Newsletter

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