Today's other news: Mass Effect in Sins of a Solar Empire, The Ship gets a sequel

Place these paddles firmly on your chest and look below to get your end-of-day gaming news fix applied directly to your circulatory system. Dawn of the Reapers is bringing Mass Effect's most notable starfaring conflict to Sins of a Solar Empire, and The Ship's developers are looking to float a Kickstarter-funded sequel .

• Sins of a Solar Empire and Mass Effect . Sometimes, just mashing two awesome things together doesn't produce the best results . We don't think this is one of those times. The Dawn of the Reapers mod will allow you to play as the Council races or their enigmatic enemies in one of the best space-based RTS-4X games of all time.
• Full Steam Ahead is a sequel to The Ship, a game where you walk around on a boat and try to stab people in secret. Essentially what our last few PC Gamer office retreats looked like. Scottish developers Blazing Griffin have announced a Kickstarter for the follow-up embarking on October 25.
• Project Lumoria is a mod that adds an expansive new campaign using assets from that one Halo game that actually came out on PC and people actually cared about. You know, the one that didn't have any numbers at the end. Set in the early years of the Human-Covenant War, the missions have been in development since 2008.
• Microsoft is dropping SpaceBux Microsoft Points in Windows 8, embracing the radical idea of just using existing currencies instead of making new ones up.
• Mafia is being remade in the GTA IV engine , speaking of porting cool things into other cool things. Chances are, we'll all be quantum dust by tomorrow .