Total Playtime: Under Review

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.