Bits - Jank

05 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

This video of kawaii Space Marines is canon, actually

There is no peace amongst the stars, but there is twirling

I know very little about Warhammer 40,000. I know it chiefly as a very expensive way to sit in a shop and move little figurines around on a Saturday, which in my youth I had neither the income nor self-confidence to try. I have a number of friends and colleagues who understand it on a foundational level, though, and they assure me that one of the benefits of the setting is that by lining up enough of the vast number of bizarre and bombastic parameters by which it operates, and squinting at them with sufficient determination, you can assemble a robust enough headcanon to justify pretty much any scenario you can imagine.

The best example of this I have been presented with is the fan reaction to the 2023’s Boltgun, which gave Warhammer 40k the boomer shooter treatment. In it, Space Marine protagonist Malum Caedo carves an implausibly bloody swathe through continental quantities of opponents while shouting instead of breathing. This is, I was assured, emphatically in line with the job description of the genetically enhanced warriors of the Adeptus Astartes - but even the most hardbitten tabletop Space Marine player would need an implausible number of perfect

04 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Questions

What game most disappointed you?

Sometimes I think I'd prefer if games never came out

My son is really pumped about Pokémon Pokopia (out this Thursday) and Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream (out next month), so much so that he recently told me he wasn't watching videos about either in case they made him less excited. He doesn't want to risk losing the hype. He's nine years old and already wise enough to know that sometimes YouTube videos lie to him or use misleading titles, but I really think if I do my job he'll be yelling at journalists for giving low scores to games he hasn't played by the time he's a teenager. The cycle must continue.

We're not there yet. Pokémon Pokopia reviews dropped earlier this week and so I got to tell him that journalists seem to love it. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave it 9/10 and it's currently the highest rated Pokémon game on Metacritic. Still, he's worried about being disappointed. What if he plays it and doesn't like it, he asked, on the walk to school. So I got to impart some important fatherly wisdom. I got to tell him about Peter Molyneux.

I've never been as excited for any game was I was for Black & White. I had

02 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Leon S. Kennedy is a car salesman now

Stop pretending this man is cool

I have been provided a copy of Resident Evil Requiem for review purposes not by Capcom's PR team, but by my own brother, who threw the game at me at 10:30pm on a Saturday night like a £60 baseball pitched at my skull. In our family we call this a "golden spanner" - a nice surprise that fucks up your entire week's plans. But he made the error of not setting a deadline, so our review will be late.

I have played long enough to discover one important thing. It is not only a horror game, but also a big advert. The developers have delivered unto Resident Evil the overt product placement techniques of a James Bond movie. It was previously thought that Leon Kennedy was deemed too heroic and cool to leave out of this story. The truth is he was required to appear because the game needed a man to sell cars and wristwatches.

Leon Kennedy behind the wheel of his vehicle, a Porsche. — Leon S Kennedy, popular videogame hero and noted sellout.

The first advert lands almost the moment Leon appears on-screen. He's inspecting a murder scene - something is rotten in this city. But a call comes in, his handler says he should go check

27 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A hoverbike hurtler that always ends in a ragdoll brawl

On your bike, mate

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

If you don't win your race in hoverbike racing game Airframe Ultra, you might at least batter your opponent into submission with a steel pipe in the clunky physics brawl that takes place afterwards. This is, as the following GIFs will prove, a wrenchingly cool-looking racer of the much-dithered retro variety. You speed across the chunky trash textures and dangerously high bridges of a future city where all the coolest kids are into jet engine hooners and grievous bodily harm.

A GIF of a racer in hot pink flying out of a narrow tunnel and coming to a halt against a backdrop of a sci-fi megacity. — Ah, London.

You pick up glowing piles of cash as you rush through narrow passages, storm drains, and busy motorways. Bash a boost button to get some extra oomph, but bash it too much and your airframe will explode. Even going too fast for too long will make your mechacycle overheat and splutter to a grinding halt. You can jab people as you pass them, like in ye olde racing game Motorstorm. Or in my case, you can be punched in the jaw just as you are feeling like the coolest racer in town.

The player lands after a big jump and is struck by an opponent who catches up from behind. — Furious.

That's fine, there'll be time

26 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Ready to die hot and confused? Here's a hardcore orbital warfare sim

Let them cook (their enemies)

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

Some interstellar navies run out of fuel in the middle of a space battle. I ran out of fuel 51 days before the battle even began. In Spacefleet: Heat Death you are given a map of solar system (well, just the Earth and the moon) and asked to hop from station to station, Lagrange point to Lagrange point, building up a fierce little gang of spacekillers so that you can survive an incoming bunch of baduns. The trouble: it is all presented like you are sitting at a computer workstation in NASA and if you don't know what Delta-V is from years of Kerbal Space Program you may as well put a giant laser to your head right now.

This is a strategy game rooted in hard sci-fi. It's the 23rd century and the Earth is swarmed by filthy spacetrash. You can buy ships and arrange them into fleets to fight or trade with many dirtbag factions - there are missile frigates, laser wielding corvettes, artillery bastards, fuel tankers, cargo haulers. They all look sort of the same, but each

25 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Beyond Words is Scrabble given the Balatro treatment

Spell is other people

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

The Beyond Words demo comes with a prominent but confusing pedigree: it proudly states it’s “from the makers of Goldeneye and Timesplitters” but bears absolutely no relation to either, rendering the association moot to the point of negativity. It’s like emphasising Babe 2: Pig In The City is “from the maker of Mad Max: Fury Road”: factually accurate, and doubtless both benefit from the same hard-won expertise, but you wouldn’t want to leave die-hard fans of either together without supervision.

There is no shooting, sci-fi or even synth music here: it’s Scrabble, and specifically Scrabble given the Balatro roguelike treatment, to an almost embarrassing degree of fidelity. You’re rewarded for placing longer words and using more annoying letters in the standard Scrabble style, but everything after that is overpoweringly reminiscent of LocalThunk’s creation.

You have a set of power cards granting buffs and multipliers, consumable boost cards that level up scores, and a store window at the end of each round to purchase more of both, using coins accumulated according to your remaining

24 Feb 2026 By Sin Vega Bits

I am very late for a beating with Treachery In Beatdown City

Silly but still topical

Becoming a games critic is a great way to think about failure all the time. Oh, you're tormented by that terrible time you didn't do enough? Amateur. The unwritten articles, the uncovered games, the abandoned projects: space-time itself recoils at the black hole of their uncountable billions. I should've stuck to shelving. You know where you stand with a shelf.

Treachery In Beatdown City made me feel this way twice over, thanks to a huge "remix" re-release, and thus a second layer of "Argh, I've left it too long now". Well, what the hell, let's do it now. You like smacking virtual jerks around, right? You like unusual designs and experimental genre fusions? You hate microaggressions? Well now. This is an interesting one.

It's a more cerebral Double Dragon where instead of button mashing, you alternately avoid enemies while action bars refill, then pause time to spend them in a Fallout 3 VATS-ish combo menu, ordering unique attacks with many status effects for preparing later moves or bypassing varied defences. The rhythm and balancing take a lot of getting used to, and a little too much waiting, but mean a long tail and more varied options and fights over time.

22 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. As you read this, I pray that I am having an actual lie-in. I must recuperate after spending all of Saturday tired and wounded, after having spent all of Friday evening fighting off the brigand Edwin from aging ad-funded webzone RPS. After several hours of struggle, he fled back into the underbrush, his devious mission unfulfilled, and his current whereabouts are unknown. I suspect we shall see him and his rotten ilk again. For now, at least, I retain the strength necessary to share some articles, videos and podcasts worth consuming from across the past week.

Sony closed down Bluepoint Games, the studio best known for remaking Demon's Souls, without them having released a new game under Sony's ownership. Nathan Brown tackled this with customary scorn in his Hit Points newsletter this week.

With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games