Fancy space games are certainly more common now than when Star Citizen [official site] was announced but Cloud Imperium’s space ’em up is still the flashiest. The devs are still working on its core elements and pulling them together into a concrete whole, but that’s starting to look pretty dang swish all right. During Gamescom last week they showed off an hour-long gameplay preview of alpha 3.0, with two players in a ship flying down from space, through a planet’s atmosphere, to land at a settlement, wander around, and pick up a contract from a proper voice-acted NPC. Have a look:

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Today is the day! The parade is prepared, Horace is hovering by the podium, and the orchestra is tuning up to play the current RPS national anthem (Cascada’s Evacuate The Dancefloor). Yes! It’s the grand final medal ceremony for the RPS Summer Games!

You’ll remember that last week we ended on a cliffhanger – Alice was in the lead after embracing capitalism and Devil Daggers, with John in second place and Alec and Graham close behind that. But thanks to the all-important audience vote on the Fan Art-Stravaganza! That could all change. But did it? Let’s find out…

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Those industrious spacefolk at Hello Games popped another No Man’s Sky [official site] patch out over the weekend, this one fixing several crashes, dealing with corrupted save files, and stopping players from respawning stranded on a space station with a busted ship. Yep, this means they’ve also shared patch notes revealing what their patches have fixed. Hello say that “these fixes should remedy around 70% of our current support requests” and they’re also working on another patch, which should enter testing today.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is no word for ‘please’. And don’t even get me started on the state of their property law! Epitomising the worst of all this rudeness is Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade [official site], a third-person shooter MMO about those rude futuremen duffing each other up for control of a planet in an endless war. A visit to the Land Registry would clear these boundaries right up, you guys – no need to murder each other for territory. Oh, spaceboys will be spaceboys! And Eternal Crusade is now due to launch on September 23rd, after eight months in Early Access.

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Playtonic Games released a new trailer for their upcoming platformer Yooka-Laylee [official site] at this year’s Gamescom, granting us another look at the game’s quirky and colorful gameplay. The charming, cartoon-y platformer stars a chameleon named Yooka, and his bat friend Laylee. Judging by the trailer, they’ll be taking players on an epic journey of mischief and clever jumpy and swimmy action.

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It’s been a long and winding road, but Sorcery!’s [official site] fourth and final chapter, The Crown of Kings, is out September 15 on both Windows and Mac, bringing the epic journey to a close. Developers Inkle (80 Days) promise that Sorcery! Part 4: The Crown of Kings is “the longest, most complex, and most devious installment of Inkle’s acclaimed narrative series.”

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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.>

This is my first time with Interplay’s TOS-set point and click adventure game since the 90s. I was braced for awful things. I was wrong. It’s still rather lovely – and, if the Abramsverse leaves you pining for the more measured approach of the Roddenberry years, rest assured that this is very> Star Trek indeed.

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Sundays are for trying to make a baby laugh by blowing raspberries, dancing, putting your face close to his, etc. Baby will not laugh at the week’s best games writing so let’s get moving.

David Gaider is a writer and game designer at BioWare. He wrote this past week an article titled “I Want to Write Video Games”, targeted at people who might say such a thing.

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Hey, do you remember Fez [official site]? You know, the clever little platformer where you could rotate your 2D world on a 3D plane to solve puzzles? The PC version may have released all the way back in 2013, but Fez has just this week, quite secretly, gotten its final patch.

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We haven’t heard much about Piranha Bytes self-proclaimed “xenial” open-world RPG Elex [official site]. The creators of Risen and Gothic did treat us to this nine minute gameplay video at Gamescom, though. It’s full of charming, awkward strafing animations, feathered velociraptor/bird hybrids, and jet packs. What’s not to like?

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