Newsletter

Another week has passed! We made it; good work everybody. Here on Jank, Graham gloried in the fact that emulation means that every game comes to PC eventually and proposed Peter Molyneux: Pop Star, the Disney Channel Original Movie that will never grace this timeline.

Brendy raised a virtual glass to virtual pubs, and I confirmed that Samson is both too limited and too janky to be compared to GTA 4 but I did it anyway. Take that, narrative convention. Brendy and Alice couldn’t make it to the podcast recording so Nate and I considered Microsoft’s latest strategy pivot and the number of ETs required to defeat Joe Rogan. 

Out there in the wider world, Valve dished out Steam Controllers to reviewers and almost all of them said it’s great, with only some minor technical dissent. Available on Monday, and probably beyond because it doesn’t have RAM in it. Paste Games, which was briefly Endless Mode and AV Club, and eternally the first byline for a vast swathe of US games writers, was shut down which is another reason to fund independent games media. 

Elsewhere, Subnautica 2 is actually happening despite everything. The developer

It was a quiet week on Jank and Brendy couldn’t be having that, so he transferred a conversational pipebomb from the Discord to the homepage by asking if a game can be so bad it's good. He then left the comments section to argue about Daikatana while he embarked on a predictably unpredictable political career in Moves of the Diamond Hand. Graham defended the clones and the Total Playtime crew shared our experiences reviewing Half-Life 3, which is the sort of thing that can only be done with financial backing so thanks once again to all who back Total Playtime and Jank and make it possible. 

Beyond Jank, Game Pass is cheaper now and will only contain old Calls of Duty, because it turns out that cost a lot of money and didn’t achieve very much. Microsoft Gaming is just called Xbox again as part of a wide-ranging manifesto that can be read as inspirational or sinister depending on your mood, but calls for “a level of self-critique that should feel uncomfortable” which I’m sure any gaming-focused subreddit will be delighted to help with.

More like Build A Docket Boy, amiright. Elsewhere in deeply awkward work

Jank this week had an unplanned theme of "solitude". It began with Graham and Brendy outlining the best first-person single-player PC game levels, which is the sort of overly-specific list we can do round these SEO-free parts, but it was all for nothing because they didn’t include a single Arkane level. This is what happens when I’m too busy to contribute to the lists; I have failed you, the reader, and will do better in future. 

Nic Ruben stayed solo to tour single-player extraction shooters, Graham was pursued by a giant centipede, and Brendy reviewed Anthology of a Killer two years after it released, which is another thing we can do when there is nobody to stop us. Thanks to all who’ve backed the site and enabled this. On Total Playtime we discussed vintage sexualisation controversies, recent Microsoft controversies, and the very real although regrettably long-odds prospect of a Duck Tales extraction shooter.  

Out there in the wider world, after Rockstar got hacked and was remarkably “yeah whatever” the hackers released the data early, revealing to a scandalised world how much money GTA Online allegedly makes and how much Red Dead Online doesn’t.

Another week has passed, which was good in parts, and one of the good things was a new Jank list. Brendy and Graham put their heads together to work out their favourite multiplayer maps, which is a pretty extensive rundown considering it should only be Q3DM17, and there are some good additional proposals in the comments. 

I reached back into Total Playtime’s Text Adventure archive to reveal that the Mass Effect Andromeda novel doesn’t have the narrative restrictions of so many other gaming books but still found its own way to be not very good. Total Playtime itself turned one-ish and celebrated by answering listener questions. Aged veteran Jim Rossignol explained why the slightly less aged Hunt Showdown is still the extraction shooter to beat and Brendy’s inaugural Living in Sim turned into a bad time driving a truck in South America.  

The gaming world had large had a fairly quiet week. There was a decent news dump from the reliably good Triple-I showcase: it introduced an extremely messed-up farming sim and told us that Warren Spector’s new thieving game is out next month, the developer of 1000xRESIST is making a game about

Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast. 

Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure. 

In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought by the Stellar

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: time to look back at what happened in PC gaming this week.

Round these parts the big news was that Brendy doesn’t like Marathon very much, which might not sound like a particularly hot take but sure did attract some Discourse. He also found a job sim about router configuration and your reaction to that description will tell you exactly whether you want to play it or not. Sin Vega modelled a good use of AI, for a specific definition of “good”, and Total Playtime programmed some superior gaming conferences. Here is what you should be playing right now. 

Beyond our hallowed walls, the magic 8-ball of games news remains stuck firmly on LAYOFFS as Epic canned 1,000 staff. The layoff announcements have become so regular and the numbers so huge that it can be challenging to visualise them, but looking at an incomplete list of the freshly-unemployed (which contains less than half of those affected) helps to bring it home: one of those documents so long it’s a physical chore to scroll through, listing lives across the world suddenly cast into a historically terrible job market. 

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