Total Playtime

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 October 2025. In it, Alice and I are once again bedeviled by Games Satan, and compelled to save a series of well-known videogame franchises from oblivion thanks to financial support driven by product placement. The twist is that Nate Games Satan chose the products, which lead to some previously unforseen partnerships between triple-A videogame brands and small-to-mid-size service companies in the West Midlands.

There is no way this sort of analysis would exist without the backing of our Patreon supporters, to whom we extend our gracious thanks. You can join them over on Patreon to unlock another year's worth of this sort of thing. Further thanks to Marsh Davies for the artwork, God Ribbon for the music and Alix Attenborough for the editing. Comments, questions, branding decks and spicy mashed potato recipes are all welcomed at [email protected]; Alix recommends adding blended curry leaf, garlic, chilli flakes and coriander.

Patreon backers will be blessed with a new episode next week. For everybody else, we'll be back regarding the news on the 28th, shortly before Saint Geoff blesses us all with a bunch of new trailers at not-E3 in June.

Games!
Minecraft, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, Mass Effect, Yakuza 0, Fallout New Vegas, Team Fortress 2.

Links!
Nate is the Honda City with optional Motocampo and Alice is the Honda Beat.

Recommendations!
The Mitchells Vs The Machines, The Tour De France: A Tale In Hotels, and The Puzzle Wood.
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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 was played by three different actors. Just a shining example of what happens without Alice there to organise things, really, although we do nail the segues so we’ve got that going for us.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it on your podcasting platform of choice.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime

Thanks to all our current Patreons for making the podcast happen, to Marsh Davies for our art, God Ribbon for our music and Alix Attenborough for our editing. Send us your preferred endings and ET at [email protected]. Enjoy the benefits of our partnership with jank.cool.
If you like the podcast, please leave us a positive review on your podcast platform of choice: it helps other people discover it,and think how much fun they’ll have.

Links!

Barry Manilow can be seen at the Westgate every month this year. Hades 2 changed the ending and that’s fine actually because mythology. Microsoft Gaming is Xbox again. Game Pass Ultimate is a bit cheaper and won’t have new Calls of Duty in it. Jonty wrote about Samson for Jank. Boiling Point’s patch notes are rightly famous. The NYT on Dwarf Fortress. Ea-nāṣir achieved immortality.

Games!

Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mass Effect 3. Turns out somebody made a game based on bad mobile game ads but not in the way I thought. Dwarf Fortress on Steam.

Recommendations!

Make some blood bread and watch One Battle After Another.

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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 stolen from Rockstar, and what will doubtless prove to be extremely inaccurate guesses at what’s in Epic’s Disney-character extraction shooter.

Other highlights this week include Brendy driving up some hills and becoming troubled by them, Nate establishing himself as our resident Jeff Kaplan correspondent, and the ease with which you can Mandela Event yourself into believing just about any idiotic Gamergate-y conspiracy theory is a real thing because they’re all so ridiculous as to be plausible.

Plus: troublesome dogs, IRL Pope beef, some very ill-advised rake-stepping on the topic of classic Square Enix games and our judgement of three recently-released videogames, which is a lot rarer than it should be given that’s what the podcast is supposed to be about. We make no promises as to if this will continue.

Thanks to all our current Patreons for making the podcast happen. You can join them to unlock more episodes at https://www.patreon.com/c/TotalPlaytimePodcast. Thanks also to Marsh Davies for our art, God Ribbon for our music and Alix Attenborough for our editing. Tell us why rental cars don’t have automatic gearboxes and why Jonty and Nate are wrong about Kingdom Hearts at [email protected]. Enjoy the benefits of our partnership with jank.cool.

If you like the podcast, please leave us a positive review on your podcast platform of choice: it helps other people discover it, and think how much fun they’ll have.

Links!

Jeff Kaplan revealed that Blizzard did not amend the size of Tracer’s butt. Rockstar was hacked again but didn’t even care, and since we recorded the episode it was revealed that the data was just proof of how much money it makes from GTA Online, the leaking of which actually caused Take Two’s share price to increase so yeah that all checks out. GTA 6 is coming out on 19th November FYI. There was some IRL Avignon pope beef. Pete Hines has some opinions about what happened to Bethesda, which is not entirely surprising. Bloomberg reported that Epic is making an extraction shooter with Disney characters. Jeremy Peel talked to the Samson devs.

Games!

Jeff Kaplan’s new game is The Legend of California. Kingdom Hearts 4 is coming. Tlatoani: Aztec Cities. Samson. Moves Of The Diamond Hand. Exit 8.

Recommendations!

Exit 8, War Machine, Takdaneh Natural Sour Cherry Juice, Primal and Rosie Cheeks Slime Shop.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 upset at us for saying things about mining but in a way that sort of implies we find mining sexually arousing. He genuinely seemed upset during recording as well. I don't think it was a bit.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6786cf573ceecdbe85eac067
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime

Thanks to all our current Patreons for making the podcast happen, and to Marsh Davies for our art and God Ribbon for our music. Send in what your regional time for woodlice is to [email protected]. Make the most of our partnership by viewing Jank.cool.

Links!
Epic shitcanned a thousand people, and the Fortnite team are a bit like 'WELP'. Chet Falizsek went on a tear about it. Rumours abound that PlayStation are testing dynamic pricing. Now maybe spotted in the wild? Crimson Desert for some reason became the latest saviour of single player games (I think off the strength of one cool trailer maybe??) and then was distinctly mid. Paul Tassi wrote about how the review build was significantly different to the retail version.

Games!
Reanimal, Slay The Spire 2, and Hardspace Shipbreaker (and Edwin did write an article about the unionisation aspects!)

Recommendations!
The UK series of Last One Laughing, the sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary, and to look up and attend any of your local amateur dramatics societies.
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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, Jeff Kaplan, formerly Jeff from the Overwatch team (he's always the Queen from the Overwatch team of our hearts) dealt with some residual C-suit trauma by going on a podcast. Not this one, though. Maybe one day.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting app of choice:
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6786cf573ceecdbe85eac067
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime

Thanks to all our current Patreons for making the podcast happen, and to Marsh Davies for our art, Alix Attenborough for our editing, and God Ribbon for our music. Do not email me about Disco Elysium at [email protected]. Make the most of our partnership by viewing Jank.cool.

Links!
ARC Raiders is replacing some of the genAI, and Digital Foundry saw Nvidia's DLSS5 and thought it was great, but everyone else made fun of it. Nvidia's CEO says we're all wrong; Kotaku asked a bunch of devs and they all hate it too. The Subnautica 2 lawsuit got weird (apparently it's coming out in May now, a decision Brendy describes as 'SUSPICIOUSLY fast'), Jeff Kaplan had a bad time.

Games!
Nate clamped his own mouth shut rather than talk about AoEII again, but Brendy has been playing Slay The Spire 2, and Alice has been playing Esoteric Ebb! They wrote about them on a website. Alice also got to play the demo for the upcoming Darkside Detective game, Backside of the Moon. She was very excited.

Recommendations!
1997 Australian comedy The Castle, Death Rider by Rhuairidh James, and commissioning an independent artist (specifically, this one)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.