Total Playtime

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.    

This week's episode is dedicated to a single bit of particularly crushing news: the demise of Bioware as part of EA's cost-cutting/the ongoing contraction of AAA game development. Nate's graphics card also died so he was unable to join us, but Alice, Brendy and myself gathered to say a few words about the departed, and quite a lot more about Alice's new drinking habit.

Plus: the art of finding suitably deranged people to write opinion columns, the complexity of squash, and what to do with 500 surplus missing-cat posters.

This website and its paying subscribers enables this podcast to exist and we thank them for it, along with Marsh Davies for our artwork, God Ribbon for our music and Alix Attenborough for our editing. You can share your memories and/or hating tips at totalplaytimepod@gmail.com, and rate us five stars

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.    

It’s another bijou two-hander this week, as Alice and I meet to pick over the remains of another week in PC gaming and get the latest updates on her dog and her neighbours, both of whom are making annoying noises. 

Annoying noises in gaming, meanwhile, come from the resurfacing of the GTA leaks guy (let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) and the newfound union of Warner Bros and Paramount into a new games/movies behemoth. The latter now includes Bobby Kotick, about whom we have nothing bad to say. There’s also a bit of AI chat and some game recommendations, which tops up our quota just enough to merit another run of highly self-indulgent subscriber episodes plucked from the cauldron of Nate’s brain. 

If you’d like to experience those subscriber episodes (along with Discord access to both

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.   

Alice and Nate are away this week, possibly because we're talking about layoffs again, chiefly those at Microsoft again. Still, this does spare us from having to tell Nate live on air that an unrevealed Age of Empires game has been cancelled.

Otherwise it's a bit of a bad-news rundown through the extended Xbox universe and into Bungie's recent decision that it's going to spend time on Destiny 2 after all, before Brendy brightens things up with some chat about the cheerily implausible fighter-plane-based fiction of Ace Combat 8. There are also some important tips about carrying car batteries, thus cementing our position as providers of service journalism.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting app of choice.

Our art is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies, our editing is by Alix Attenborough

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.   

For the first time in a while all four of us could make this recording, and it's a free-to-all news episode to boot. This meant we had to address the twin issues of Gamescom and an abundance of GTA 6 footage, both from vegetable-themed hackers and latterly Rockstar themselves via an extended preview on Netflix. The former is a much more interesting discussion point, although not particularly impressive unless it later transpires it was the previous GTA hacker doing it with even less technology this time.

I am also able to share some limited insights from Gamescom, although not all that much because I only saw three games and one of them I can't write about. Please support Jank so that we have enough money to send Brendy next year and have him report on all the very weirdest games on the different international stages.

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.   

Alice and Nate were both unavailable this week, prompting Brendy and I to realise the crushing shortage of local whimsy in our lives. Our daily existence is simply devoid of rural oddities or freestyle whimsy that lends itself to a banging cold open, so we ended up with several minutes of middle-aged car chat which Brendy heroically drags back to a gaming reference. 

Those matters aside we turn to the matters of the week, chiefly Saber’s CEO lashing out at a departed writer who handled it by having a great night out that ended in karaoke, which is the sort of karmic vengeance we should all aspire to. Plus: good philanthropy yet with concerns about whether philanthropy can actually be good, the ongoing destructive instincts of large corporations, and big walks with medium guns. 

Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies