The News Cannon for 1/8/15: The OMG-What-Happened-to-the-Last-Couple-of-Days Edition

Hey folks, happy Thursday! Sorry about the lack of news yesterday (and maybe the day before too), but it turned out to be a WACKY CRAZY day in many ways, and I just ran out of time and energy. I’m back with a bit of extra news to make up for it, so let’s dive in!

• Greenlight – Seems like only yesterday (or maybe the day before) were were congratulating more spacey games getting through the Greenlight process onto Steam, and now we have more games to look forward to that just got approved! This includes Human Extinction Simulator, Into the Stars (which was Greenlit in TWO DAYS crazily enough), Subspace Continuum, Andromeda 5, SCHAR: Blue Shield Alliance and Smugglers 5: Invasion. Big congrats to all the devs who got in past the velvet rope. ;)
• Elite: Dangerous – A new patch has been released that fixes a bunch of little things like not being immediately shot at by Johnny Law if you accidentally nick him with one bullet while bounty hunting, but my favorite is this – “there should be an improvement in matchmaking that should mean you are more likely to see other players if they are in the same region as you.” This should make seeing other players more common now, so yay! Beyond that, Ars Technica has an article about the game with the Oculus Rift while PCGamesN has a review of the game.
• Dominus Galaxia – Never heard of this game before? Not surprising, since it used to be called Beyond Beyaan! :) Brent is now working together developer Jeff Graw to bring what will hopefully be an even better game than the ones they had been working on separately. :) I know I’m looking forward to more about this game. :)
• Sol Trader – Rock, Paper Shotgun has a lovely little writeup of the game.
• Artemis Bridge Simulator – Eurogamer has a great article in which they get to play with someone’s custom bridge setup, and it looks fantastical.
• FleetCOMM : Operation Vigrior – The developer has posted a couple of posts on Kickstarter detailing how he’s still alive, what the next steps for development are, and how you can download a demo.
• EVE Online – The Mittani has a couple of intriguing stories revolving around the people in the game. First off, there’s the story on how players are helping raise funds to assist a player diagnosed with stage IV carcinoid cancer. Another article talks about how the average age of the game’s population has changed over time, which makes sense, but is still interesting to see none the less.
• Wing Commander – An intrepid fan as pulled some audio files from Wing Commander IV, much of which includes Pliers’ often witty dialogue and delivery. Check it out on the CIC.
• Galaxy Heist – Lovely screenshot from the dev over on Twitter shows off some engines. ;)
• Distant Star: Revenant Fleet – A new blog post talks about the joy of drones.
• StarDrive 2 – GameSpot has an interview with the game’s developer Daniel DiCicco, and as an aside, we’ll have him on the podcast next week as well! :)
• Unending Galaxy – A new blog post talks about pirate bosses, nebulae and the traits you can have as a pilot. Neat!
• Starpoint Gemini 2 – The folks at Dealspwn have a fairly positive review up of the game.
• Space Salvager – A new update to the game adds control mapping! Yay!
• Star Citizen – Red Bull of all folks have a rather detailed article up about the game and its crowdfunding success.
• Shallow Space – A new fiction series has begun entitled The Tale of Samuel Shallom which I’m guessing ties into the game eventually.
• Solar Crusaders – A new blog post details several of the game’s UI elements, and it looks pretty cool.

We’re not done though, as we have some sales! First off, Approaching Infinity is on sale until 1/22 for $34.95, which still makes it a damned bargain in my opinion, as I’m having a blast with it. Finally, GamersGate is wrapping up their massive End of the Year sale, and there are so many games on sale — including spacey games — I can’t list ’em here.

That’s it for today folks! Have a great one!