Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag
At last, the Z list
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
It has been a whole year of Total Playtime! Plus like six weeks of Text Adventure and one week where we just bailed for scheduling reasons, all of which means that the “one year anniversary” ep arrives around the sixteen-month mark. At no point did we promise to be organised or mathematically sound, and we remain very thankful to our Patreons (and the fine backers of Jank) for funding an entire year-and-a-bit of barely-focused rambling about PC games and things pertaining to them.
Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag
0:00
/4087.8823
With this instalment we finally hit Episode Z and with it, the final inch of runway before we have to come up with a new naming convention for the 27th Patreon episode. If you come back here in two weeks we might have done so; or we'll have just moved on to A1 or Cyrillic characters or something.
To mark this momentous occasion, we opened the sausage mailbag to answer questions from our
Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels
These maps lead the way to our hearts
When Graham and I sat down to scrounge together a definitive list of our favourite multiplayer first-person shooter levels, we knew that many of them would originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are children of the dial-up deathmatch, so it comes as no surprise that many of our most-loved maps are simple blocky arenas made of grubby textures and low-definition skyboxes.
But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea. Okay, nobody at Blizzard is making a homage to Facing Worlds. But battle royale maps that dramatically evolve are all about flavour begetting function. And the Finals definitely owes a thing or two to Quake 3. Don't get what I mean? Read on, and find out.
Crossfire - Half-Life
Graham: It's all well
The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly
Toiling for Initiative
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.
Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.
Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising
0:00
/5034.631836
The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you at
Hunt: Showdown is still showing other extraction shooters how it's done
Hunting down an old timer
Sure, these fresh gunslingers have a lot going for them. Jonny Embark and Bungie The Kid both shoot from the hip and they certainly put on a show. Those young guns make a lot of noise. But it's the quiet, gnarly old gunfighter you should really fear. That guy sat on the porch with a distant look like he has seen too much? The old timer chewing something he pulled out of his horse? He's the one to pay attention to. Because he survived.
The survival of Hunt Showdown is not simply the survival of players as they escape with characters unmurdered from its (thankfully crafting-free) first-person extraction game, but also in the title's remarkable ability to persist and grow over many years in a world where most multiplayer efforts are quietly taken out in the yard and shot. In the deadly corral of a hit-driven hobby the master has modestly abided, and in the year of our lord 2026 Hunt is not simply one of the most impressive and competently designed extraction games, it also has a fairly good claim on being one of the best multiplayer shooters ever made. As a veteran of the old times myself, I
The Lie-In
Our weekly roundup of links worth reading
Good morning, videogames. If you're reading this, then you've survived both the clocks going forward and April Fool's day, two events designed explicitly to kill the exhausted and the middle-aged. Your reward is this long weekend of rest, relaxation and reading about some of the best writing about videogames from the past week.
It was nice of PC Gamer to write some fan fiction about us, with Jeremy Peel producing an ode to eurojank, both the "wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors".
In the same way, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the term appears to condemn a whole continent's games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But speaking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to meet studios punching above their weight, I can tell you that eurojank—a term thrown around often in PC gaming circles in the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.
Games like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord and Raccoin don't literally let you bet your money away, but they and many other games have used gambling as inspiration for everything from aesthetics
Jank Mail: Beetle hats
This week in PC gaming
Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast.
Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure.
In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought by the Stellar
Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals
Plus: mining sexual tension
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
This week we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs. They got rid of a thousand actual people, for what I think are very vague reasons, i.e. Fortnite is somehow not making enough money. This seems like an impossible circumstance. Fortnite is basically a printing press that produces sheets of dollar bills with Tim Sweeney's face on.
Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals
0:00
/3547.2457142857143
Maybe he should stop trying to make a shop that most people don't use because its UI is still really bad and annoying. Why isn't there a half decent way to sort the games I have? Why does the application act like me asking it to order my game library in order of purchase is a task of the same difficulty as God asking Abraham to, like, seriously murk Isaac?
We also discuss Sony's dynamic price testing, which sees the return of a much beloved beans metaphor. This, in turn, leads to an extended
What you should play this weekend
Tell us what you are playing in the comments
This isn't just a weekend, it's a Mega Weekend. That means many of us around the world have both today and Monday off work, and need games worthy of filling such a bountiful gift of free time.
I've got three suggestions for what you could play, but share your own intentions in the comments below.
Fishbowl
"Fishbowl is a narrative game about dreams, grief, and hope," reads its Steam description, but you can probably tell that much from the screenshot above. This sits somewhere on the spectrum between To The Moon, Undertale, Yumi Nikki and Omori, with cheerful pixel art paired with inky dark voids. I feel like real life as enough inky dark voids as it is, but I know many who eat these games up.
Temtem: Swarm
For about three weeks in 2022, creature collecting and battling in Temtem was the hottest game in town, as finally the PC had something to offer those with a Pokémon itch. The excitement didn't last, but its developers continued to update the
The homepage is over but you can signup for more
You like more, right?