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"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car

Last week a blitz of articles asserted that live servicey shooter Overwatch 2 was making a comeback, a conclusion that presumes the hero blaster had ever "gone" anywhere in the first place. PC Gamer called it a long-in-the-works "glow-up", a fairer assessment than Kotaku's grandiose statement: "While you weren't looking, Overwatch put its crown back on". Neither article examined the hero shooter and how it plays today from the position of a long-lost player, instead providing a summary of changes and dramas over the years. The recent influx of press has more to do with a PR push developers Blizzard have been making to bring attention to an (admittedly large) update that adds five new heroes in one day. The silliest part of this update is the decision to rebrand Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch, a walking back of the sequel's grand intentions so clownish that it resulted in some more fun headlines. 

So, the natural question arises: is Overwatch actually good again? Was it ever even "bad"? Maybe if someone - I dunno - replayed it and wrote about it, we can find out. So let's do that.

For context, I

A few months ago Metroid Prime 4 was shown to press, and caused a small, localised stink in the chattosphere. We don't care much about Nintendo games at Jank, and I have no emotional stake in Metroid (Samus is the Ninty equivalent of John Halo - an extremely boring person vacuum-packed in fancy metal) but I do enjoy divining the stinklines that emanated from the first-person shoot 'n' splore, and the complaints by folks who got hands-on time with it.

The odour was familiar: a sidekick character would verbally needle you about performing the next correct action. "Samus, there's something interesting over there," a sidekick called Myles will say if the player strays too far in one direction. "Are you sure we don't need to use that?" Somebody in the resulting shiteswirl of social media discourse called this a "nag line". A succinct moniker for a trend that has existed in games for a long time without being given a name.

Nag lines are common enough, you'll know one when you hear it. Spend ten seconds inspecting a cool-looking prop while an NPC waits by a door, and they might say: "This way,

This week Larian boss Swen Vincke, a man never short of an opinion, donned the cursed sash of Twitter Main Character with the suggestion that games critics should be subject to their own Metactritic-style judgement, just to see how they like it.

“It’s easy to destroy things, it’s a lot harder to build them," he wrote on X, a platform I’m not going to link to because I don’t want to expose you to all the horrifying footage it contains. "The best critics understand this. Even when they’re being critical, they do their best not to be hurtful.”

“Sometimes I think it'd be a good idea for critics to be scored, Metacritic-style, based on how others evaluate their criticism. I like to imagine it would encourage a bit more restraint. The harsh words do real damage. You shouldn't have to grow callus on your soul just because you want to publish something.” He subsequently deleted much of the thread, correctly stating it was being taken out of context, although Edwin has preserved it over on RPS.

The idea was roundly slated for overlooking the