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 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.
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
We created Text Adventure, our videogame book club, with sincerely open minds: we wanted to see how official novels intersect with, and perhaps elevate, the games on which they are based. The answer, six books in is: badly and emphatically not, respectively.
There is of course a tension between what makes a good book and what makes a good game. A novel, by definition, lives or dies by narrative; a game lives or dies by gameplay. An effective character in a game is one that’s distinct enough to be meaningful but flexible enough to bend to the player’s will; a character in a novel needs to be built such that the reader understands the choices they will see them make. Worldbuilding in prose can be done precisely and with the assumption that the reader is paying attention; worldbuilding in games is done via multiple formats by multiple people and with the assumption that the player will not notice unless you forcibly control their gaze, and even then, only maybe.
It is possible for a videogame book to bridge this divide, but based on our first season not all of them try. I don't want to just blame the writers for this: I suspect that they were commissioned on a flat rate with a hard deadline and issued with either a voluminous and unyielding brand bible or a marketing Powerpoint, or both, and made the best they could in the time available to them. It is technically possible to create something great under such circumstances if you try hard enough, but anybody who’s done creative work-for-hire will have found themselves coming up against somebody with the power of creative sign-off and zero-to-negative creative ability, and after a while you accept that it’s easier to just cash the cheque and move on.
The nadir of our first season was Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, a mesmerisingly terrible book which set out to include the entire game, side-quests and all, along with correctly capitalised references to the trademarked weapons technology. Its slavish reproduction makes abundantly clear how bad so many game stories are, because absent the engagement that comes from holding a controller it’s just a series of too many events with not enough connecting tissue.
You don't realise how much plot there is in an Assassin's Creed game until you have to read a 500-page summary of it.
This approach of ruthless documentation is doomed to fail because the vast majority of games are, necessarily, driven by what’s fun to play and the narrative is usually something that’s forced to align with that. The simplest solution is to separate the two entirely, like the visual novel-style conversational asides between characters that break up gameplay in titles like Tactical Breach Wizards, but the sort of game that’s big enough to get a spin-off novel invariably weaves its story into the game itself.
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly ourbackers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them bysubscribing here, and you can findall 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).
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:
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly ourbackers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them bysubscribing here, and you can findall previous episodes here.
It’s a free-to-all episode this week, so Alice, Nate and myself turned ourselves to the major issues of the day: Xboxes are really expensive, how a Skyrim username error can get you wrongly imprisoned for soliciting minors, a new Thimbleweed Park and a very detailed explanation of how good the Space Marine x Helldivers 2 partnership is.
Join us for a detailed overview of the Astra Militarum, a half-remembered summary of the Xbox P&L and a fleeting cameo from Alice’s dog. Plus: children who chew on cigars from birth, engaging worm protocol, and clown husbandry.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and this week our editing is by Dave of the Sonic The Comic podcast who did a banger job even with limited guidance. Thanks to backers of Jank (formerly
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 Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week’s supporter-exclusive episode is a little piece of history, because it was recorded last month only a few hours after Alice had started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time. It therefore captured the first few moments of burning contempt, like a building collapse caught by a passing dashcam, that would ultimately result in the Dungeon Crawler Carl review.
