Newsletter

This weeks’ newsletter arrives late, with apologies: I thought I would be able to write it during my journey back from America, but overestimated the efficacy of in-flight WiFi and my own energy levels after slogging through two airports, three rail lines and a last-mile cab ride. You get the benefit of something written in the fuzzy-head/itchy eyeballs state of jetlag, rather than the exhausted-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility one, and I hope you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Jank has rudely persisted in my absence. Brendy admitted he was wrong about Slay The Spire 2 and celebrated its co-op mode, Graham reviewed the videos he watched while playing Lost and Found and my podcasting partner/nemesis Alice Bell reviewed Esoteric Ebb. She made do without me for this week’s Total Playtime, which addressed the main issues of the week before pivoting to endorse furry art.

Chief among the former was NVIDIA’s debut of DLSS 5. This tricks out existing games to give “photo-realistic” visuals through the magic of aftermarket gen-AI and was loved by Digital Foundry and hated by almost everybody else, including a number of developers whose work was featured in the announcement. NVIDIA’s CEO said

Good afternoon. Jonty, the usual author of Jank Mail, is away on a business trip. He is at the Game Developers Conference in the Weimar Republic of America, interviewing games industry people and typing up their words with bloodshot, jet-lagged eyes for his other, proper job. Disgusting.

That means I'm in charge of the weekly newsletter. I promise not to talk about hacking sims and skateboarding and Tekken. Here's what we've been up to at Jank, and what's been going on in the broader world of video and/or games.

First, here at Jank Dot Cool I finally completed Resident Evil Requiem and wrote a review. The short version is that it's dumb fun, stacked with characterful zombies, and full of fan service. My brother describes it as the Resident Evil equivalent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I cannot dispute this theory. I guess we should have expected as much with "Requiem" in the title.

We also discovered the font it uses for the game's dramatic (comically inconsistent) mega-text splashes. We didn't

Another week draws to a close, which means another collection of articles appeared on this fine website. Graham expressed the history of PC gaming in two delivery games, told his son The Parable Of Molyneux and stayed up late coding a dark mode for the website. I got a Warhammer expert to retcon kawaii Space Marines into the Warhammer 40k canon, and Brendy listed the best salesman in PC games, motivated by his disdain for Leon Kennedy’s James Bond-ass product placement. On Total Playtime we chatted a bit about the Next Fest demos we'd played, none of which cracked the top ten so our hipster status endures.

Beyond these delicately yellow-tinted walls, there was some good game news: Marathon is doing well, Slay The Spire 2 is doing amazingly, Resident Evil 9 is doing even better and is also a PC game now, because Capcom is increasingly a PC publisher. Chun-Li, welcome to the resistance. In bad game news Highguard threw in the towel and is shutting down, although the remains of the dev team crunched out a final update for the sendoff. When the lights go out it will have lasted 46 days in total, which is 31

The week, and February, is over. What did we learn? We played a bunch of Next Fest demos and so did everybody else until Marathon came out. Brendy commends Airframe Ultra and partially understands Spacefleet: Heat Death, and I revealed that Beyond Words sure is what it looks like. Sin Vega took a late trip to Beatdown City and Brendy continued to develop our #brand by asking some developers to share their best jank. 

Out in the wider games industry, the end of Phil Spencer’s reign at Xbox remained a topic of spirited discussion. The takes spanned the usual games community spectrum from “farewell to our saviour” to “good riddance, loser”, alongside a suspiciously comprehensive savaging of Sarah Bond. The most obsequious take was rewarded with an interview with new broom Asha Sharma, in which she reaffirmed a commitment to Xbox without saying what that actually means. 

Sharma is at least being commendably transparent about not having Spencer’s gaming chops, which by all accounts would be very difficult without blocking out three days a week for Achievement farming, and says she needs to “learn about the ‘why’” of previous decisions, which is the sort of thing

Welcome to Jank Mail, our rundown of the week in PC gaming and Jank in particular. I like to start with the latter because we are of course the true arbiters of what matters, but today I have no choice but to start with IGN’s reveal that Big Phil is out at Xbox, along with his presumed successor Sarah Bond, prompting a lot of late-night discourse and Microsoft rushing out the PR plan that was supposed to kick in next week. 

I’m a bit down about it: Xbox has been a state of perpetual struggle in the last decade and lots of people have well-developed reasons to hate Spencer's guts, but in my encounters he was always a nice guy who consumed and cared about the products his business made. This made him a very rare breed in the executive class, who routinely regard both their output and their audience as budget line items. His replacement is a jar-grown exec who previously headed Microsoft’s AI output so the discourse outlook isn’t wonderful, although she said games are art in her intro message so at least that’s one argument we can stop having.

What else

It’s Valentine’s Day, so let us slip into something more comfortable - like a look back at this week’s headlines.

At Jank Towers, Graham wished that games culture was more like book culture, although discovered in the process that the photography is harder than you think. I played Quarantine Zone: The Last Post and found it to be a deadening amount of busywork, and Car Service Together which was a more satisfying amount of busywork until I found out what Brendy was doing. Our members-only Discord now has a #jontys-garage channel and I wish to make clear that I had no hand in its creation.

Brendy also went back to the newly-denumbered Overwatch to see if it had indeed been reborn, and exclusively revealed that it’s still Overwatch. Finally, a games media outlet brave enough to say “it’s good, if you like that sort of thing”. He also rejoiced in the return of Samurai Gunn 2 and joined Nate and myself on Total Playtime to pick some game characters to be our life coaches.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, Discord said that it wasn’t going to force everybody to verify their age to use

It’s Saturday, which means it’s time to review the week in PC gaming. Chez Jank, Brendy completed his mountain-climbing adventure by being eaten by the developer of Cairn, before killing all his squad members in Menace, reviewing TR-49 and proposing some additional Types of Quest. Graham found the perfect Speed Racer game but can’t play it, and a perfect PICO-8 that he can’t stop playing. The minds at Total Playtime decreed that the Splinter Cell novel and Split Fiction are both bad. 

Beyond these walls, we learned that there's a Baldur's Gate 3 TV show in the works, although Larian are not involved which is another little data point on why they're sticking with their own IP for their next game. It's being made by Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, which I prefer to think of as Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin because that was much better television. 

Welcome to Jank Mail, our weekly newsletter, summarising the last week in PC gaming and our own contributions to it. Henceforth it will arrive on Saturday, but I was running late this weekend. The thing about being called Jank is that any such haphazardness can be attributed to brand marketing, so it’s on purpose actually. 

The most significant event in PC gaming last week was, of course, the launch of Jank: a new reader-funded website about PC games which strives to publish things that other outlets are too commercially sensible not to. Graham wrote our introductory manifesto, and Brendy explained and then embodied it by making three game developers climb a mountain, asking some others about working at Telltale, and explaining why AI can’t do game criticism. 

We all nominated our best games of the decade so far, and debuted our regular guides to what you should play and read this weekend. We recommended Sektori and reviewed Sword of the Sea and Big Hops, and debuted our partnership with the Total Playtime podcast by making Graham read the Death Stranding novelisation, which captured the most wearing parts of the game and none of the highlights but