Max Payne vs Octodad vs The Flood vs Dog vs SkiFree Yeti
Let endless battle end
You may remember the brutal massacre that occurred while I was on paternity leave. In the first season of Character Select, we pitted heroic game characters against one another in bloodthirsty brawls and let you argue on their behalf. After careful review of the duels (and comments in support of the various fighters) we can confirm at least five beloved fictional personalities have perished, although the true death toll is probably closer to 50. (Spoilers: the entire population of Stardew Valley has been killed.)
The survivors are listed in the headline above, however, keen-eyed readers may notice the presence of yet more "vs" between them - the dread abbreviation. Well done. You have discovered the truth: the great killing spree is not over. In this gore-soaked season finale, those who remain must now face off in a ferocious free-for-all. Only one will walk away. You, reader, will decide who.
Before we crack on to the battle royale. Let's review the destruction that came before. Thanks to all Jankers who commented with their version of events. In the fight summaries below we've selected our favourite battle outcomes from your collective twisted imaginings. Crowdsourced violence, it's
The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.
Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.
For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years
Jank Mail: X-termination
This week in PC gaming
We are approaching the end of Wall Week, our celebration of carefully created barriers to mark the erection of our own. Graham mused on how a youth spent making Half-Life maps taught him the sheer miraculousness of any game being released. Due to a communication error, Brendy reviewed Wall-E. I mused on the PS360’s waist-high era, we published the definitive list of the best walls in games, and Jeremy Peel considered how Dunwall’s walls set you free.
Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter.
Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect.
The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games
Are you a brick or a builder?
Wall Week is over
A woman made of leaves asks you this question in City Of Muse, a little-known seaside walking sim released in 2021. "What are you: a brick or a builder?" she says. It's a question I have often remembered, from a tiny game, likely long forgotten by the few who played it.
As Wall Week comes to a close, I want to take a sincere moment at the end of our overextended joke to talk about what we are building here at Jank, and why a paywall is more than just a turnstile charging an entry fee. This article is not paywalled - you're invited in.
When we talk about videogame walls for Wall Week, we're not always thinking of them as a divider. Even our own paywall, which is as porous and reliant on good will as any other, isn't meant to be some impassable and offensive barrier. If I build a wall in Age of Empires 2, or fix a broken one with a team of multiplayer engineers in Foxhole, I'm keeping my enemies out. But when I build a castle rampart or a cabin wall in Minecraft, I'm thinking of the future,
What you could play this weekend
This post is free
Wall Week, our weeklong celebration of putting up our paywall, is nearing its end. As Brendy explained, many posts will remain outside that paywall each week, including weekly regulars like this one, and including your ability to comment on those articles. We made the decision early on to make commenting free because we want Jank to feel like a community; a cool place to hang out and chat, even if you don't have the money to hand over when Brendy tries a shakedown.
So come in, pull up a chair. Tell us what you're going to be playing this weekend.
Moonlight Peaks
Ever since I completed Pokémon Pokopia, I've been looking for a new game to give me errands to do. Moonlight Peaks looks like it could be that game, as a supernatural life sim in which you play as a vampire, befriend the local witches and mermaids, and spend your time potion-making and, of course, growing crops and fishing.
Echoes Of Aincrad
It's been a surprise to me that there aren't more isekai videogames, given the genre's ubiquity and popularity in anime. It's especially odd given how many isekai anime are
Anatomy of a wall
Some kids learn piano or dance. I learned how to keep render speeds low for Half-Life geometry
This is Wall Week, but there are no walls here. What you see in the screenshot above is not a wall, but a brush. A brush is a simple geometric shape rendered within Half-Life's Quake-derived GoldSrc engine. This particular brush is constructed within the Valve's mapmaking tool and consists of six faces, their corners defined by vertices. When run through the bsp compilation process, all faces not visible within the vacuum-sealed innerspace of your level are marked so as not to be rendered, and the remainder will rendered in-game as triangular polygons. If you look at the image and see a wall, then it is only an illusion.
Why is any of this important? It's not, really, in 2026, but I spent a thousand hours learning how to make Half-Life maps when I was a teenager and 25 years later I'm still mentally trying to keep the r_speeds down.
"R_speed" stands for "render speed", the speed at which the GoldSrc engine is able to draw whatever is currently on screen. It's a console command you can turn on in any Half-Life level to cause a waterfall of stats to trickle down the console log like you just enabled the Matrix.
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This article is part of Wall Week, a celebration in honour of our paywall going up.
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Total Playtime: Call the Waspman
Ding dong the wasps are dead
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced through the munificence of 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 we started recording mere hours after Xbox started firing people, so we didn’t have the full despair reserves to draw on but we managed to discuss it anyway. We also mourned the loss of the corporeal, as represented by Sony’s announcement they’re ceasing disc production, and celebrated the spiritual, as represented by Alice’s potentially magical waspman. You can listen below or find us on Transistor.
This episode also contains an exclusive tease of an upcoming Jank article, and it’s right at the start so you don’t even have to keep listening – although of course you should because there’s so much to learn here about Nate discovering horny Marvel artwork. Plus: getting vouched for by a non-naughty priest, drinking a pint of wasps, piracy for the greater good, wholesome role models for 40-year-old men
The 10 best walls in PC games
Wall, wall, wall, look what we have here
Good walls make for good videogames, as Robert Frost probably wrote. That's why we wanted to celebrate these load-bearing pillars of the medium. They are the textures that engulf us, the boundaries that restrain us, the low cover that protects us, and the canvases awaiting messages daubed in blood or ink to entertain us. They are the ironically overlooked line-of-sight breakers that form the backbone of almost every game you've ever played.
From first-person shooters to collaborative adventures to ancient puzzle games, these are the best walls in PC games.
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This article is part of Wall Week, a celebration in honour of our paywall going up.
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