Feature - Jank (Page 4)

28 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking.

Good morning, videogames. I am a little late with The Lie-In today, such that it is no longer morning as this goes live. This is because I met up with Jonty in fleshworld on Friday night and we filled ourselves with the devil's liquid. The regret on Saturday was overpowering. Now it is Sunday and I am reborn via the medium of links to good videogame writing.

Star Fox released this past week. I am currently resisting the urge to buy it, at least until I've completed a couple of other Switch 2 games that sit in front of it in the queue. For now, I enjoyed Chris Schilling's review for Eurogamer.

Conscious as I am that memory is the most unreliable of narrators, I don't recall feeling quite so exhilarated by some of these stages. Katina's mothership is more imposing than ever, spitting out fighters by the dozen. Sector X's derelict base feels enormous as you pick your way through its ruins. Take the warp route on Meteos and your destination is positively kaleidoscopic, a proper feast for the eyes. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest this is

25 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Don't pre-order games

They never run out of megabytes at the megabyte store

The videogame industry wants you to buy games before they're released because it makes it easier for them to project their future earnings, and because they want your money before you find out whether a game is good or not.

Don't do it. They won't run out of copies, I promise.

Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 go live today. It's one of the most anticipated entertainment properties ever, in any medium, and I can understand wanting to give in to that excitement, and to participate in some way with what feels like a cultural moment of real significance.

You don't have to do that by giving them $80 today for a videogame you can't play until November 19th.

Book some days off work. Replay the previous games in the series. Watch some video essays about them. Create a zine about Franklin's dog. All of these are methods of participating in the moment that don't cost you $80 for a videogame you can't play yet.

To be clear, my anti-pre-order stance is not related to Grand Theft Auto 6 specifically.

I've seen the pattern play out

24 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The device I want Valve to make

What if the Steam Deck was smaller and less powerful?

If you want a more powerful Steam Deck designed solely for playing games on your television, good news. On Monday, Valve revealed prices for the Steam Machine, a companion cube designed to bring PC gaming into your living room. All of the reviews pretty much agree: they're cool, small, quiet machines that offer a gateway to the platform, but feel too expensive because everything is too expensive now.

That's great and I've added my name to the waiting list. Now Valve should make what I really want: a less powerful Steam Deck that's still handheld but half the size.

I've owned a Steam Deck since launch and I like it a lot. I don't take for granted how wonderful it is to be able to play PC games on the go - or in my case, while lying in bed or on the couch - and it's great that it's powerful enough to play a surprising number of the games on Steam. I could run Elden Ring on that thing, or Resident Evil Requiem, or with the right settings even multiplayer shooters like Arc Raiders.

I could watch No Country For Old Men on

24 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Blueprints is dead, and so is my unfinished game about cats

Goodbye to the only way I know to code

Coding is hard. Show me lines of C# and I will curl into a ball and weep. I have tried many times to learn a programming language and every time I only get as far as learning about arrays before my entire neocortex dribbles out of my nose like a rejected milkshake. But that was not the case with Blueprints. Unreal Engine's visual scripting noodles let you sorta-code entire game systems using dinky little wires and pleasing flow charts. Finally, I can make the game I have always dreamt of: a broken walking sim about collecting bodega cats that will get two downloads on Itch.io.

Except now all my grand dreams are being swept away. Unreal Engine is retiring the relatively accessible Blueprints in favour of a bizarre, vaguely culty coding language called "Verse" that Epic is calling a "system for building metaverse experiences." Still going on about the metaverse, I see. Fantastic.

To understand the minor upheaval that is going on in the world of Unreal developers, you need only hear about the most recent State Of Unreal address, in which the company showed off plans for Unreal Engine 6. The decisions announced in this

22 Jun 2026 By Jeremy Peel Feature

Saying goodbye isn't easy

How do you let go of game characters you adore - especially when developers won't let you

Your final session with a game rarely registers as such. A new release turns your head and eventually you notice that months have gone by since you last pressed the big green button on Steam. By which point, any muscle memory has atrophied, or been muddled by different sets of keyboard shortcuts. Playing that game again will be difficult and, really, how good was it in the first place? This is the most common kind of gaming goodbye: an apathetic drift towards other distractions.

But there's another type: the goodbye to the game you've fallen in love with, in which the characters are fond companions and trustworthy accomplices. At a certain point, the rhythms of their conversation tapped their way into your brain, becoming a song you're happy to have stuck in your head. A welcome and soothing accompaniment to everyday life. Bidding adieu to characters like that takes careful management.

On the one hand, you value their company, and don't want to part too soon. On the other, they deserve proper closure, and that typically comes with the developer-mandated ending to the game in question. Spend too much time mopping up side-quests and

21 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. My kid has wanted to get into chess for a little while and I finally got round to setting him up on Chess.com. He played some challenges and some matches and, in the afternoon, came to me triumphant. "I am getting good at chess," he said, clearly proud. "That's great," I said, "I hope you are having fun." Later that evening, right before bed, he urged me to get my own Chess.com account so we could play together. I beat him three times in a row and he went to bed sad and quiet. Will he ever play chess again? Will I ever stop feeling guilty? It's clear to me that games were a mistake, but here are some links to words, videos and podcasts about them.

A picture went around the internet last week of the actor Jack Quaid wearing a mocap suit and wrapped in PVC piping, seemingly for his role as the gelatinous cube in the upcoming God Of War: Laufey. For Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine spoke to animators, actors, and a mocap technician to puzzle out the benefits of recording motion capture for a cube.

“There’s definitely a case

14 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. The World Cup is now underway, which means I can spend the next several days complaining that England's opening game is on at a comfortable 9pm BST while Scotland's opening game was on at 2am. Bloody typical, isn't it. No wonder I need a lie-in today, so let's quickly gather some articles about videogames worth reading.

I love Spore, a grand and ambitious everything-game that doesn't quite work, but which is fascinating to play and to read about. For Design Room, Jay Castello interviewed Will Wright and and seven other members of its development team to put together an oral history.

"He was like, I want to do a game about all the things that had to happen for humans to exist, improbability upon improbability upon improbability," says Trottier. "I want people to have an innate, marvelous sense of how amazing it is that we ever happened in the first place. And they'll do it by experiencing one failure after another after another."

For Manifesto Jam 2026, Mike Cook writes what a lot of people need to hear.

THE DREAM OF SELLING GAMES IS KILLING THE DREAM OF MAKING

11 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Let us discover a new world

With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City

I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.

In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?

"The best thing a game can do to create a