Total Playtime

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...

We celebrate the birth of the Xbox 360, and God's own sausage-in-a-suit-jacket Phil Spencer. But mostly the Xbox 360. We reminisce about what the 'box mean to us, and Jonty reveals some of the behind-the-scenes dead-eyed virtual child Milo goss you've been waiting for. Plus! Games Satan returns with possibly his weirdest question yet. A big thank you to God Ribbon for our music, Marsh Davies for o...

This week is another two-hander, as Jonty and Nate are both away, so Brendy earns his keep by joining me as we have mild opinions about Rockstar delaying Grand Theft Auto VI, but stronger opinions about Rockstar firing a bunch of developers out of nowhere. We also discuss an interesting interview from Tomas Sala, developer of Bulwark and The Falconeer, AND, as a special treat, we've been playing s...

This week we're down a Jonty (not permanently, don't worry) but up a new chair, thanks to our Patreon pals! And it's been a week of upheaval elsewhere, as Microsoft and Xbox has been the focus of a lot of news. Halo is re-back, but also on PlayStation!? What do we think this means for hexboks? Nothing particularly encouraging, but Brendy is annoyed by some Halo rocks. PLUS Nate makes fun of AI, an...

Alice is unavailable so we are joined by another voice of podcasts past: James Archer , the RPS master of waring hard. He assists us in considering the latest collection of furious developer commentary and shares his judgement on the handheld Xbox thing, for which he is rewarded by being anointed Archbishop of Games Canterbury. You may think these freeform attempts at rolling our own belief system...

Circumstances forced us to once again talk about serious things this week, as EA has (subject to approval, lol) been bought by a consortium of definitely not the worst people you don't know. Meanwhile, we got a first look at Insomniac's Wolverine game, and for a 'cat rescued from a tree' sorry of levity, Randy Pitchford posted through Borderland's 4's PC optimisation problems. Thanks to our Patreo...

Alice has been Nic Cage Wickerman'd by her own dog, a sorry state of affairs, but one that does at least tie in with talking about Hollow Knight: Silksong, a somewhat popular game, as we understand it. You know who else is popular? That Mario fella. He turned 40 this past weekend (sort of, if you start counting from Super Mario Bros. rather than Donkey Kong, which is technically Mario's first appe...

Alice went to Gamescom and she's here to tell us all about it: games, German KFC, stealing from the Capcom booth and posing with the Farming Simulator tractor. A pretty standard Gamescom experience, all told, although she didn't go to the shitty bar that all the other Brits attend or get completely screwed by the German rail system so there's still room for improvement. Plus: the in-game currency...

Nate's on deadline so it's just Alice and Jonty this week, considering the newly independent Digital Foundry, the not-at-all-newly-scandal-engulfed Roblox, the latest on the Subnautica 2 and Itch.io drama, and all the games we've been playing. Anybody would think this is a podcast about videogames or something. You can listen to the episode directly right here, or find it in your pod catching apps...