Jank (Page 8)

10 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith News

Sprawl Zero wants to take the FPS back to 2005

Some of us never left

I'm not a big fan of using modern internet phrases when writing about games. You know what I mean: "Hollow Knight's vibes are immaculate" or "I'm Balatro pilled", that sort of thing. It dates your writing within about fifteen minutes, and it pales in comparison to the power of original language you chose yourself.

Anyway first-person shooter Sprawl Zero appears to be Ravenmaxxing.

"Y2K is back" says a loading bar at the start of the trailer, and then "Reloading 2005" just before the liquid drum-and-bass drops for a combat montage of catching bullets, bum-sliding, and throwing physics barrels at enemies. At several points the player punches a man so hard they burst. This is a game made by people who I'd bet have seen Ghost In The Shell, Akira and probably at least one OVA, and who have played not only Raven Software's Singularity, but probably also Ritual's Sin and Monolith's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. They have probably seen The Matrix more times than they can count.

All of which is excellent. We've had several years now of "boomer shooter" renaissance, with developers trying to recreate the Id Software glory days of Doom and Quake. That's been good, but I'm

10 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Payphone Go is good old-fashioned internet nonsense

Gotta phone 'em all

One of the many things that the social media age has robbed from us is an abundance of daft play-ish projects, invariably cooked up by some developer in San Francisco, of the sort that used to be announced on Boing Boing and written about in Wired magazine. Back in the early 2000s such things came along with pleasing regularity, in part because they were rationed out through blog posts and magazine articles rather than dropped into the firehose of social media.

Nowadays San Francisco is the global source for dead-eyed AI boosterism, Cory Doctrow is posting through it on social media with everybody else, and Wired is focused on documenting contemporary warfare and the rise of the surveillance state. It was more fun when all this was Flickr and Feedburner, which is one of the foundational beliefs that lead us to launch Jank in the first place.

This is why I was delighted to come across Payphone Go. Its origin is pure early-2000s SF nonsense: somebody realised that there's a public record of the 2,203 payphones still remaining in California, and has built a natty and totally superfluous tool which enables you to "claim" each one by calling it.

09 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Resident Evil Requiem’s big text splashes explained

NAMES AND LOCATIONS IN A SANS SERIF FONT

The big font splashes in Resident Evil Requiem are so cool and stylistic! Many might mistake these pseudo-title cards for a stylish flourish that looks neat but remains utterly meaningless as a scene-setting device when you can already see exactly what the giant text is declaring – but you’d be missing the true brilliance of these stylish, cool, aesthetically booming words. Big spoilers in this discussion.

First of all, plastering big all-caps text onto the screen is a great, impactful way to introduce new characters, fresh to the Resident Evil series, like FBI agent Grace Wrenwood.

But it works even for characters we know and love, like former cop and successful car salesman Leon Rhodes Hill.

Oh, wait, no. I see the confusion now. He’s Leon Scott Kennedy. She’s Grace Ashcroft, not Wrenwood. Excuse me. I misunderstood the format. Once you get it, it’s very simple and effective. Clearly it goes:

FIRSTNAME
PLACE

That’s okay, now that we know the format, we can continue to meet new characters like…

Oh, no, wait. I see the new confusion. Elbridge is not a person. That’s okay, the title cards don’t need to be consistent or actually

08 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s core

07 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Capcom, Highguard and an unplayable classic

This week in PC gaming

Another week draws to a close, which means another collection of articles appeared on this fine website. Graham expressed the history of PC gaming in two delivery games, told his son The Parable Of Molyneux and stayed up late coding a dark mode for the website. I got a Warhammer expert to retcon kawaii Space Marines into the Warhammer 40k canon, and Brendy listed the best salesman in PC games, motivated by his disdain for Leon Kennedy’s James Bond-ass product placement. On Total Playtime we chatted a bit about the Next Fest demos we'd played, none of which cracked the top ten so our hipster status endures.

Beyond these delicately yellow-tinted walls, there was some good game news: Marathon is doing well, Slay The Spire 2 is doing amazingly, Resident Evil 9 is doing even better and is also a PC game now, because Capcom is increasingly a PC publisher. Chun-Li, welcome to the resistance. In bad game news Highguard threw in the towel and is shutting down, although the remains of the dev team crunched out a final update for the sendoff. When the lights go out it will have lasted 46 days in total, which is 31

06 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Phil Spencer Xbox Explosion

Two men, one pod

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 episode is unsusually quiet and on-topic, because both Alice and Nate were away and that really cuts down the level of free-form improv and extended complaining about people on the internet. It fell to Brendy and myself to hold the fort, which does at least mean it's an all-Jank show to merit this post.

Total Playtime: The Phil Spencer Xbox Explosion

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/3666.94515

The lead talking point was Phil Spencer's departure from Xbox, in which I attempt to present him positively and Brendan counter-argues that executives should not be treated like humans. Humanity is further cited in discussion of the entity wearing Videogamer.com's skin pumping out AI-written articles, including a Resident Evil review which briefly appeared on Metacritic. Brendy has already made clear our view on AI-written reviews, which the article in question handily backed up by being extremely dull and offering no useful insight.

Having a games writer phographed wearing a shirt and suit jacket, rather than a black T-shirt and

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

WYSPTW or wapwapwapwap for short

Videogames are intensifying! The first week of March has delivered more games I want to play than any other so far this year, and I haven't finished with all the Next Fest demos I want to play yet. Please, please slow down, we are but three sickly men with a small blog.

Here are just some of the games you should be playing this weekend, but remember to tell us all the other games you are playing in the comments below.

A crowded pier dense with shops, a bar, a ship, and dozens of people, rendered in a colourful orthographic style. — Oh, it's a fucking wonderland, is it? Delightful as shit, are we?

Lost And Found Co.

I played the demo of Lost And Found Co. several years ago and had checked in on it intermittently since. Its release this week was still a total surprise. This is a Where's Wally-style hidden object adventure that excites me, mainly, for the warmth and detail of its art style. Sooner or later I'll be queuing up some podcasts and spending hours finding miscellany in its Hergécore dioramas.

Two adventurers stand by a chest. "Not a mimic", reads a sign above it. — This isn't by one of the original Disco Elysium developers, mercifully.

Esoteric Ebb

What if you took many of the RPG systems and writerly flourishes of Disco Elysium and applied them back towards a more

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Jank business

We now have a dark mode

You asked and we delivered

We didn't know what the response would be when we launched Jank, except for one undoubtable fact: people were going to ask for a dark mode. Sure enough, you did, and so now we have one. Head down to the footer and you'll find a toggle to travel into what I am affectionately calling the After Eight zone.

Or perhaps you don't have to. The site should respect whatever dark mode setting you already have set within your browser, so it may well already be dark without you needing to press the switch. Either way, you can select whichever you prefer and the site will remember between sessions.

Oh! Since you clicked through to the full post, you don't even have to scroll down to the footer. You can just click the button here. Don't tell the others:

🌙 ☀️

If you have any feedback on how dark mode looks, please let us know in the comments. I prefer my sites to be bright like lightly spoiled snow, so I may not know precisely what you desire from the dark web. Is it contrasty enough? Does our reddish-orange accent colour work on a darker background better than I fear? You be the