As we reported earlier, superstar DJ Solomun brings Los Santos to the world in his latest Grand Theft Auto 5-set official music video (see above). Today, he's got company, as GTA Online welcomes Italian duo Tale of Us to the Big Smoke. 

"As your new Nightclub sends shockwaves through the San Andreas party scene, English Dave is busy recruiting the best new talent to ensure your club’s reputation is top notch," explains this Rockstar Newswire post. "The latest rumor? Tale Of Us, Italy’s finest purveyors of lush and melodic techno, are available for hire and ready to step up as resident DJs in your Nightclub."

Live in LS now, Tale of Us debuts new and exclusive music from their latest album Afterlight—which will feature on Apple Music, Spotify and Los Santos' newest radio station Los Santos Underground Radio in the coming weeks. "Kicking things off this week is an LSUR-exclusive mix—Solomun, recorded live from the hottest club in Los Santos, with more mixes set to arrive in the coming weeks," says the Newswire. 

With its new tunes, comes two new modes of transport—which the developer says range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The former is captured by the four-door "superiority complex on wheels" Enus Stafford; whereas the latter is represented by a new camo-covered, nightclub-promoting blimp, emblazoned with the latest act's logo. Here's an action shot of both:

Guest List rewards this week include another complementary $100,000 bounty, vehicle liveries and some 'Galaxy & Los Santos Underground Radio' t-shirts. Property discounts are plentiful with 25 percent off Hangars, Bunkers, Executive Offices, Garages, Special Cargo Warehouses, and Biker Clubhouses. All of the above's respective renovations are 25 percent off, too. 

Oh, and there's talk of a "lost relic resurfacing" some point soon. We're told to "keep a lookout for the first clue to unlocking this unique totem later this week." I wonder what that could mean. 

More on everything mentioned there can be found this-a-way. 

Phantom Doctrine is a bit of an enigma. With a secret base you build across a campaign and turn-based combat on an isometric grid, it walks and talks like an XCOM set in the Cold War. But from what we've played, this isn't simply a reskin where sectoids are swapped for Soviets—refreshingly, Russia isn't the bad guy at all, but a secretive group known as The Beholder Initiative.

Instead of soldiers, you build a roster of agent-operatives, who populate a world map filled with enemy agents. Unlike XCOM, both your spies and your enemies can be captured, put under the influence of each other's brainwashing, then released back into the world for later instruction. Perhaps you'll lose track of your Czech agent Wendigo in Kiev, only to have them return to you weeks later at 1 HP, unsure if they escaped bravely or are actually a double agent.

A new video given to us by CreativeForge games explains how espionage and conspiracy-untangling fit alongside the trappings of XCOM—check it out above ahead of Phantom Doctrine's release date of August 14.

Planet Alpha began life in 2013 as a side project of then IO Interactive person Adrian Lazar. It popped its head above the parapet earlier this year—under the collective banner of Planet Alpha ApS Game Studio and Team17—and it's now got a release date: September 4, 2018. With its interchangeable environments, hulking robot baddies, and vibrant and varied landscapes, I think it looks gorgeous. 

But don't trust me, trust this trailer:

Aptly named 'Survival', the above depicts the plight of the hapless player who can "rotate and control" the alien planet they've wound up stranded on. Through its puzzles, stealth, platforming, and, clearly, survival mechanics I'm getting Inside, Limbo and even Earthworm Jim vibes from the above.

"Planet Alpha is the work of passion of a small but very ambitious team. We are building something special and we’re putting everything we have into it," said Lazar earlier this year. "Developing the game for over four years has been a roller coaster, so when we looked for a publisher we were very selective. 

"I am thrilled to have found in Team17 a partner who can offer us the resources that we need to bring this game to the players, but more importantly I'm excited to have a partner that truly believes in Planet Alpha as much as we do. I cannot wait to share our creation with the world." 

More information on all of that lives on Planet Alpha's website and Steam page. Here's another look at its announcement trailer:

Planet Alpha is due September 4, 2018. 

It’s no secret that Sam Lake is a Twin Peaks fan. The influence of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s cult series is felt in every game he writes, from the Pacific Northwestern folk horror of Alan Wake to Max Payne 2’s Address Unknown. This fictional TV series concerns a man being haunted by strange spirits including a backwards-talking pink flamingo. “Mirrors are more fun than television,” the bird says in a distorted, otherworldly voice. “She has dyed her hair red.” 

Address Unknown is the inspiration for A Linear Sequence of Scares, a brief but memorable level from the first act of Max Payne 2. Max visits contract killer Mona Sax, who’s hiding out in an apartment above an abandoned funhouse based on the show. Max comments that the place was shut down after the series was cancelled in the ’90s. But as he makes his way through it, the place is fully operational, complete with corny jump scares and cardboard recreations of scenes from the show. 

The show itself is a wonderfully creepy Lynch send-up, and can be watched on television sets scattered throughout the game. It’s never played straight, however. Remedy sometimes takes its stories a little too seriously, but Max Payne 2 is self-aware: particularly in the way the events on the TV shows Max catches snippets of reflect his own story. “When entertainment turns to a surreal reflection of your life, you’re a lucky man if you can laugh at the joke,” Max monologues as he enters the funhouse. “Luck and I weren’t on speaking terms. Or maybe the place was just too lame to be funny.”

The funhouse represents the city of Noir York, where Address Unknown takes place. The streets are made from plywood and cardboard, with parts folding away to reveal trippy tunnels swirling with psychedelic patterns, representing the show’s hero slipping into madness. “A funhouse is a linear sequence of scares,” Max says. “Take it or leave it, it’s the only choice given.” A sly nod, perhaps, to the fact that Max Payne is, for all its clever setpieces and narrative quirks, still a totally linear action game. “It makes you think about free will,” he continues. “Have our choices been made for us?” 

Later, Max escapes into the inner workings of the funhouse, where the animatronic characters who populate it are stored. Remedy was obviously proud of its advanced physics system, and one of the rooms here is full of props to knock over and shove around, including a ball placed near a tempting pyramid of paint cans. And it’s this area that leads Max to Mona’s hideout, where he finds her in the shower singing Late Goodbye, a song by Finnish band Poets of the Fall that is heard throughout the game.

Weirded out

While I love Max Payne 3, it couldn’t be more different from Remedy’s entries in the series. Rockstar’s game is a macho revenge story served straight-up, but the games written by Sam Lake feature elements of the surreal, of mythology and the occult. This isn’t always successful, of course, but the Address Unknown funhouse is the best expression of his knack for the weird and provocative, making Max Payne 2 more than just another action game.

A Linear Sequence of Scares is one of the most fondly remembered levels in Max Payne 2—which is odd considering you don’t fire a single shot in it. But maybe that’s why. It’s a rare moment of peace among all the cinematic, slow-motion bloodshed, giving you a chance to explore, rather than fight against the world. It’s also just really weird, even for a Remedy game, with a surreal, inscrutable atmosphere that’s undoubtedly inspired by David Lynch, but doesn’t feel like a lazy pastiche of his work. 

Quantum Break, Remedy’s most recent game, has the odd moment of humour, but otherwise it’s too straight-faced. I don’t know what the studio’s next game is, but I’d love to see it go back to the tongue-in-cheek humour of Max Payne and Alan Wake. I admire its ambition to tell mature stories, but you can still do that with a bit of dark comedy thrown into the mix. I honestly can’t remember a standout level from Quantum Break, but I’ll never forget my descent into the twisted depths of the Address Unknown funhouse.

Ken Levine’s slightly overlong adventure about killing a man who wants to live the libertarian geneticist dream of playing office minigolf at the bottom of the ocean (or something like that) holds up surprisingly well to a contemporary visit. I mean, the whole thing falls into the bin by the time you fight an Ayn Rand book cover and then sit through a Hallmark commercial or a vague nuclear threat, but still. 

This is a reinstall, but only in the most technical sense. I have indeed previously installed the game, but it led with an injection scene. That meant I quit instantly while trying not to throw up. Several years later and I’m marginally better at stomaching on-screen injections, so I have returned to Rapture to see what all the fuss is about. 

The opening segment has you descending to Rapture in a bathysphere. It’s a cinematic-style showpiece which wants you to luxuriate in the Art Deco skyscrapers and the neon lights which encapsulate the vim of early 20th century capitalism and consumerism. I can’t think of another game which looks like BioShock—and given gaming’s love of aping what’s influential, that’s surprising. 

It’s the art style which carried me through to the end of the game, actually. I’ve gone back several times to ‘classics’ of PC gaming which I missed when they were first released. Each time I’ve played enough to get a sense of what they are, but tend to drop out once that’s accomplished, whether it’s because of clunky controls, dated graphics, a save system we’ve improved on a hundredfold since, or a propensity for tedious boss fights. Sometimes it’s just that without the context of its release—when it was first or new or interesting—it’s just not very good.

Breakaway

BioShock is not a subtle game. It bludgeons you with its references and I was never interested in the story—especially when key beats were delivered as monologues while the player is trapped in a room with nothing to do. I, uh, managed to miss the main twist/infodump because I was so bored during one monologue that I went to listen to some Kelly Clarkson while I waited for the dude to stop yammering. 

But generally, it’s a fun game—all theatrics and loud fighting—despite some odd limitations. For example, BioShock is really stingy with its resources. Most obviously you can see the stinginess when it comes to the magic juice called EVE. But I was also aware of scarcity when it came to ammo. Y’see, the game has a photography system where you can take snaps of enemies in order to learn more about their weaknesses and which ammo to use against them for optimal results. The implication is that you would use this information, selecting the right tools for the job. 

In practice this meant I knew what would be more effective if I had it in my arsenal, but would then need to make do with the scrapings of ammo I had to hand. Armour-piercing rounds might be the ideal option, but try telling that to the bunch of napalm, two proximity mines and three regular pistol bullets in my inventory. I was doing the equivalent of rummaging round in my handbag for bus fare and then trying to buy a ticket with a fluffy toffee, four stamps and a hairband.

It also seemed like the game was teasing interesting power/weapon combos and aiming for Dishonored-style emergent experiences (don’t @ me about the release timeline). But in reality, you never needed to progress from the electric-shock-then-wrench-or-shot tactic. You could try other combos if you wanted to, but it felt awkward to do so and the payoff wasn’t really worth it.

Springing a leak

While I’m talking about the negatives, there is a dreadful escort mission, the level layouts can be rather confusing and the save system meant it was more efficient to die, respawn and return to a brawl than expend health packs during a fight. 

I also found the feted Fort Frolic level hard to navigate. I can see why it’s the standout of the game in terms of being the level which does something different. It forces a different kind of complicity out of the player—making you photograph corpses and display the images is a very different experience to simply killing a boss. 

It also allowed for rare moments of expressive play in terms of how you framed those photographs. I only photographed the feet of the dead. At the time I was trying to photograph as little of a corpse as I thought I could get away with and still trigger the next step. Looking at the resulting display of dead feet in the level’s lobby, I think I managed to outdo the boss, Sander Cohen, in creepiness. 

But as someone who has played games with hub-type levels since the mid-’90s, the navigation here felt counterintuitive. As I became frustrated I knew I started missing atmospheric or theatrical touches which Fort Frolic’s designer, Jordan Thomas, had included and thus Fort Frolic started to meld into the bombast of the rest of BioShock. 

I would’ve quit earlier. Especially given every EVE refill meant sitting through another injection animation. But I stayed, and it’s because I wanted to see more glimpses of this underwater world.

Absentmindedly pinging a crossbow bolt into the head of a splicer was made a bazillion times more palatable by the shadow of a shark passing over a glass tunnel. Faffing around with the squillionth Pipe Mania minigame to pay slightly less for napalm was offset by sightings of red coral formations outside the Hephaestus region. 

I’ve since tinkered with the .ini file so I could access the free camera and toggle the UI. The bathysphere opening is great when playing normally but fantastic when watching it from the outside, stopping to watch turtles skim past neon signs or getting sidetracked by shoals of fish.

Dumpster diving

Playing BioShock also helped me make a bit more sense of BioShock Infinite. The latter is still flawed and rather dull, but elements like finding bullets in chocolate boxes now had a reference point rather than simply being weird. The original BioShock is all about finding cash, snacks and proximity mines in ashtrays. 

Occasionally this rummaging came together in a brow-raising way (one splicer had two cream cakes and a length of a hose in her pocket, which sounds like the recipe for one hell of an evening) but more often it was just nonsense. No more nonsensical than the contents of pockets in Fallout and other games, but in BioShock the detail in the world design makes this pocket-and-bin lucky dip feel far more incongruous. 

Limiting resources can make decisions within a fight sequence feel important. You aren’t just able to fling bullets indiscriminately or heal whenever the fancy takes you. But games have found less clunky ways of achieving the effect over the years, or of rebalancing the rarity of each resource to better support experimental play.

It’s the same story with the bins and pockets. Hiding resources incentivises players to scour areas, making these feel more like consequential spaces which the character inhabits, rather than dead zones. But BioShock represents a more basic implementation than I’m generally used to now. 

Infinite used the same idea and I remember being so confused by why anyone would hide edible hotdogs in bins. With the added context of a BioShock playthrough I assume the developers were treating this loot system as one of the defining elements of BioShock or as a knowing nod to the original. It doesn’t make it less weird, but I guess it’s interesting that BioShock’s protagonist has always been a raccoon. I mean, I assume that’s the twist?

It seems like a simple job. Travel to a nearby town, rescue a few villagers who’ve gotten themselves lost in the local coal mine. But when your rookie knight arrives in the snowy hamlet of Karthas, he learns the true horror of what has happened. Something terrible has been awakened in those deep mines—something evil—and it’s a good thing you brought your sword.

Chasm is a challenging side-scrolling platformer in the tried and tested Metroid mould, with games such as Castlevania, Zelda, and Spelunky also hard-coded into its DNA. It's like a Metroidvania best of, relying on no particular gimmick or hook, which is a little concerning at first, because, honestly, it doesn't really do anything that exciting with the genre.

The titular chasm is the complex, maze-like, procedurally generated network of tunnels that yawns beneath Karthas, from the dusty coal mine just below the surface, to the ancient dungeons and arcane temples hidden in the depths. The feeling of plunging into a mysterious, dangerous world, of being an intruder, is a powerful one. You can’t help but wonder what lies at the very bottom of the labyrinth, but the deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets.

Enemies on the first few floors are easy to outsmart and kill. Rats, skeletons, bats, kobolds. The usual suspects. Later foes, however, are fast and deadly, requiring patience and precision to slay. But they’re always predictable in some way, and learning their patterns is where the skill in Chasm lies. Memorising and dodging a volley of deadly fireballs from a flying skeleton demon, then sneaking through a brief hole in its defences to deal the killing blow, is immensely satisfying.

But your fumbling early attempts to learn those patterns can be frustrating. When you die in Chasm you’re kicked brutally back to the main menu and forced to reload a save. Getting back into the game only takes a few seconds, but it feels like a lifetime when you’ve died at a boss for the tenth time and want to just get it over with. And save points are often far apart, which means repeatedly retracing your steps can repetitive.

But whenever I’m annoyed by something in Chasm, I’m won back over by how wonderful it feels to play. Everything you do is brilliantly snappy and precise, and it’s clear developer Bit Kid spent considerable time tweaking the controls to make them feel just right. Your move set is basic at first, but as you explore the chasm you unlock moves such as grabbing ledges, sliding, and double-jumping that steadily increase the complexity of the level design.

There’s a procedural element to Chasm, meaning every playthrough is different. But it doesn’t feel like a load of machine-generated tunnels stuck clumsily together. I never once got the sense that I was playing something dreamed up by a computer, and if you told me my particular version of the map was hand-crafted by the developer, I’d have believed you. And if you like a particular layout, you can save the seed to play it again or share with friends.

In the spirit of Metroid, keeping a mental map of the world, in conjunction with a simple map that’s filled in as you explore, is essential. Thankfully there’s also a cleverly-designed teleport system that makes quickly returning to Karthas to resupply and talk to any villagers you’ve rescued fairly easy. Opening these shortcuts up is a huge relief, because it means you can save, and refill your mana before diving into the next, more difficult level of the chasm.

And so your journey continues, down, down, ever down, fighting bosses and minibosses, uncovering secrets, unlocking new abilities, finding new weapons. Weapons radically change how Chasm plays. A short, stubby knife means you have to get uncomfortably close to enemies to attack, but it does lot of damage. The satisfying crack of the Castlevania-inspired whip gives you a bit of distance. The club is slow to swing, but hits hard. Sometimes if I was struggling with a boss, switching to another weapon would suddenly make it much easier, which adds a nice, simple layer of strategy to the game.

There are some light RPG elements too, with enemies spewing out XP orbs that boost your health, strength, and so on. But otherwise it’s a deeply old-fashioned game—by design, of course—and that means it can be quite gruelling at times. You’ll have to repeat sections over and over again to master them, and I found my patience wearing thin more than once. But that’s part of the deal in these kinds of games, and if it’s a quality, polished Metroidvania adventure you want, you can’t do much better than Chasm, even if it does play it a little safe.

World famous techno DJ Solomun entered GTA Online last week, as part of its After Hours update. As I mentioned here and here and here, the Bosnian superstar's music is banging—and his latest track, named Customer is King, brings Los Santos to the world. 

Captured entirely in-game, the official music video for Customer is King features below, which is the first time Rockstar has collaborated with an artist in this way, the developer tells us. 

You'll spot some Easter eggs along the way—poor Tracey De Santa gets kidnapped towards the end, for example—and I reckon you'll like the production even if you're not into techno. The thought that you might not be makes me sad, but perhaps that's a conversation for another day.

What a day poor Solomun's had there. 

And it could be argued it's about to get worse—Tale of Us enter the LS club scene fold today, and could potentially draw audiences away from the big man. I'll dive deeper into ToU's arrival in a separate post, but know that the duo joins GTA Online alongside its new LSUR radio station.  

"Los Santos’ first resident DJ has arrived in Los Santos as part of GTA Online: After Hours and today Solomun celebrates the release of the Customer Is King EP, the 100th release on his label, Diynamic Music with a video for the title track," says Rockstar on the above. "Watch Solomun as he puts in a hard day’s work making deliveries across Los Santos while trying not to get caught up in the everyday chaos of the city. 

"Shot entirely inside the world of GTAV, this is also the first time a real world artist has debuted new music via their own story inside the GTA universe."

An awful-looking game called Climber recently vanished from Steam after several Dota 2 players reported they'd been scammed by Climber users pawning lookalike items.

The scam revolved around a Dota 2 item called the Dragonclaw Hook. The genuine Dragonclaw Hook is an immortal-rarity item for the hero Pudge. It was briefly available in early 2013 and can no longer be obtained outside of the Steam Community Market, where it can fetch upwards of $800. 

However, the Dragonclaw Hook these players were offered was a carefully crafted fake. According to a screenshot posted on Reddit by angelof1991, Climber's counterfeit hook used the same image and description as the genuine article: 

According to a screenshot from mage203, Climber even used Dota 2's logo in the Steam Community Market: 

Climber's Steam Database entry corroborates these screenshots. The game's recent activity shows it was scrubbed from the storefront less than 24 hours after the Dota 2 logo was added to its page, and the fake Dragonclaw Hook is buried in its item definitions. 

A cached version of Climber's Steam page shows it launched in Early Access on May 18, 2018 for $1. Its Steam description calls it "a game in which you need to go as far as possible," and it looks like a Max Dirt Bike-style game made in Microsoft Paint. 

Climber's developer and publisher, respectively KIRILL_KILLER34 and The Team A, have one other game on Steam. It's called Space Vomit, and it looks just as atrocious as Climber. According to its Steam reviews, it's a shoddy $1 game that instantly gets you thousands of Steam achievements. Interestingly, Space Vomit also uses the same Early Access blurb as Climber, with a scant few words changed. Here's a side-by-side comparison: 

Climber and all of its items have vanished from Steam, but at the time of writing, Space Vomit is still available, though it isn't on the Community Market. It's unclear whether the scammers merely skipped town after getting caught or if Valve intervened. Earlier today, Valve removed a game from Steam after its developer, Okalo Union, was accused of creating fake Team Fortress 2 items. However, like KIRILL_KILLER34 and The Team A, Okalo Union's Steam account is still live at the time of writing. 

Notably, this whole mess comes weeks after Valve announced that it will no longer police what's on Steam unless it's illegal or "straight-up trolling." And with no moderation apparently in place to weed out games like Climbers, it is likely that more scams like this will crop up in the foreseeable future, so check your trades carefully.

While our early impressions of Monster Hunter: World's PC release were largely positive, they've soured over the weekend. After 10 more hours of play, and a plenty more between the rest of PC Gamer, it's clear that Monster Hunter: World has a significant crashing problem. We reached out to Capcom for a statement, and luckily the development team is aware of the issue and a fix is on the way. The exact timing hasn't been detailed, but we'd expect to see it before Monster Hunter: World launches on PC on August 9. Until it's fixed, here's what's up and why we think it's happening. 

Over the course of a four hour session, I saw about one crash an hour. Worse, when a crash occurs during a hunt, you lose all progress since the last save. Monster Hunter: World automatically saves after missions, but any significant crafting or item management between hunts goes down the tube. Quick load times are something of a salve, but hopping back into a multiplayer hunt after a crash after too much time disqualifies you for rewards attached to the quest. You'll still get to harvest the beast at the end, but no bonuses for you. 

Considering that hunts can take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, and that Monster Hunter: World is a game fundamentally designed around repetition, it is a devastating, unacceptable problem.

So why is it happening? We're not positive, but all signs point toward undue stress on the CPU. Capcom has acknowledged and explained why Monster Hunter: World is such a CPU-heavy game, but it might be too dependent on our PCs' brains in its pre-release state. 

After a few crashes, I kept task manager open on another monitor to keep find a potential bottleneck, and sure enough, my CPU usage was at 100% at the time of every crash. The rest of my hardware didn't see comparable spikes. Both my PCs meet the minimum and recommended spec for Monster Hunter: World, and run smoothly otherwise, so I hesitate to blame hardware outright. I get the impression this is simple bug, as catastrophic as it seems. 

Multiplayer hunts might increase the chances of a crash, as it happened more frequently and on both ends in sessions with friends, but I've experienced them in offline sessions, too. 

Again, this is all before public release. We're still waiting on updated graphics drivers and Capcom's promised fix. It's fairly common to see performance hiccups cleaned up before or shortly after launch, but these particular crashes are common and crippling enough to merit a PSA for anyone expecting a perfect launch.

Tens of thousands of people are busy exploring No Man's Sky again, discovering all sorts of weird and wild sights in the procedurally generated galaxy. Below I've gathered up the weirdest of what players have found, but first let's start with a few of my discoveries. Probably the oddest moment I've had this past week was when I warped into a star system and found myself staring at a moon that appeared to be sporting a rather massive vagina on its surface.

I know there have been plenty of players who have use terrain tools to sculpt dongs on planets, but this is vagina so big you can see it from space, and it isn't the result of player shenanigans. It's a naturally appearing mathematical occurrence that just happens to look like a very big vagina. (Or maybe it looks like the flame of a candle. You be the judge.) Here's a full-sized image.

The moon, called Dagnor III, circling a planet named Crobia, was an 'Empty Moon', with no creature or plant life present. Even the vagina itself vanished when I flew too close, disassembling into more random-looking cracks and ridges in the moon's surface long before I got close enough to land. To me, though, it will always be the Moon Vagina of Dagnor III.

With that bit of business out of the way, here's a look at some other oddities spotted in No Man's Sky over the past week. Obviously there are some spoilers below if you want to find (and be surprised by) all this stuff yourself. 

This planet covered with bony things

Many players have come across planets that are lifeless but simply covered with these weird objects that look like they're made of bone. You can mine them for resources if you have an advanced laser, and as far as I can tell they're new to Next, joining other semi-rare oddities like bubble planets.

This other weird planet covered with these other weird things

If you've come across a [REDACTED] planet (that's what it's called on your scanner) and landed, you probably saw some of these... things. Again, it's another somewhat rare occurrence, littered with tall metallic spires, some of them hovering a few feet off the ground.

This blobby plant creature that has a huge butthole

I'm not obsessed with body parts or anything. I promise! I just keep accidentally finding them in No Man's Sky. Here's a large multi-eyed plant blob that was sloshing around on a planet, and I decided to kill it and push it down a hill because I am a massive space jerk. That's when I discovered it had an enormous butthole (or some sort of hole) that it hops around on.

OK, that's it for body parts from me, I promise. Probably.

This abandoned, pre-Next space station

You'll no longer find a space station in every single star system: some haven't been discovered or explored by the NPC factions yet. Others, however, have been colonized but later abandoned. What's really cool is that these abandoned stations have the same layout as the original space stations: the single round door and same types of small chambers they had before they were redesigned for Next. The landing pads all glow red and it's more than a bit creepy in there. If you find one, be sure to check it out.

Aliens that bring their own chairs everywhere

It was always a bit strange that trading posts had all these seats set out for visitors, rows and rows of them, but no one ever sat in them. Before Next, the single occupant at the post always stood. With more NPCs added, I figured now some of those seats would at least be filled.

Well, no. There are usually a handful of NPCs at the trading posts, and some of them are sitting. But it looks like NPCs prefer to bring their own chairs with them. I'm still not sure who all those seats at trading posts are for and why no one will sit in them. Another No Man's Sky mystery.

A very, very red solar system

I'm not the only one at PC Gamer playing No Man's Sky, as our intrepid photographer Andy Kelly posted last week about all the interesting stuff he's been coming across, including a startlingly lovely, extremely red galaxy (above). I've seen a lot of blue and yellow and green systems, and some that are fairly reddish, but I've never seen a bright red system quite like this. Beautiful.

This sentinel walker at rest

What I'd hoped (but sort of doubted) might be pilotable mechsuits shown in the Next trailer turned out to be high-level sentinel walkers, mechanical protectors of the resources on certain planets. Reddit member Scinetik spotted one on of these pain-in-the-asses on hunkered down in standby mode. 

I love that they have sort of an offline, resting pose. Just chilling out, relaxing, waiting for someone to break the rules. And then it's stomping time.

A floating chocolate-dipped donut

Mmm, delicious! If this planet found and posted by Reddit member Lunitari696 contains an island that looks like a chocolate-dipped donut, maybe it also contains a massive cup of coffee, too. You'd need a pretty big ship if you wanted to take it with you, though.

Is this a ship for ants?

Hm. Decent little hauler there docked at a space station, until you notice it is a decent very little hauler. I'm not sure the player, if they chose to buy it, could even squeeze in there since they're actually taller than the wee ship. And if so, surely it wouldn't have the cargo space to hold more than a few gravitino balls.

A hex moon orbiting a hex planet

Hex planets have been around since the last expansion, and while I don't really know their purpose they're still one of my favorite planets to come across. I've seen these synthetic planets and hex moons before, but only one at a time and never two in the same systems. It happens, though, because he's a hex planet with a hex moon orbiting it. Reddit user TezzaMcJ found these two beauts.  There's a couple more shots here.

A frigate of hungy ghosts

You can acquire frigates by flying close to them and hailing them on the radio, and then inspecting their stats. Before you buy it, make sure you take a close look at the crew. This crew's mood is 'Hungry', which could mean hungry for action or maybe they're just not well-fed.

Be sure to look at the Notes section, too. It contains important information, such as about this frigate found by Reddit user phoisgood495. If you enlarge the picture above, you'll see the note mentions that the frigate is 'crewed by ghosts.' Huh. That seems important. That seems too important to be left to a note. In fact, it should really be painted on the side of the ship.