Bits - Jank (Page 5)

11 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Project TurboBlast's vehicles have wheels, but it's an antigrav racer in spirit

You know where you stand with a name like TurboBlast

It's difficult to find arcade racers where the handling isn't either mundane by dint of hewing too closely to ancient inspirations, or too fussy or difficult by dint of having been designed by sickos who are much better at these games than I am.

Project TurboBlast hits a sweet spot, judging by its demo, from its on-the-nose name to its F-Zero-on-wheels boost-happy racing style. "Don't blink," the announcer yells at the beginning of each final lap, and I don't think I did.

The music is great in this trailer, too.

Let me clarify "F-Zero-on-wheels". TurboBlast's tracks are wide, twisty, often suspended above an abyss, and covered in glowing boost pads, like every antigrav racer you've ever played including the likes of WipeOut. Your actual vehicles are on wheels, however, both cars or bikes, and you'll need to drift around every corner like in a Mario Kart or a Victory Heat Rally, one of the better arcade racers from recent years.

TurboBlast really is all about managing your turboblast. Aside from the boosts littered across the track, you have a slowly re-filling boost meter

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

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

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

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

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.

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