Total Playtime

This week's episode is dedicated to a single bit of particularly crushing news: the demise of Bioware as part of EA's cost-cutting/the ongoing contraction of AAA game development. Nate's graphics card also died so he was unable to join us, but Alice, Brendy and myself gathered to say a few words about the departed, and quite a lot more about Alice's new drinking habit.  Plus: the art of finding su...

It’s another bijou two-hander this week, as Alice and I meet to pick over the remains of another week in PC gaming and get the latest updates on her dog and her neighbours, both of whom are making annoying noises.  Annoying noises in gaming, meanwhile, come from the resurfacing of the GTA leaks guy (let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) and the newfound union of Warner Bros and Paramount int...

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 are away this week, possibly because we're talking about layoffs again , chiefly t...

Alice is away this week, so three grown men get to sit around and puzzle over a particularly baffling week of news items and become steadily less certain that we were describing reality. There were some positives: Nate got to let a year’s worth of Hearthstone annoyance off his chest, Brendy got to drop an unexpected Halo deep cut, and I got to talk about a nice cat that I met. All solid therapeuti...

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 new...

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 sh...

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 ha...

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, Na...

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 peo...

Total Playtime is a weekly podcast about PC games, formerly funded by Patreon and now part of Jank. This is a free episode, but premium episodes are published every two weeks and are only available to paying subscribers. You can join them over here . The prodigal dad returns! Yes, Brendy finally got enough sleep to return to podcasting with his newly minted As A Father Of A Daughter viewpoint, mea...

This week's episode is late, for which we apologise and blame Geoff Keighley because let's face it, he's the one pulling all the strings these days. Jonty was still sat in meeting rooms in LA when this episode was recorded and Brendy is still doing dad things, so it fell to Alice and Nate to judge the output of a week's worth of game showcases despite really wanting to just talk about their dogs i...

This week Alice and I gathered in hot rooms to have hot takes on the main news stories of the week, chiefly the end of Destiny (and perhaps the employment of many of its developers) and the start of the Disco Elysium sequels. We also attempted to understand the Warhammer Skulls Showcase without Nate to guide us, which didn't get very far but we are quite taken with playing as Skaven. We've also be...

I regret to say that we were unable to record a regular news episode this week. Everybody was away or ill or both, with the exception of Brendy who is a new parent and thus is going to be preoccupied, exhausted and/or covered in body excretions for the forseeable future. To tide our regular listeners over, we are resurrecting a former Patreon-exclusive episode: Episode Q, which previously aired in...

It’s an emergency episode this week: both Alice and Brendy were away, so I had to dial in from Vegas to assist Nate in judgement of the main news events. This lead to some sub-optimal audio and a diminished runtime, for which I can only beg your forgiveness. Other errors include misrepresenting how mobile game advertising works and incorrectly saying that Frank Oz puppeteered ET, when in fact ET w...

In a rare treat this week’s episode is not talking about layoffs, but I contrived to introduce them as additional context for Pete Hines being savagely critical of what happened to Bethesda, so the narrative thread is maintained. Otherwise this is quite a good-natured look at the latest PC gaming happenings, including what turned out to be some extremely inaccurate guesses at what hackers had stol...

This week we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs, Sony's dynamic price testing, and the difficulty in reviewing Crimson Desert, maybe. One of these results on an extended discussion of the world's favourite glassy-eyed YouTuber. Please note, Jimmy, that the title is a lighthearted joke; I beg, do not turn your eye of Sauron upon us.  Plus! Brendy gets unaccountably u...

This week we bring you an accidentally AI-themed extravaganza, as Krafton lost their Unknown Worlds/Subnautica 2 lawsuit for the funniest reason possible: they asked ChatGPT what to do. But just before that, Nvidia unveiled their new Super Sampling and its more like Super SLOP, am I right? Many came out to mock the TikTok-beauty-filterfication of Grace from Resi Requiem. And just before that , Jef...

It’s a quiet one this week, as Alice is away doing mysterious things and Nate is away on a secret mission which you’ll have to hear about in two weeks’ time. It thus falls to Jonty and Brendy to ruminate on Xbox without Phil Spencer, games journalism without humans, and deciding which Pokémon starter would be the best restaurant starter.  You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in you...

This week it's a conspiracy theory special, as Alice develops increasingly outlandish theories about the forces and decisions that shape the games industry, the pharmaceutical industy and the world, and Jonty and Brendy try and talk her down. Plus, layoffs again, pondering the ideological opposite of Rivers Cuomo, why the AI era is dumb and stupid, and a truly inspired Alien: Isolation mod idea. Y...

It was claimed that Sydney Sweeney was excited about the Split Fiction movie, and that’s an excuse for Alice to be absolutely livid about the Split Fiction game, so please strap in for ten uninterrupted minutes of her choking on her own bile. After that, we manage to find time to discuss the nature of Morrowind, people choosing not to go to GDC, Highguard’s doomed pact with Geoff Keighley, the mos...

This episode was previously exclusive to our Patreon backers, but we're making it available to everybody to show what you're missing behind the paywall. You can get access to more Text Adventure plus a year of other subscriber episodes, at patreon.com/TotalPlaytimePodcast . Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we and a guest read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it...

It's a heady intersection of belief systems this week, as we combine Alice's insomniac enthusiasm for weird Instagram crystal sales with Nate's rigorous interrogation of Tim Cain's Types Of Quests. Plus: a horny dog, a nightmarish Pikachu, the Roman god of webinars and Games Anubis joins our increasingly incoherent pantheon. You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting a...

It's 2026, and Alice's dog is still being a dick so she had to leave Jonty, Nate and Brendan to share their gaming New Year's Resolutions, only for the wheels to come off immediately because Nate won't commit to playing new games and Brendan won't commit to resolutions as a concept. We were nevertheless able to muster some recommendations along important discussion of the Eurovision of games, beco...

Merry Christmas, sausages one and all, and please enjoy our seasonal gift of grumbling about a Geoff Keighley event. All four of us, plus Anthony Hopkins, took time out from Christmas shopping/wrapping/disorganisation to judge the best of the year-end awards season, and also debate movie series that Alice should binge-watch in her act of seasonal self-harm. Plus: the least-qualified discussion of...

In this episode we discuss the (frankly, needlessly) controversial HORSES, an Italian surrealist horror game that has been banned from Steam and, latterly, the Epic Game Store, and boy everyone and their mother has been yapping about it. What do we think of Steam's ban? Is nudity ever okay? And what's up with this Ian dude? (Answers: Steam can do what they want but this is still bad; no, live in s...