Total Playtime Premium Episode

23 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Half-Life 3 Review Chat

Gordon’s fitness journey

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.

For the latest Patreon-exclusive episode of Total Playtime - shared of course with the impeccably discerning readers of Jank - there was only one possible topic: the release of Half-Life 3, to which as professional gaming opinion-havers we were granted early access.

Total Playtime: Half-Life 3 Review Chat

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It’s a surprising release even by Valve’s eternally inscrutable standards, which makes this a particularly interesting episode as we each share our personal responses to a series of unexpected, nay, unprecedented design choices.

I can’t really describe this without spoiling the episode, so you’ll just have to listen along to discover our reactions to things like Bluto’s Adversary, the high-protein economy of City 18, PodTides and the narrative justification for punching a hole through your own monitor. These are the experiences, and questions, only offered by this calibre of truly next-generation gaming experience.

You can listen to the episode right here, and it's also available on Patreon and Spotify.

09 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag

At last, the Z list

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 has been a whole year of Total Playtime! Plus like six weeks of Text Adventure and one week where we just bailed for scheduling reasons, all of which means that the “one year anniversary” ep arrives around the sixteen-month mark. At no point did we promise to be organised or mathematically sound, and we remain very thankful to our Patreons (and the fine backers of Jank) for funding an entire year-and-a-bit of barely-focused rambling about PC games and things pertaining to them.

Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag

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With this instalment we finally hit Episode Z and with it, the final inch of runway before we have to come up with a new naming convention for the 27th Patreon episode. If you come back here in two weeks we might have done so; or we'll have just moved on to A1 or Cyrillic characters or something.

To mark this momentous occasion, we opened the sausage mailbag to answer questions from our

07 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly

Toiling for Initiative

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.

Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising

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The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you at

27 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Sink The Business Belgrano Within You

Plus: Don't ever hire Nigel Mansell as an after-dinner speaker

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 the crew waited for me to be away before addressing a topic that I have a lot to say about, which this week is the magical world of B2B conferences. Yes, it's another bit of high-concept nonsense and just to make it extra surreal there is a quiz about Lord of the Rings as perceived by Nate's seven-year-old daughter.

Total Playtime: Sink The Business Belgrano Within You

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The quiz is a remarkable challenge for the listener alone to face, but the conference programming calls for your input. Alice, Nate and Brendy have all cast their dream B2B lineup, for a very specific prescription-painkiller type of dream, and are turning to the Total Playtime listeners and the Jank readers to vote on which is the best (details on that below). Plus: Quiet Egg, chasing the sock dragon, and a candidate for the Madonna of videogames who I can guarantee you will not guess in advance.

You can listen to the episode

27 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

Dead reckoning

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 Patreon episode is another demonstration of our fearless defiance of editorial convention, as we not only run our big quiz of the year in February, but do so by traversing the Egyptian underworld and resolving the gaming-related trials of Anubis.

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

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Thrill as Nate breaks out the voice changer, Alice upgrades her eagle, Brendy challenges Nate on the single worst topic imaginable and we face a surfeit of burning snakes. Truly no other podcast combines questions about sales figures and GTA trailers with an extremely in-depth knowledge of ancient Egyptian belief systems. Which, not to be dismissive of other cultures, are remarkably complicated and a real hassle to navigate when you're simply trying to escape the grip of the underworld.

Plus: asking Shaq what a basketball is, "an enigmatic and barely understandable point in the journey", and the return of a beloved RPS regular. You can listen to the podcast right here on this page, and

17 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood novel doesn't understand how books work

A stabbing pain

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers, and we’re also surfacing entries of Text Adventure, their video game book club.

This was the first book in the Text Adventure series, chosen according to the rigorous selection criteria of “what books do I own already,” and having completed the first season I am confident it is the worst. Its almost mesmerising awfulness is derived from a baffling commitment to including the entire plot of the game, which means it has to cram in five years of Ezio’s rebuilding the Guild of Assassins along with significant chunks of Rome. Nothing is excised, everything is present, including the clumsily staged tutorial VO.

Text Adventure: Assassins Creed Brotherhood by Oliver Bowden

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This is comically antithetical to good storytelling: quite apart from the fact there’s enough plot here to support a five-part series, key parts of the narrative machinery are missing entirely. Characters are introduced and then murdered immediately, people take time out from plot beats to recount stealth mechanics

13 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

Let game designers guide us

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 a Premium instalment for paying subscribers, which means we can abandon our already tenuous grasp on current events and succumb to the intoxication of high concept. This week: as the world lurches into self-improvement at the start of the year, which videogame characters would we choose to coach us into living better?

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

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You can see the picks of Brendy, Nate and myself below, and you can listen to the episode to hear our reasoning. Alice was away this week, but wished to make clear that she considered our answers poorly- thought-out and also that her choices would be Aloy off of Horizon Zero Dawn, Officer Dooley from The Darkside Detective, and that posh one off of Final Fantasy XV.

Fitness

Jonty: Ezio from Assassn's Creed

Brendy: Kiryu Kazuma from Yakuza

Nate: Schelemeus from Hades II

Motivation

Jonty: Skelly off from Hades

Brendy: ~~Little Lion from Skin Deep~~ GLaDOS from Portal

03 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The first Splinter Cell novel makes Sam Fisher into a neocon Alan Partridge

I thought this guy was supposed to be stealthy

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, Alice, Nate and I were joined by the delightful Johnny Chiodini to read the first book based on Sam Fisher, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell by David Michaels. Nate fell at the first hurdle by erroneously reading the second novelisation, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda, which speaks to the professionalism of the Total Playtime operation and why we felt it aligned with a website called Jank.

The practical impact of this error was limited, as both books are archetypal hoo-rah Clancyverse publications of the mid-2000s, when the US-lead invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were still fresh. Both books were best-sellers, neither of them are any good, and the first is notable for capturing the spirit of the game in a startlingly negative way.

Text Adventure: Johnny Chiodini's Raymond