The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. What's the point of a lie-in when your bed is on the ground? I am, as this post is published, waking up - if indeed I slept at all - at a campsite, where I have been experiencing all the discomforts of the outdoors with a large contingent of children and animals. For that reason, I'm going to keep things brief this week, and hope that you enjoy your links from a comfier bed than my own.

Videogame studios aren't monoliths, writes Hayes Madsen, responding to an article that tried to draft fantasy developers for Microsoft IP from the burning remnants of last week's layoffs and divestments.

Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.

I hadn't even heard of this game, but Lewis Gordon

Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years

Good morning, videogames. It was a little quiet on Jank this week. Is this acceptable? Not to me, and I think you should be ruder to us in the comments so we don't let it happen again. In the meantime, here are some fine words about videogames (and Jackass) to see you through Sunday morning.

The best cinema-going experience I've had in the last ten years was seeing Jackass Forever, because nothing unites an audience like a funny and painful stunt. I used to look down upon the show, even as I watched it, but some mixture of audience nostalgia and good personal branding by the likes of Steve-O have changed its place within culture in the years since. For Aftermath, Joshua Rivera writes about exactly that, and how it "transformed from idiotic nuisance to one of the most endearing symbols of male friendship in pop culture", culminating in the new and final movie, Jackass: Best And Last.

Writing too much about Jackass is its own kind of stunt; the word count creeps up and so does the likelihood you've embarrassed yourself somehow, like you've shit your pants in word form. It is silly

Good morning, videogames. I am a little late with The Lie-In today, such that it is no longer morning as this goes live. This is because I met up with Jonty in fleshworld on Friday night and we filled ourselves with the devil's liquid. The regret on Saturday was overpowering. Now it is Sunday and I am reborn via the medium of links to good videogame writing.

Star Fox released this past week. I am currently resisting the urge to buy it, at least until I've completed a couple of other Switch 2 games that sit in front of it in the queue. For now, I enjoyed Chris Schilling's review for Eurogamer.

Conscious as I am that memory is the most unreliable of narrators, I don't recall feeling quite so exhilarated by some of these stages. Katina's mothership is more imposing than ever, spitting out fighters by the dozen. Sector X's derelict base feels enormous as you pick your way through its ruins. Take the warp route on Meteos and your destination is positively kaleidoscopic, a proper feast for the eyes. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest this is

Good morning, videogames. My kid has wanted to get into chess for a little while and I finally got round to setting him up on Chess.com. He played some challenges and some matches and, in the afternoon, came to me triumphant. "I am getting good at chess," he said, clearly proud. "That's great," I said, "I hope you are having fun." Later that evening, right before bed, he urged me to get my own Chess.com account so we could play together. I beat him three times in a row and he went to bed sad and quiet. Will he ever play chess again? Will I ever stop feeling guilty? It's clear to me that games were a mistake, but here are some links to words, videos and podcasts about them.

A picture went around the internet last week of the actor Jack Quaid wearing a mocap suit and wrapped in PVC piping, seemingly for his role as the gelatinous cube in the upcoming God Of War: Laufey. For Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine spoke to animators, actors, and a mocap technician to puzzle out the benefits of recording motion capture for a cube.

“There’s definitely a case

Good morning, videogames. The World Cup is now underway, which means I can spend the next several days complaining that England's opening game is on at a comfortable 9pm BST while Scotland's opening game was on at 2am. Bloody typical, isn't it. No wonder I need a lie-in today, so let's quickly gather some articles about videogames worth reading.

I love Spore, a grand and ambitious everything-game that doesn't quite work, but which is fascinating to play and to read about. For Design Room, Jay Castello interviewed Will Wright and and seven other members of its development team to put together an oral history.

"He was like, I want to do a game about all the things that had to happen for humans to exist, improbability upon improbability upon improbability," says Trottier. "I want people to have an innate, marvelous sense of how amazing it is that we ever happened in the first place. And they'll do it by experiencing one failure after another after another."

For Manifesto Jam 2026, Mike Cook writes what a lot of people need to hear.

1. THE DREAM OF SELLING GAMES IS KILLING THE DREAM OF MAKING

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,