Jank has been alive for six months. That's older than some babies I know. Since our launch at the dawning of the year we've been writing non-stop, except for the hours 9am to 5pm, which is when we have to work real jobs to feed our families, dogs, and cars. Like many of you, we are not permitted to Jank on company time.
This hasn't slowed us down. We've written over 200 articles so far, and commissioned more from our favourite word mercenaries roaming the land. You've maybe missed a few of these articles and I don't blame you - you're a busy person, you have obscure JRPGs to play I have never heard of. So here's a round-up of our best work so far. Alongside a quick look at our plans for the future.
We reviewed new and old games
We've reviewed 17 games in total so far, which may not sound like much compared to bigger websites. But look at us, we're tiny. Some sites no longer bother to write reviews at all, or only focus on the big releases. But we don't discriminate between
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.
Total Playtime is 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 summarising the episodes of the first season, which aired while Total Playtime was still Patreon-funded.
In this episode, we considered it appropriate to review a book about a malignant spirit haunting a former workplace by summoning former colleague Matthew Castle, now of The Back Page podcast, who joins as our guest and was able to offer both incisive judgement and additional deep Castle lore for fans of the old RPS podcast.
The warning is there right in the author’s bio, which says of series creator Scott Cawthon that “while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart”. This description indicates both a strong self-regard and tendency towards over-writing, which explains quite a lot about the hundreds of pages that follow.
Cawthon has since stepped away from the simple but very effective survival horror series that made him extremely rich, but back in 2015 he was still closely involved in everything that carried the name. This included co-writing the first novelisation alongside Kira Breed-Wrisley, a professional ghostwriter who went on to become the go-to FNAF novelist for a time: looking at the voluminous list of rewrites and departed collaborators on the movie, one suspects she was blessed with a supernatural patience.
There are traces here of something that could have been an average-to-good genre piece - a Goosebumps-plus teen horror story or a functional B-movie. The protagonist, Charlie, has a functioning inner life; there is an understanding of young lives and young obsessions, there are sometimes whole paragraphs of evocative prose. There is also, unfortunately, a non-negotiable requirement to spend five nights in a location where no sane person would spend five minutes, and that is merely one element of an increasingly incoherent morass of narrative elements that one suspects were dropped in throughout the writing process.
If aliens are watching, I hope they can't see the state of my bedroom. Voices Of The Void is a job sim about being a lonely engineer in a remote signals laboratory, pointing big satellites at the sky in the search for extraterrestrial life. You are like Jodie Foster in Contact, except less qualified. It is extremely my cup of hot tea. It is also about living in a disgusting dormitory full of cockroaches.
I spent the first hours in this surprisingly complex and funny sim not pressing buttons on the old analogue machinery required to do my job, but instead sweeping up years of rubbish that had piled up in the abandoned lab before I took over. Chinese takeaway cartons, bottles, fried circuit boards, busted keyboards, indeterminate pulp. If the little grey men do send a message, I might miss it. I am busy scrubbing the toilet.
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Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.
You arrive to the lab in the dead of night, your first task to simply go around switching on the lights in every room. You read the emails waiting for you on the computer running on the desk. Your science boss wants you to record signals from space and send the recordings to them every day on hard drives, alongside other data on a big tape reel. I ignore the emails, take a look around, find the cleaner's closet, and come back with a roll of black bin bags. I am NOT working in this absolute shit hole until I have at least cleaned up my desk.
Why bother filing the serial numbers off a beloved sci-fi property when you can simply use the file to scratch on your signature and call it a day? To be fair to ZeroSpace, not everything here is a knock-off of Mass Effect - quite a lot of it also pilfers from StarCraft. For instance, it has good ol' boy flamethrower marines that would definitely call Mass Effect a "space opry" if they ever said anything that wasn't a pun about setting people on fire.
Mostly I just wish I'd known sooner that you can do this. No one can stop you, apparently! ZeroSpace has basically Matriarch Benezia in it. The not-Krogan are here too, except they're also sort of the Cabal from Destiny. It's all up for grabs! I hope you're as excited for Nic Reuben's Denis Villeneuve's Frank Herbert's Dune Part 3 as I am. ZeroSpace is shameless, shonky, and wince-inducingly pricey for how early access it currently is.
And I sort of love it.
I sort of love it because, while transparently making a clumsy smash and grab for other, better works, ZeroSpace doesn't
Good morning, videogames. I am having an actual, proper lie-in this Sunday for possibly the first time in years, since I have no family appointments to keep. I look forward to waking up thick-headed, groggy and ill, like every 40-something when they get slightly more sleep than usual. Perhaps I can soothe my aching head with some good words about videogames.
Over at Aftermath, Luke Plunkett wrote about Soren Johnson's 4X game Old World, to explain what it gets right in its attempts to design around issues with the Civilization series.
I think a focused 4X game is a good 4X game. Why? By limiting its representation of history to a single era, Old World is able to invest in much more detailed and interesting diversions within that period than Civ has ever been able to manage. Most important of these is a dynasty and relationship system lifted straight from Crusader Kings, where every faction is made up of families and clans, and every major individual within them is represented by personality traits and skills, and the relationships they develop as a result.
Graham went camping and lived, and he’s so drunk on success that now he’s going on holiday. His parting words were some games you can play this weekend. Brendy remains but is all tuckered out after his consideration of megastructures:
The same human absence is there inNier Automata's peopleless ruins, inStray's domed and sunless city. I don't know if these are big enough qualify as megastructures, but they certainly feel like them. On the other hand, I barely count the Dyson Spheres and habitat craft ofStellaris as megastructures. Not only are there too many people hanging around, but the perspective is all wrong. In Hypogea and Metal Garden you are a small being looking up, but in Stellaris you are a god looking down. For a megastructure to truly hit, the sense of scale must land on you like a ton of cement from above and beyond. For something to feel big, you have to first feel tiny.
We shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another
It is time once again for Total Playtime, now the official Jank podcast, arriving a little late this week due to some production issues arising from my sending the file to the wrong person. I apologise for the error.
This week it’s a free episode available to all, in which our four hosts gather to judge the news of the week - chiefly, Bethesda’s smoke-bomb declaration of Fallout 5 in an effort to distract from laying off a number of people who would have made it; Sony’s abandonment of discs as a storage medium and EA’s correct prediction of the World Cup final. If that all sounds a little dull, don’t worry, Nate naturally and effortlessly channeled it into pornographic takes of classic Gothic novels. Plus: the four male hobbies, a Henry Cavill origin story and headphones made out of eldritch meat.
Our art (now feat. Brendy) is by Marsh Davies, our music is by God Ribbon and our editing is by Alix Attenborough. The podcast only exists thanks to those who subscribe to Jank (and previously backed it on Patreon, which will endure for one more month only).
