Feature - Jank

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 Black

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 into an irony-poisoned vortex of MadLibs provocation if they’

21 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Defence of the clones

From GridWars to Clone Hero, copying software isn't always evil - and can be worth celebrating

I browse the Nintendo eshop from time to time, checking on new releases. The games on there that make me feel the grubbiest aren't the hentai jigsaws; those, at least, are honest. It's the clones. "Peak: The Adventure Begins", for example, seems designed specifically to be mistaken for Peak, the co-op climbing game currently unavailable on the Switch. It feels like a trick, and from the screenshots it looks like a poor imitation.

I don't always feel that way about clones, however. In 2005, the Xbox 360 was released, and with it Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. It was an unlikely killer app. Originally a minigame playable during loading screens in Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 2, Retro Evolved turned the twin-stick shooter into a standalone game available via the brand new Xbox Live Arcade, and its rippling neon and frenetic combat sold the promise of HD gaming a lot better than Kameo: Elements Of Power.

At the time, everyone around me was score-chasing in Retro Evolved. I worked on a PC games magazine and we coveted the game.

Enter Canadian developer Marco Incitti, who used game making software Blitz Basic to create GridWars, a near-copy of Geometry Wars with a

19 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this entity - the creature.

13 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The best singleplayer levels in first-person PC games

Let me level with you

Last week we confronted Jank readers with the 17 best multiplayer FPS maps in living and possibly unliving memory. Did you think we were finished? You imbecile. You clown. Now it's time for all the brilliant singleplayer levels. And some of them aren't even about shooting.

We had originally sat down to hash out all the finest levels in first-person games without caring how many players were enjoying the view or dying from a ruptured skull. But after compiling that megalist we realised: my god, if we split this monster into multiplayer and singleplayer maps... we will have TWO articles. It was a revolutionary idea, and one that has made Jank approximately 0.05% more efficient this week. We provide stupid jokes and shareholder value.

Fort Frolic - BioShock

A bunny eared enemy with hooks waits outside the doors to Fort Frolic.

Graham: Someone, somewhere is going to say: what about The Cradle, the most beloved level from Thief: Deadly Shadows? To them we say: sorry, we haven't played it. But we have played Fort Frolic, the BioShock level from the same level designer, Jordan Thomas, in which the player is trapped in a district by Sander Cohen, an artist who works across mediums, from "creepy living statues" to "classically scored murder ballet"

12 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. The Brighton marathon is taking place today. I'm not running in it, but I will be doing something much harder: crossing the road while it takes place. Before I'm trampled to death by thousands of angry people in shorts, let's consider some of the best writing about games from across the week.

For Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen asked a flock of developers how pausing works in their games.

“In most of the Vlambeer games and Minit / Disc Room,” said developer Jan Willem Nijman, “I take a screenshot (with the UI disabled), then either jump to a completely different empty room or deactivate everything... with that screenshot as the background, [and] on unpause jump back [to the game]. Sometimes there’s a 1-frame delay because that screenshot needs the UI disabled.”

Ashley Day wrote about the experience of going back to Super Mario 64, 30 years later, to finally get those 50 bonus stars.

I’ve known for years that your reward for doing so is to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle and receive 100 extra lives from him, but I always thought that was a bit pointless. After all, why would you need all those

08 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels

These maps lead the way to our hearts

When Graham and I sat down to scrounge together a definitive list of our favourite multiplayer first-person shooter levels, we knew that many of them would originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are children of the dial-up deathmatch, so it comes as no surprise that many of our most-loved maps are simple blocky arenas made of grubby textures and low-definition skyboxes.

But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea. Okay, nobody at Blizzard is making a homage to Facing Worlds. But battle royale maps that dramatically evolve are all about flavour begetting function. And the Finals definitely owes a thing or two to Quake 3. Don't get what I mean? Read on, and find out.

Crossfire - Half-Life

A blocky courtyard with a helipad in Half-Life.

Graham: It's all well

06 Apr 2026 By Jim Rossignol Feature

Hunt: Showdown is still showing other extraction shooters how it's done

Hunting down an old timer

Sure, these fresh gunslingers have a lot going for them. Jonny Embark and Bungie The Kid both shoot from the hip and they certainly put on a show. Those young guns make a lot of noise. But it's the quiet, gnarly old gunfighter you should really fear. That guy sat on the porch with a distant look like he has seen too much? The old timer chewing something he pulled out of his horse? He's the one to pay attention to. Because he survived.

The survival of Hunt Showdown is not simply the survival of players as they escape with characters unmurdered from its (thankfully crafting-free) first-person extraction game, but also in the title's remarkable ability to persist and grow over many years in a world where most multiplayer efforts are quietly taken out in the yard and shot. In the deadly corral of a hit-driven hobby the master has modestly abided, and in the year of our lord 2026 Hunt is not simply one of the most impressive and competently designed extraction games, it also has a fairly good claim on being one of the best multiplayer shooters ever made. As a veteran of the old times myself, I