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Total Playtime: RIP Bioware

So long and thanks for all the filth

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.    

This week's episode is dedicated to a single bit of particularly crushing news: the demise of Bioware as part of EA's cost-cutting/the ongoing contraction of AAA game development. Nate's graphics card also died so he was unable to join us, but Alice, Brendy and myself gathered to say a few words about the departed, and quite a lot more about Alice's new drinking habit.

Plus: the art of finding suitably deranged people to write opinion columns, the complexity of squash, and what to do with 500 surplus missing-cat posters.

This website and its paying subscribers enables this podcast to exist and we thank them for it, along with Marsh Davies for our artwork, God Ribbon for our music and Alix Attenborough for our editing. You can share your memories and/or hating tips at totalplaytimepod@gmail.com, and rate us five stars

Total Playtime: The Bernard Matthews of the Halo Extended Universe

Culinary misadventures

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch. 

A special subscriber episode this week, as Nate became fascinated by the inexplicable Xbox partnership with McDonalds and insisted that we sample it, only to be thwarted at the last minute by his local branch running out of Master Chief-branded McNuggets. Thus: an episode in which Brendy and I are both in the grip of early-onset post-McDonalds regret while Nate sits giddily excited while his wife treks across the West Midlands looking for a branch that still has them in stock. 

Will she succeed before we finish recording? Does any of this stuff qualify as “food” as recognised by any scientific authority? And do any of them earn anything approximating a recommendation? Listen in to find out. 

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Total Playtime: Literacy Was Too High a Price to Pay

Somehow, Kotick returned

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.    

It’s another bijou two-hander this week, as Alice and I meet to pick over the remains of another week in PC gaming and get the latest updates on her dog and her neighbours, both of whom are making annoying noises. 

Annoying noises in gaming, meanwhile, come from the resurfacing of the GTA leaks guy (let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) and the newfound union of Warner Bros and Paramount into a new games/movies behemoth. The latter now includes Bobby Kotick, about whom we have nothing bad to say. There’s also a bit of AI chat and some game recommendations, which tops up our quota just enough to merit another run of highly self-indulgent subscriber episodes plucked from the cauldron of Nate’s brain. 

If you’d like to experience those subscriber episodes (along with Discord access to both

Text Adventure: Bioshock - Rapture, by John Shirley

That sinking feeling

Total Playtime is Jank's podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

It is time once again for our book group to gather and discuss another videogame-based tome. Our choice this month is Bioshock - Rapture by John Shirley, and our guest is Johnny Chiodini, who previously joined us last season to discover how terrible the first Splinter Cell novel was.

This book is much better, I am pleased to say both for our sake and Johnny's. It covers the fifteen years leading up to the start of the first game, introducing the characters that appear in both that and its sequel, through a series of short chapters that hop between them as they gradually realise that trapping themselves in a libertarian millionaire's undersea colony while injecting themselves with extracts of radioactive slug may perhaps have been a bad idea.

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Total Playtime: Delivered in the tone of Igor

It happened again

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.   

Alice and Nate are away this week, possibly because we're talking about layoffs again, chiefly those at Microsoft again. Still, this does spare us from having to tell Nate live on air that an unrevealed Age of Empires game has been cancelled.

Otherwise it's a bit of a bad-news rundown through the extended Xbox universe and into Bungie's recent decision that it's going to spend time on Destiny 2 after all, before Brendy brightens things up with some chat about the cheerily implausible fighter-plane-based fiction of Ace Combat 8. There are also some important tips about carrying car batteries, thus cementing our position as providers of service journalism.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting app of choice.

Our art is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies, our editing is by Alix Attenborough

Total Playtime: Negged by the War Crimes Pensioner

Sequel suggestions for the extremely wealthy

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to that exalted throng: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode so far. 

This week’s episode was actually recorded during Opening Night Live, and while it’s tempting to say we did this as a deliberate slight on Geoff it was actually just an accident of timing, illness and baby issues. Journey back to this more innocent time when Gamescom was still going, the GTA 6 leakers were still juicing their memecoin ahead of its underwhelming rugpull, and Alice had not been cast by the local amateur dramatics society. 

The topic this week is pitching lavish sequels, but specifically only those that could only exist thanks to the backing of generous philanthropists such as the Jank subscribers who fund both this site and this podcast. Join Alice, Nate and Brendy for a brisk run through a wide variety of variously beloved game franchises that could be profitably* re-established to guaranteed** success, plus an extended aside about rural living. 

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Total Playtime: Question-mark Interrobang?‽

Welcome to 2030 Week

Alice is away this week, so three grown men got to sit around and puzzle over a particularly baffling week of news items and become steadily less certain that we were describing reality.

There were some positives: Nate got to let a year’s worth of Hearthstone annoyance off his chest, Brendy got to drop an unexpected Halo deep cut, and I got to talk about a nice cat that I met. All solid therapeutic behaviours. Plus: subscribing to Accomplished Shootsman Magazine, earning money for being meat in the room, and surviving the horrors of modern capitalism. You can listen right here on this page, or find us in many of the places you get your podcasts. 

Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and our editing is by Alix Attenborough. The podcast only exists thanks to those who subscribe to Jank (and previously funded us on Patreon) who are additionally rewarded with an extra episode every other week dedicated to things like our videogame book club and the developing trials of Games Satan. Subscribe today and get us closer to being able to afford Brendy full-time.

Links! 
Blizzard announced a

Total Playtime: Game design for the devil

Hand the devil idle playthings

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

This week’s episode is another gameshow special, with the return of our old nemesis Games Satan. He has dragged us down to the plains of Hades (Alice is calling in from the Field of Reeds according to established Total Playtime canon) to pitch cursed game ideas. The person with the best pitch may escape from hell, but we have a fixed budget: a mere fifteen Hell dollars, which must be spent on one choice from each of the following categories:

Theme

  • $5: Total free choice
  • $4: Medieval fantasy, International Sports, Neo-Noir, Pirates; Victoriana
  • $3: Pigs, Lunch, Podcast for Binmen, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Falklands War
  • $2: US tax system, Enoch Powell, Shouting at animals, Cigarettes, Your own deepest insecurities IRL
  • $1: Mr Beast Beef Lumps, Obese Snakes (horny), “Formula Gun”, Famous Ronalds, Bronchitis (non-derogatory)

Visuals

  • $5: Photorealistic, 8K, ray tracing, etc etc - basically indistinguishable from reality
  • $4: tastefully stylized 3D animation in any style of your choosing, but the artist has done very little to conceal their thumb fetish
  • $3: Crisp, indie darling 16 colour pixel art, but only visible if the player is wearing a proprietary 5kg iron visor
  • $2: Charming hand-drawn crayon sketches with occasional swerves into shocking tableaus of screaming skeletons and gore
  • $1: pure dark crimson on black text-based interface with migraine-inducing flickers

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