Podcast

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

In a rare treat this week’s episode is not talking about layoffs, but I contrived to introduce them as additional context for Pete Hines being savagely critical of what happened to Bethesda, so the narrative thread is maintained. Otherwise this is quite a good-natured look at the latest PC gaming happenings, including what turned out to be some extremely inaccurate guesses at what hackers had stolen from Rockstar, and what will doubtless prove to be extremely inaccurate guesses at what’s in Epic’s Disney-character extraction shooter.

Total Playtime Episode 33: Wee Butt Mode

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Other highlights this week include Brendy driving up some hills and becoming troubled by them, Nate establishing himself as our resident Jeff Kaplan correspondent, and the ease with which you can Mandela Event yourself into believing just about any idiotic Gamergate-y conspiracy theory is a real thing because they’re all so ridiculous as to be plausible. 

Plus: troublesome dogs, IRL Pope

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs. They got rid of a thousand actual people, for what I think are very vague reasons, i.e. Fortnite is somehow not making enough money. This seems like an impossible circumstance. Fortnite is basically a printing press that produces sheets of dollar bills with Tim Sweeney's face on.

Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals

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Maybe he should stop trying to make a shop that most people don't use because its UI is still really bad and annoying. Why isn't there a half decent way to sort the games I have? Why does the application act like me asking it to order my game library in order of purchase is a task of the same difficulty as God asking Abraham to, like, seriously murk Isaac?

We also discuss Sony's dynamic price testing, which sees the return of a much beloved beans metaphor.

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

It's a news episode this week, and you know what that means: people getting cross about AI. The results are at least entertaining, though, starting with NVIDIA's DLSS technology which promises to yassify game characters regardless of circumstance or the artistic decisions of their creators. This is seemingly in service of photorealism, which has been the final goal of graphics card manufacturers since the days when they put weird CGI fairies on the boxes, but has never really been creatively interesting and never will be because we already know what reality looks like.

Total Playtime Episode 31: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON

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It nevertheless appears inevitable that the technology will be both widely available and widely used despite making the output actively worse, making it the videogame equivalent of TVs using motion smoothing by default, but in the meantime the memes have been pretty good and that's the best we can hope for in the

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

Once again we find ourselves in a situation where I, Alice, was not there to record this episode, but am here to write the description for it. I can call Jonty a big smelly poohead and there's nothing he can do about it! Haha! You should have come up with a Podcast Post Editing Simulator, Jonty. That's the theme this week: coming up with pastimes to make simulation games about, but which have not already been simulated by ambitious and fast-moving developers. It turns out there are a lot of sim games.

Total Playtime: Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Sim

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Nevertheless, the lads were able to come up with several concepts, as follows:

• Philosophy Professor Simulator
• Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Simulator
• Lin Manuel Miranda's Bin Man Hell Uganda
• Left Wing Roid Monster Olympics (not the name Nate actually gave it but I feel mine is more evocative and not open to a lawsuit from Andy Samburg)

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week's episode is unsusually quiet and on-topic, because both Alice and Nate were away and that really cuts down the level of free-form improv and extended complaining about people on the internet. It fell to Brendy and myself to hold the fort, which does at least mean it's an all-Jank show to merit this post.

Total Playtime: The Phil Spencer Xbox Explosion

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The lead talking point was Phil Spencer's departure from Xbox, in which I attempt to present him positively and Brendan counter-argues that executives should not be treated like humans. Humanity is further cited in discussion of the entity wearing Videogamer.com's skin pumping out AI-written articles, including a Resident Evil review which briefly appeared on Metacritic. Brendy has already made clear our view on AI-written reviews, which the article in question handily backed up by being extremely dull and offering no useful insight.

Having a games writer phographed