Total Playtime Premium Episode

Total Playtime: The Bernard Matthews of the Halo Extended Universe

Culinary misadventures

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch. 

A special subscriber episode this week, as Nate became fascinated by the inexplicable Xbox partnership with McDonalds and insisted that we sample it, only to be thwarted at the last minute by his local branch running out of Master Chief-branded McNuggets. Thus: an episode in which Brendy and I are both in the grip of early-onset post-McDonalds regret while Nate sits giddily excited while his wife treks across the West Midlands looking for a branch that still has them in stock. 

Will she succeed before we finish recording? Does any of this stuff qualify as “food” as recognised by any scientific authority? And do any of them earn anything approximating a recommendation? Listen in to find out. 

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Text Adventure: Bioshock - Rapture, by John Shirley

That sinking feeling

Total Playtime is Jank's podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

It is time once again for our book group to gather and discuss another videogame-based tome. Our choice this month is Bioshock - Rapture by John Shirley, and our guest is Johnny Chiodini, who previously joined us last season to discover how terrible the first Splinter Cell novel was.

This book is much better, I am pleased to say both for our sake and Johnny's. It covers the fifteen years leading up to the start of the first game, introducing the characters that appear in both that and its sequel, through a series of short chapters that hop between them as they gradually realise that trapping themselves in a libertarian millionaire's undersea colony while injecting themselves with extracts of radioactive slug may perhaps have been a bad idea.

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Total Playtime: Negged by the War Crimes Pensioner

Sequel suggestions for the extremely wealthy

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to that exalted throng: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode so far. 

This week’s episode was actually recorded during Opening Night Live, and while it’s tempting to say we did this as a deliberate slight on Geoff it was actually just an accident of timing, illness and baby issues. Journey back to this more innocent time when Gamescom was still going, the GTA 6 leakers were still juicing their memecoin ahead of its underwhelming rugpull, and Alice had not been cast by the local amateur dramatics society. 

The topic this week is pitching lavish sequels, but specifically only those that could only exist thanks to the backing of generous philanthropists such as the Jank subscribers who fund both this site and this podcast. Join Alice, Nate and Brendy for a brisk run through a wide variety of variously beloved game franchises that could be profitably* re-established to guaranteed** success, plus an extended aside about rural living. 

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Total Playtime: Game design for the devil

Hand the devil idle playthings

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, which will grant access to every episode since launch.

This week’s episode is another gameshow special, with the return of our old nemesis Games Satan. He has dragged us down to the plains of Hades (Alice is calling in from the Field of Reeds according to established Total Playtime canon) to pitch cursed game ideas. The person with the best pitch may escape from hell, but we have a fixed budget: a mere fifteen Hell dollars, which must be spent on one choice from each of the following categories:

Theme

  • $5: Total free choice
  • $4: Medieval fantasy, International Sports, Neo-Noir, Pirates; Victoriana
  • $3: Pigs, Lunch, Podcast for Binmen, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Falklands War
  • $2: US tax system, Enoch Powell, Shouting at animals, Cigarettes, Your own deepest insecurities IRL
  • $1: Mr Beast Beef Lumps, Obese Snakes (horny), “Formula Gun”, Famous Ronalds, Bronchitis (non-derogatory)

Visuals

  • $5: Photorealistic, 8K, ray tracing, etc etc - basically indistinguishable from reality
  • $4: tastefully stylized 3D animation in any style of your choosing, but the artist has done very little to conceal their thumb fetish
  • $3: Crisp, indie darling 16 colour pixel art, but only visible if the player is wearing a proprietary 5kg iron visor
  • $2: Charming hand-drawn crayon sketches with occasional swerves into shocking tableaus of screaming skeletons and gore
  • $1: pure dark crimson on black text-based interface with migraine-inducing flickers

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Total Playtime: Text Adventure 2 - Heaven's Vault

A good videogame book!?

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.

Behold the first episode of Text Adventure's second series. It's only fitting that our video game book book club forces us to contort our titles into the malformed and over-punctuated shape of many video game titles! We very much put our best foot forward this week with Heaven's Vault 1: The Loop, by Jon Ingold, earning the highest single score a book has gotten in this series.

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Total Playtime: Help, I've Got Clowns

20 impossible questions about Dwarf Fortress

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.  

This week's slightly-delayed, subscribers-only Total Playtime is a Dwarf Fortress special, as Nate glories in the 20th anniversary by challenging Alice and Brendy to answer 20 questions on his favourite PC game. Due to the nature of Dwarf Fortress, the episode sounds like high-concept fiction but this is all genuinely the stuff of patch notes. 

Join them to learn all sorts of variously horrifying and/or tedious trivia, including Nate's claim on being the Forrest Gump of Dwarf Fortress, every form of gibbons, and lungfish who fly for no reason anybody understands. You can listen to the episode right here, or on Spotify and other podcatching apps (click the Account button at the top right of the page to find the link for your membership podcast feed).

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The new reading list for our video game book club: revealed!

Book your spot today

Get in losers, we're going reading. Yes, Total Playtime is bringing back our Text Adventure series, our video game book book club. That isn't a typo, it is as in: it is a book club, for books adapted from or around videogames. Examples of the first series are already on the site! Enjoy as we read the Assassin's Creed BroHo novelisation, the first Splinter Cell book, the Mass Effect: Andromeda prequel, to name but a three.

We can now reveal the slate for the second series, with a new Text Adventure coming every month for the special sausages who sign up to support Jank. It's important to note that we didn't set out to make Text Adventure a series where we were very mean about books. Unfortunately, almost all the ones we read in the first series were very bad, but we solicited recommendations for actually good ones this time, so the first book stepping up to the Text Adventure guillotine is Heaven's Vault Book 1: The Loop by Jon Ingold.

The full list, with the date the episode will air, is as follows:

August 27th
Heaven's Vault I: The Loop by Jon

The first Witcher book is great, which points to a larger problem

Rivia questions

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. 

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