
For the first half hour of this retro blastathon, I habitually hammered the R key after loosing a few bullets. It did nothing. Body memory will not help you here, even if your head memory is summoning visions of the 2000s sci-fi shooters this dusty megacity is inspired by. You will navigate blocky levels full of secrets while lobbing empty pistols into the faces of your enemies and tossing back grenades. The gag presents itself. This is literally a throwback shooter.
You are a cybernetic killfiend of the Junta, the city's ruling force. A terrorist group are doing terrorism, and worse! They're being preachy about it. It's your job to bleed 'em out and silence their cultish leader, Silas. I say "your job" but it's clear from the protagonist's robotic recitations ("Memory is the phantom. Autonomy is the flaw.") that you are a pre-programmed, captive killing instrument doing the dirty work of your shadowy, fash overseers. Not that your cult foes are clean-cut goodies. Better just keep murdering until the plot twists happen.
It is technically a prequel to a wall-running FPS called Sprawl from a few years ago. I sensed a few nods to that story but they have gone completely over my head.
Yes, 2000s shooters may be the soul, but the body is all Doom 2016. It is a rhythmic, flowing shooter that demands the player keep pace. Enemies are nippy and move around arenas with cowardly self-preservation, making movement more important than cover. The combat rhythm is a dance on repeat: pick up, shoot, punch, dash - not forgetting to use your abilities to mix things up. You telepathically pluck up gas cannisters and chuck them at dudes, and you earn your health back by remembering to use bullet-time every so often, which generates glowy green healing drops.
Most importantly, the lack of ammo forces you to snap up and try out every gun, even those you don't like so much. Dropped weapons are coloured according to rarity, so you can easily teleyoink a rare purple pistol and ignore the everyday grey guns. But sometimes you have to improvise and use whatever's grabbable in a heartbeat.
The environment design is smoggy, brutalist, and devoid of nature. Between this and Vholume, it is a great time for concrete futurehells.
I commend this as an act of despotic game design. The developers are forcing you to eat your vegetables because - as it turns out - some vegetables are delicious and you will feel better having digested all your grenade launchers. In 2001 some hardwired troglodytes moaned about Halo only letting you carry two guns at any time, but this was the most interesting change in mainstream shooter design for a decade. Sprawl Zero pushes that logic a little further and builds a whole game around it. It makes one big combat decision and commits. For that alone, it is worth playing.
Summarising Northern Journey feels like a transgression. Maybe it feels so secret because we haven't covered it enough. Maybe it's because The Gaemars are liars and hypocrites who yearn for the gruel. Maybe it's because playing it gently awakens some ancient feeling that the world is vast and unknown, and full of dark and strange things instead of just more goddamn humans doing the same thing as every other human because that's what the other humans are doing.
Of the three things I know about Finland, probably the most relevant is that it borders Norway, where Northern Journey is set. But not really. Nobody names this region, nobody explains more than where to go next and what to look out for. Its setting is that place. The world before "the world" meant a list of countries and buildings and certainties and fucking adverts.
