Total Playtime Premium Episode

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

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and sometimes Brendan although he was still on paternity leave when we recorded this one. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a backer-only episode, which in the recording we still describe as for Patreons because we hadn’t agreed the Jank union yet. The subject is the internet’s favourite source of eternal argument: game reviews. How do they happen, how can they be wrong, and what lessons have we learned from them? The answers are, in order: hastily, no, and very few. Join myself, Alice and Nate to work this out at length. 

This episode includes some more-than-usually ropey audio from me (sorry, we think we’ve fixed this but we have a few more episodes to get through) Nate’s games journalism origin story, and a massive picture of Brendy (figurative). Plus: a dead man’s Fallout 76 shoes, how long you have to play a game for, and somehow nothing about actual scoring which you’d have thought would have taken up most of the runtime. This is in itself a valuable lesson about not judging something based on its presumed contents, but we also get in some bitching about review embargoes so in many respects this is exactly what you’re expecting.