Newsletter

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,

There was no Jank Mail last week, for which I apologise: I was in LA for the annual trailer spectacular once called E3, and now being consumed by Geoff Keighley’s glossy rival Summer Game Fest, which incorporates both his own showcase and the adjoining ones that he freely attaches the brand to. I learned many things, and one of them was that it’s not possible for me to attend everything and write any meaningful digest of the contents, so I’m going to bless you with a jumbo roundup today. 

Let’s start with what Jank did. Brendy found a game that lets you kick orcs off a cliff and it only costs £7 (total, not per orc). He also sort of reviewed Subnautica 2 by asking game developers how to create a feeling of discovery. Total Playtime planned a videogames zoo, Character Select pitted the Thumper Beetle against the Skifree Yeti and I became increasingly worried that Gabe Newell’s new yacht is the setup for a horror film. Graham was won over by The Adventures of Elliott, before heroically watching most of the showcases and picking out 12 games that give him hope for the

This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.

He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.

This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the

This week on Jank, Graham used The Lie-In to get in one more round of Mixtape discourse, which is now over and need never be spoken of again. The first Disco Elysium sequel came out and Nic reviewed it. Titanium Court came out already but Alice has reviewed it now, so it’s official. Both reviews are qualified endorsements, which are secretly the best kind of endorsement. 

On Total Playtime, we came up with the worst merch ideas we could think of and made the mistake of inviting suggestions on the topic, so now I have people emailing me about Disco Elysium Funko Pops. This week’s Character Select pitted Stardew Valley against The Flood, which paired nicely with our definitive judgement of the best grenade in videogames.

Outside these ruthlessly uncommercial walls, a new financial year has dawned so the publishers are all announcing what happened in the  last one. Take-Two did great because people love NBA and spending money in GTA Online, Ubisoft did badly because that’s just what it does these days and Embracer did badly because of everything it’s ever done since its inception. It’s going to solve this

It’s been a slow week on Jank because Brendy still away raising a newborn, although he still somehow found time to write about the book-tidying game that is all he can handle playing right now. He also pitched invertebrate against excessively-vertebrate in this week’s Character Select, Xenomorph vs. Octodad. Total Playtime recording was thwarted by illness and travel and also Brendy’s offspring, so please enjoy a back-catalogue banger on innovation in product placement. Graham played an incremental game that’s also a platformer and that’s it, that’s the name and the post. He also played Mixtape and said it was good.

Out there on the internet, lots of other people had opinions about Mixtape and there was Discourse. Nathan summarised it over on Aftermath but the even shorter version is that some people liked it, some people hated it, and people who dedicate their lives to shrieking on the internet took the existence of either viewpoint as emphatic proof of whatever they believed beforehand. 

The next big release was Subnautica 2 which came out in Early Access and is a huge hit, which means that the Krafton CEO almost certainly has

This week in Jank, the big news is that Brendy launched Character Select, our new series pitting game characters in a fight to the death as decreed by the comment section. The debut bout is chemically-dependent cops, with Max Payne facing off against Harry DuBois, and the reaction has been extremely impressive.

Other things: Graham belatedly discovered that Abiotic Factor is less like DayZ and more like Pokémon Pokopia. Jeremy Peel joined our illustrious freelance roster to praise Marathon’s med drones. On Total Playtime, Nate compelled Alice and myself to pick out our preferred Gaming Pope attire, because our internal lore is already at that level after only a year of broadcasting. 

Out in the wider PC gaming world, the Steam Controller sold out instantly and if you want one you need to get in line. Microsoft ditched the gaming Copilot integration which nobody liked or wanted, which I hope other companies will consider inspirational. The GameStop CEO attempted to buy eBay despite not having enough money or apparently any understanding of why that would be worth having and is now trying to meme his way out of it, which would be the most embarassing CEO move

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.