By Jonathan G. Lee

Hey! It’s Jon again. After 31 years of water and juice, I have become hopelessly addicted to coffee over the past month and now I understand why. Caffeine is like legalized PEDs for writers.

This week’s Circle Round Up is brought you by the coffee bean, which is probably also responsible for every significant piece of western literature after 1616. That’s when coffee was first grown in Europe. Yes, I’m one of those people that googles every little hobby and habit they get into. And yes, google can be used as a generic verb! Merriam Webster says so!

Last week, we learned that Hello Games, the developer of No Man’s Sky, was being sued over a patented math formula. Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, tweeted that his game doesn’t actually use the formula in question. Out of the furnace and into the fire, because No Man’s Sky was leaked this week. A redditor has already beaten the game and gave his own disappointed review, derailing the hypetrain and rippling drama all over reddit’s gaming community. Austin Walker gives us the full report here. (Also, take a listen to the Brian Eno-like soundtrack.

When Deus Ex: Mankind Divided started releasing its promotional material, it raised a couple eyebrows, specifically for using the term apartheid to describe the Deus Ex world’s oppression of augmented humans. The game came under scrutiny again this week when a new piece of concept art revealed a sign that reads “AUG LIVES MATTERS”. Allegra Frank covers the story here.

Harold Goldberg flew to Buenos Aires to talk tango and turn-based strategy with Andres Chilkowski, CEO of NGD Games. NGD Games is the studio behind Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars, a reboot of the iconic 4X Master of Orion franchise from the 90s. Read here as Harold writes about Argentine game development, la Reina del Plata, and some upcoming details on the reboot.

Jorge Jimenez crawls through ancient libraries, battles undead soldiers, and gets rekt by a guy with a pyramid head in his playthrough of Necropolis. Watch it here.

With the arrival of the Xbox One S, you can now play Xbox One titles in glorious 4K, as it always should’ve been! But all is not right in the universe, Alex Cranz reports, because Microsoft is going to roll out another update of the Xbox One next year. The Xbox One S is pretty fricking sweet. But at a $300-400 dollar price tag with another shiny successor coming next summer, you may want to know all the details before swiping that credit card. Read Alex’s full review here.

And now for news outside of the Circle. . .

Sean Bean is the voice of Civilization VI’s tech tree quotes. Finally, a role where it’s impossible for him to die! Read more about this historic development here.

Citius! Altius! Fortius! The Summer Games update for Overwatch is out, the game’s very first seasonal event! Log-in to the game and win crates to unlock brand new skins, sprays, emotes, victory poses, player icons, and even new gameplay modes! The release coincides with the upcoming Rio Olympics, even though Blizzard has never once used the word Olympics in any of their press material cause they don’t wanna get sued. Watch the trailer here.

A very helpful dude named Jason Scott put up every single issue of Nintendo Power up on the Internet. He did a fantastic job because I’ve been leafing through some of the pages and they are really crisp, high-quality scans. You can find the whole archive here.

If you’re going to spend eight hours a day drawing armor for videogame characters, it’s probably a good idea to understand how actual armor works. Indie game dev Anna Jenelius discusses the materials, purpose, and function of armor in her post here. I’m not an expert on armor but it looks like she really did her homework.

Til next time!