Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re finishing up our summaries of the first season.
This article series has not matched the broadcast order because I wanted to end here, with Andrzej Sapkoski's The Witcher: The Last Wish: a collection of short stories that is more-or-less (the publishing order is somewhat haphazard) the first time that anybody encountered roving monster slayer Geralt of Rivia. It is by some distance the best book we read, and unfortunately I must assume that is because it was written as standalone prose rather than something that was backed out of a game world.
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week’s supporter-exclusive episode is a little piece of history, because it was recorded last month only a few hours after Alice had started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time. It therefore captured the first few moments of burning contempt, like a building collapse caught by a passing dashcam, that would ultimately result in the Dungeon Crawler Carl review.
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re summarising the episodes of the first season, which aired while Total Playtime was still Patreon-funded.
In this episode, we considered it appropriate to review a book about a malignant spirit haunting a former workplace by summoning former colleague Matthew Castle, now of The Back Page podcast, who joins as our guest and was able to offer both incisive judgement and additional deep Castle lore for fans of the old RPS podcast.
The warning is there right in the author’s bio, which says of series creator Scott Cawthon that “while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart”. This description indicates both a strong self-regard and tendency towards over-writing, which explains quite a lot about the hundreds of pages that follow.
Cawthon has since stepped away from the simple but very effective survival horror series that made him extremely rich, but back in 2015 he was still closely involved in everything that carried the name. This included co-writing the first novelisation alongside Kira Breed-Wrisley, a professional ghostwriter who went on to become the go-to FNAF novelist for a time: looking at the voluminous list of rewrites and departed collaborators on the movie, one suspects she was blessed with a supernatural patience.
There are traces here of something that could have been an average-to-good genre piece - a Goosebumps-plus teen horror story or a functional B-movie. The protagonist, Charlie, has a functioning inner life; there is an understanding of young lives and young obsessions, there are sometimes whole paragraphs of evocative prose. There is also, unfortunately, a non-negotiable requirement to spend five nights in a location where no sane person would spend five minutes, and that is merely one element of an increasingly incoherent morass of narrative elements that one suspects were dropped in throughout the writing process.
We shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another
It is time once again for Total Playtime, now the official Jank podcast, arriving a little late this week due to some production issues arising from my sending the file to the wrong person. I apologise for the error.
This week it’s a free episode available to all, in which our four hosts gather to judge the news of the week - chiefly, Bethesda’s smoke-bomb declaration of Fallout 5 in an effort to distract from laying off a number of people who would have made it; Sony’s abandonment of discs as a storage medium and EA’s correct prediction of the World Cup final. If that all sounds a little dull, don’t worry, Nate naturally and effortlessly channeled it into pornographic takes of classic Gothic novels. Plus: the four male hobbies, a Henry Cavill origin story and headphones made out of eldritch meat.
Our art (now feat. Brendy) is by Marsh Davies, our music is by God Ribbon and our editing is by Alix Attenborough. The podcast only exists thanks to those who subscribe to Jank (and previously backed it on Patreon, which will endure for one more month only).
Yet more selfless ideation for the industry's benefit
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week is a rare two-header, as Nate and I convened to workshop some future games in the Alien Isolation franchise, as a service to Creative Assembly once they’ve finished the second one. The results are… surprisingly plausible pitch ideas, although I foresee some real hassle getting the rights squared away.
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced through the munificence of 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 we started recording mere hours after Xbox started firing people, so we didn’t have the full despair reserves to draw on but we managed to discuss it anyway. We also mourned the loss of the corporeal, as represented by Sony’s announcement they’re ceasing disc production, and celebrated the spiritual, as represented by Alice’s potentially magical waspman. You can listen below or find us on Transistor.
This episode also contains an exclusive tease of an upcoming Jank article, and it’s right at the start so you don’t even have to keep listening – although of course you should because there’s so much to learn here about Nate discovering horny Marvel artwork. Plus: getting vouched for by a non-naughty priest, drinking a pint of wasps, piracy for the greater good, wholesome role models for 40-year-old men
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and sometimes Brendan although he was still on paternity leave when we recorded this one. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week is a backer-only episode, which in the recording we still describe as for Patreons because we hadn’t agreed the Jank union yet. The subject is the internet’s favourite source of eternal argument: game reviews. How do they happen, how can they be wrong, and what lessons have we learned from them? The answers are, in order: hastily, no, and very few. Join myself, Alice and Nate to work this out at length.
This episode includes some more-than-usually ropey audio from me (sorry, we think we’ve fixed this but we have a few more episodes to get through) Nate’s games journalism origin story, and a massive picture of Brendy (figurative). Plus: a dead man’s Fallout 76 shoes, how long you have to play a game for, and somehow nothing about actual scoring which you’d have thought would have taken up most of the runtime. This is in itself a valuable lesson about not judging something based on its presumed contents, but we also get in some bitching about review embargoes so in many respects this is exactly what you’re expecting.
Total Playtime is a weekly podcast about PC games, formerly funded by Patreon and now part of Jank. This is a free episode, but premium episodes are published every other week and are only available to paying subscribers. You can join them over here.
The prodigal dad returns! Yes, Brendy finally got enough sleep to return to podcasting with his newly minted As A Father Of A Daughter viewpoint, meaning that we are now tied in a dead heat between parents and what I’ll generously call “free spirits”.
There was too much news this week, to the point where we even snuck in some commentary about Kier Starmer. It’s only brief, though, as we move on to considering the social media ban and the associated elevated risk of teens becoming cool hackers, the head of AI who thinks generative AI is bullshit, and what was at the time the latest bad news for Xbox although characteristically they’ve pulled some more out since.
Plus: the Steam Machine, Nate’s narc child, and please don’t touch my grass. Please ask your doctor if having a baby is right for you. Thanks to all the Patreon and
