Jank (Page 8)

01 May 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Five Or Six ETs Could Tear Joe Rogan Apart

An unexpected reminder of Barry Manilow

It’s an emergency episode this week: both Alice and Brendy were away, so I had to dial in from Vegas to assist Nate in judgement of the main news events. This lead to some sub-optimal audio and a diminished runtime, for which I can only beg your forgiveness.

Total Playtime: Five Or Six ETs Could Tear Joe Rogan Apart

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/2992.6986

Other errors include misrepresenting how mobile game advertising works and incorrectly saying that Frank Oz puppeteered ET, when in fact ET was played by three different actors. Look, we're all trying our best here, and we do nail the segues so we’ve got that going for us. Plus: Nate takes his first steps back into Dwarf Fortress, a good-faith reading of corporations that Alice will definitely not agree with, and a terrifying demonstration of sound mixing.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it on your podcasting platform of choice.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6786cf573ceecdbe85eac067
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime

Thanks to all our current

01 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

It's another long weekend here in the UK, which means more time than ever for either playing videogames or thinking about how you could have been playing videogames if only you'd made significantly different life choices.

In either case, there remains time for talking about what you're playing this weekend with your fellow commenters, on Jank, the only website that permits such things.

Bus Bound

I have a real soft spot for driving simulators - as distinct from racing sims - that let you pootle around a city while obeying traffic laws and exploring side streets. Bus Bound offers that alongside another weakness of mine: a management layer in which you're setting down the bus routes yourself to efficiently meet the needs of the population. It doesn't look to have the atmosphere of OMSI's 1980s East Berlin (what does), but I'm tempted to board.

Forbidden Solitaire

A "card-slashing horror game about unearthing the contents of a cryptic 1995 CD-ROM that should have never existed." I have no particular nostalgia for '90s CD-based horror games, but I did play a lot of Windows 95 Solitaire, and this is from Grey Alien Games, the

30 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A love letter to videogame pubs

Pint?

The pub is a haven and a hopeless place. Fantasy RPGs uphold the tavern as the hubworld of society. More than piazzas or busy markets or sturdy fortresses, the pub is where real things happen and where real people spit. It feels natural that it becomes a favourite of game designers. In our boring fleshy world they are both the alcoholic's watering hole and a place of legitimate relaxation and escape. They are a third space where office-cursed ghouls can unwind and complain about corporate, and a buzzing recruitment bazaar where jobs are slyly offered to those who dare to schmooze after a conference. Some of the best ideas happen in the pub, why shouldn't some of the best quests begin there too?

When I think of the game pub, I think first of Skyrim's roadside inns. It is impossible to estimate how much of Skyrim's sense of place is owed to its many thatched rest stops, offering you fireside and food in deep warm contrast to the blizzards outside. There's history in these pubs, even if it is the fictional history of a fantastical realm.

29 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

On a long enough timeline, every game is a PC game

If an old game is forgotten, abandoned, unplayable, then it's ours

A few weeks ago, I saw someone, somewhere, mention Scud Race, a Sega racing game I had never played. I hadn't played it because it was one of Sega's Model 3 racers and, unlike Daytona 2 or Sega Rally 2, it was never ported from its origins in an arcade machine to a home console. If I wanted to play it today, I'd have to pay £1600 for a second-hand machine, hire a crane to hoist it into my second floor apartment, and make my child give way by moving his bed into the refuse room downstairs.

Except, not really, obviously, because I could always just emulate it.

Ninety minutes later:

Emulation is a delicate subject, or at least it ought to be. I want developers to be fairly compensated for their work, and that means I want people to support game development by paying for games. I also love games consoles and want manufacturers to be able to produce and experiment with hardware at scale. Yet I also believe that games ought to be played, and this is the only practical way to play Scud Race in 2026.

Supermodel is a long in-development open

28 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Peter Molyneux is a pop star

The developer has constructed a mythic persona, but Masters Of Albion sees him still waiting to embrace it

Back in 2023, Peter Molyneux began talking to press for the first time about his new game, Masters Of Albion, which released into Early Access last week. "The only thing I can say", he told GameReactor, "is that, firstly, this game is the first game really that I've coded, been a coder on since since Black & White." In 2017, Molyneux was talking to press about his previous game, Legacy. "I was in the hotel this morning, I was having breakfast, I was coding Legacy, and I had an idea. Within an hour, I was actually playing with the thing," he told Glixel. The year before, Molyneux was discussing the newly released Godus Wars with Eurogamer, and the fallout of an infamous interview he had done with Rock Paper Shotgun. "After a couple of days I came up with this simple strategy: I would just be a coder and a designer." He lists a few of the things in Godus Wars he personally coded. "I did some coding on The Trail as well," he says at the end of the interview.

So Masters Of Albion is the first game that Molyneux has coded, or been a coder on, since

27 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Samson

Samson is GTA 4 with good hair and no money

Crime and creative accounting

The Steam page for Samson invites comparisons to GTA: open world, cars, combat, and a grimy criminal narrative that could be unconvincingly presented as a view on contemporary America. In practice, it’s more limited: it’s a bit like GTA, but specifically GTA 4, and just the opening section, except with more melee combat, less mission variety, some distractingly detailed visuals and a truly remarkable array of bugs.

The aesthetic is strongly reminiscent of the sort of mid-budget 90s action film in which character actors dimly recognisable as guest stars from Frasier conducted car chases in boxy Fords and shootouts in indistinct warehouses, with the crucial difference that Samson is not issued a gun: the only combat is melee, which uses two moves, one dodge, and some short-lived weapon pickups. Driving, meanwhile, is limited to a handful of different vehicles, some of which are equipped with nitrous and all of which are equipped with an implausible ability to leap sideways for the purposes of bashing another vehicle off the road. It reminds me a little of Sleeping Dogs, the last great nearly-man of the GTA pretenders, but the resemblance is regrettably superficial.

The player's car, pursuing three vans over a bridge towards a junction. — Samson's muscle

26 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. Sometimes, especially in the quiet weeks, I'll include articles in The Lie-In that aren't exemplary works of prose, but which I still hope have some broader worthwhile point or which might generate an interesting discussion. All the same, let's see if I can manage to avoid accidentally linking to something AI-generated this week, eh?

Abram Buehner laments people playing Tomodachi Life for the benefit of the algorithm rather than for their friends. I'm not sure I believe there's any wrong way to play Nintendo's madlibs 'em up, but this is about a subculture that otherwise hasn't come across my social media feed.

That didn’t go over well. The breathless replies argued that to put your real friends into the game was to cross a social boundary, to subject them to the vulgar, wild sandbox of Living the Dream. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, since the actual replies were more along the lines of “I’m not putting my IRL friends into the yaoi simulator lmao.” To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked

25 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Playing politics

This week in PC gaming

It was a quiet week on Jank and Brendy couldn’t be having that, so he transferred a conversational pipebomb from the Discord to the homepage by asking if a game can be so bad it's good. He then left the comments section to argue about Daikatana while he embarked on a predictably unpredictable political career in Moves of the Diamond Hand. Graham defended the clones and the Total Playtime crew shared our experiences reviewing Half-Life 3, which is the sort of thing that can only be done with financial backing so thanks once again to all who back Total Playtime and Jank and make it possible.

Beyond Jank, Game Pass is cheaper now and will only contain old Calls of Duty, because it turns out that cost a lot of money and didn’t achieve very much. Microsoft Gaming is just called Xbox again as part of a wide-ranging manifesto that can be read as inspirational or sinister depending on your mood, but calls for “a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable” which I’m sure any gaming-focused subreddit will be delighted to help with.

More like Build A Docket Boy, amiright.