Hello youse.

It s safe to say that some of the news I m about to share with you is the most exciting news that I ve shared on this site in a long, long time. If you re deep into board gaming, you ll probably know most of this news already, but have you heard my incisive analysis? No. If you re only casually into board games, all this exciting news might just drag you much deeper into our cardboard world. And if you don t care about board games at all, some of this might change your mind.

Take a few minutes of your day to read more.

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A fan-made remake of Metroid 2 has been scrubbed off the internet just two days after it was released, when Nintendo sent the developers a takedown order. It was finished and offered as a free game on Saturday on the creator s website, Project AM2R, but quicker than you could say legal team Nintendo had sent a DMCA order to those responsible. The creators have since removed all download links to the game. It s all very sad and predictable. But the programmer behind the remake is being characteristically gracious.

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My overriding impression of No Man’s Sky’s since its reveal has been of its desire to create a wonderful space. I mean that in the sense of a space that inspires wonder – the kind of feeling I get when I unexpectedly happen upon a curious insect and am reminded of how much of the world is still unknown to me.

But there always seemed to be this really awkward relationship between No Man’s Sky pursuit of that sensation and what that meant in terms of mechanics, of objectives, of any kind of directed space. When I met Sean Murray at E3 last year we touched on the ideas of keeping people engaged with a world. The challenge didn’t seem so much creating wonder but combining it with engagement that extends beyond those initial encounters and keeps a player coming back. At the time, and at a subsequent hands-on, the engagement seemed to stem from the systems in place to keep you moving onward, never settling down, and continuing to explore towards the centre of the game’s galaxy.

I was disconcerted, then, by yesterday’s blog post titled What Do You Do In No Man’s Sky and another the day before in which Murray reveals and then reaffirms that base building is coming in a future update.

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You might have noticed all your friends’ avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That’s because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let’s you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs – without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.

I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man’s Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.

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The Internet Archive has previously made banks of emulated games available to play in your browser – from the DOS era, from arcade machines, from Ataris and Segas and other old consoles – but none of that tickled my thumbs much. That they’ve just added 2000+ Amiga games, however, has me reaching for my Zip Stick. From Lemmings 2: The Tribes to R-Type, these were the games of my youth.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Sleep Is Death brought a little of the pen-and-paper experience of collaborative storytelling to the PC.

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I’m not going to tell you what Moirai [Steam page] is about. I’m just going to suggest you play this free game for the few minutes it will last you.

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No Man’s Sky [official site] is out today! On PS4. In America only. Sigh.

The No Oceans banner that used to so frequently be flown on the good ship RPS has been gathering dust of late, so improved have game releases been in recent times. It’s a sad thing that it should be an exciting-looking indie game that’s had us dust it off. With PC code not likely to reach us before it reaches you on Friday, below are our plans for trying to bring you the most useful coverage we can.

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Quadrilateral Cowboy is built on the Doom 3 engine, which was released long ago under GNU General Public License that states that derivative works must also be released under the GPL. The result? Quadrilateral Cowboy is now open source, meaning you can hack at the source code for the first-person hack-and-heist sim.

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We Happy Few [official site] is in Early Access at the moment. It’s the dystopian survival game set in a drug-addled English city in the sixties. The trailers and concept art makes it look like something in the vein of The Prisoner, but from what various RPS-ers have played it really doesn’t make good on that promise yet.

But, for those of you who did pick it up, this week the development team at Compulsion Games are deploying an update to the game which takes into account a bit of the Early Access feedback. There’s stuff like bringing down the difficulty of the survival element so you go a bit longer between naps, snacks and slurps and some waypoint/map alterations. There are also combat changes, looting tweaks and the all-important assurance that “Basic rubber duck is now throwable”.

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