Questions - Jank

22 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Questions

Can a game be 'so bad it's good'?

I'm asking but I already know

One day, as we all sat around in our splintered cyberlimbo slurping up the feeds and making absolutely no effort to better ourselves, a reader called Akwan entered the chat channel of Jank's subscriber-only Discord like a quiet ghost with a stinking fish carcass. "Just out of curiosity," they said, with the tone of somebody who may or may not know the grenade they are holding has zero pins. "Does anyone here have a computer game they think is 'so bad that it's good'? I've seen movies I think fall in that category but no computer game comes to mind."

Suddenly, everyone woke up.

I enjoy the forum-post-as-conversational-pipe-bomb, and this instantly qualified. When you think of "so bad it's good" movies you might think of big dumb fun in a vintage Arnie movie, or cult stinker The Room. This kind of movie is easy enough to identify even if it's impossible to draw the line at any specific point. Sometimes just a concept is enough (Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado) but in many instances it is all down to the dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue.

I will never stop telling people how good Ace Combat 7 is, and

04 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Questions

What game most disappointed you?

Sometimes I think I'd prefer if games never came out

My son is really pumped about Pokémon Pokopia (out this Thursday) and Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream (out next month), so much so that he recently told me he wasn't watching videos about either in case they made him less excited. He doesn't want to risk losing the hype. He's nine years old and already wise enough to know that sometimes YouTube videos lie to him or use misleading titles, but I really think if I do my job he'll be yelling at journalists for giving low scores to games he hasn't played by the time he's a teenager. The cycle must continue.

We're not there yet. Pokémon Pokopia reviews dropped earlier this week and so I got to tell him that journalists seem to love it. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave it 9/10 and it's currently the highest rated Pokémon game on Metacritic. Still, he's worried about being disappointed. What if he plays it and doesn't like it, he asked, on the walk to school. So I got to impart some important fatherly wisdom. I got to tell him about Peter Molyneux.

I've never been as excited for any game was I was for Black & White. I had