Newsletter

It’s been another week in PC gaming, plus an extra day because I had some family business so apologies for the late running. Jeremy Peel kicked things off by explaining that Microsoft has always been a problem for PC gaming so we should not expect it to change now. Yes, they gave us DirectX, but they also gave us Games For Windows Live. 

It was never clear what value GFWL offered players. Nobody wanted its achievements, Gamerscore or messaging functionality, since the social hubs of PC gamers existed elsewhere. The much-vaunted crossplay between Windows and Xbox 360 barely materialised. And of course, it was the home to plenty of clumsy DRM, a role that sealed its fate in the court of public opinion. GFWL was there to police players rather than to help them.

Graham somehow curated good game writing without even being here. Upon his return he reviewed Emuurom and wants you to know that while it contains vast and complex depths you can still enjoy it for much simpler reasons. 

If you love Animal Well and Blue Prince, I think Emuurom could be your new favourite game. Someone less dummy than me might therefore

Another week has passed in glorious Jank, which means that (thanks to the generous backing of our supporters) we have survived six months and written, yikes, over 200 articles. Brendy summarised some highlights but really it's all good and we added still more this week, starting with Nic Rueben's delight at ZeroSpace’s shameless appropriation of both Starcraft and Mass Effect:  

And yet, like, there is something here, flittering about the halls of its hilariously brazen necropolis of zombie inspirations like a moth caught in a packet of moth-flavoured crisps. Do I dare call that something soul? 

He certainly can, it's our site and there is nobody to stop it. As further proof, for this month’s Living in Sim Brendy had a great time in a filthy astrology lab:

Eventually, I discover an asteroid, a planet, and a white dwarf. A few weaker signals dissolve before I can even readjust the satellites to look at them. My bosses are not impressed and they routinely pay me less than my daily wage because I have not fulfilled their exact orders in the emails. You are supposed to go outside and hike or bike

Graham went camping and lived, and he’s so drunk on success that now he’s going on holiday. His parting words were some games you can play this weekend. Brendy remains but is all tuckered out after his consideration of megastructures:

The same human absence is there in Nier Automata's peopleless ruins, in Stray's domed and sunless city. I don't know if these are big enough qualify as megastructures, but they certainly feel like them. On the other hand, I barely count the Dyson Spheres and habitat craft of Stellaris as megastructures. Not only are there too many people hanging around, but the perspective is all wrong. In Hypogea and Metal Garden you are a small being looking up, but in Stellaris you are a god looking down. For a megastructure to truly hit, the sense of scale must land on you like a ton of cement from above and beyond. For something to feel big, you have to first feel tiny. 

Jeremy Peel considered the megastructure, or at least magnificent structure, of Boiling Point, which means I have to mention the song that plays during the installation process and nowhere else in the game.

Hello, enjoyers of Jank. I am informed there are a lot of new readers among you, swamping through the gates thanks to a brutal takedown of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Come in, come in, warm yourself by the burning effigy of Ernest Cline. I think you're going to like it here. 

This newsletter is normally scribbled by Jonty. But this week he's missing, presumed on holiday. I'll do my best to fill your eyes with games industry newsbits in his absence. This will be difficult. I've been distracted because I have only this week learned of Jimothy, a creature which is either a raccoon in Seattle with shortened spine syndrome, or the latest cryptid stalking America, depending on who you ask. Anyway, I'll try. Onto the videogames.

The Oatmeal (@theoatmeal.bsky.social)

I drew a police sketch of Jimothy in case the cops need it

Bluesky SocialThe Oatmeal

Here at Jank

We began the week with a brawl. The season finale of Character Select (in which we pit game characters against one another) saw Max Payne, Octodad, Dog from Half-Life 2, the Flood from Halo, and SkiFree's Yeti having a free-

We are approaching the end of Wall Week, our celebration of carefully created barriers to mark the erection of our own. Graham mused on how a youth spent making Half-Life maps taught him the sheer miraculousness of any game being released. Due to a communication error, Brendy reviewed Wall-E. I mused on the PS360’s waist-high era, we published the definitive list of the best walls in games, and Jeremy Peel considered how Dunwall’s walls set you free.

Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter. 

Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect. 

The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games

It’s been a quiet seven days on Jank, befitting the summer months. In a token sop to world events Graham extolled the virtues of watching the World Cup in first-person care of the BBC’s interactive replays, enabling you to experience first-hand whatever it is that people are mad at Ronaldo for. Brendy chatted with some devs to understand his love of the command line, with reference to both Duskers 2.0 and foundational PC fandom text Hackers (1995). 

The newly-integrated Total Playtime considered the dark art of game reviews, and we didn’t even get round to scoring or being extremely mean about Starfield but we did reveal Nate’s games journalism origin story so that’s your subscription value right there. And What You Could Play has once again provided three recommendations from Graham and many more from our excellent commenters.

Beyond these fetching yellow walls it has been Necrosis Week at Xbox, the die-off starting with extremities like IO’s fantasy game and then racing up towards more significant limbs like Arkane and Undead Labs, which are marked for as-yet-uncertain surgery on Monday. The company cheerily asserts that it’

The big Jank news this week is that we officially have formally merged with Total Playtime, which means that (a) we have an official podcast but (b) it’s one that has been here the whole time. A warm welcome to the Total Playtime Patreon backers who have joined us on the site and in the Discord - if you have not moved your Patreon subscription over, you have two weeks to do so.

Graham dedicated this week to iconoclasm, marking the debut of the Steam Machine with a demand that Valve make the Steam Deck smaller, less powerful and cheaper, and the brouhaha over the ability to pre-order GTA 6 to share his core belief that you should not pre-order games. Brendy highlighted some of the hundred-plus new Quake maps that have been created to mark the game’s 30th anniversary, and mourned the death of his unfinished cat game, thanks to Epic’s decision to give up on the Blueprints coding platform. 

On the newly-integrated Total Playtime, Brendy returned from the parenting wilderness to opine on the news of the week, including what was then the most recent Microsoft calamity, AI again, and Nate’

This week on Jank, Graham found that The Witch’s Bakery offered nothing new and yet everything he needed, and that Blood Dungeon was a welcome addition to his sixteen-year history of Messhof games. Brendy crashed a Google plane into Google’s HQ and he’d do it again, you hear? He also brought back Living in Sim with a look at The Data Center, which is as soothing a distraction as you’d expect but does not reckon with the AI usage it both enacts and implies. I played Bad Magpie and found that it advances the bad-bird canon.

This week not on Jank the big news is, once again, Xbox fucked it. Widely-reported and conspicuously not officially-commented-upon stories reported that Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory are all on the chopping block, as part of a widespread bloodletting which was foreshadowed by the announcement of the Great Reset and the departure of the boss of Xbox Game Studios, who presumably peaced out rather than spend months reciting bullet points in severance meetings. This comes a mere week after a lavish fan hoedown which included a reveal of Ninja Theory’s new game,