Wondercon Cosplay Heroes and Villains

Super babes Wondercon Cosplay Heroes and Villains

Backbreaker Bane

Cable from Xmen!

Captain America

Darth Vader cosplay

Female Magneto

Justice League?

Dredd

Mario and the Princess and Luigi

Harley Quin and Poison Ivy

Power Girl

Images wonderfully taken by Steve ‘Frosty’ Weintraub

Klencory: This is not the ending you were looking for

I lied. Here’s another post on the Mass Effect ending.

One fan asked the question a few years ago…. about the Klencory planet found in the original ME game which has the following data

“Klencory is famously claimed by the eccentric volus billionaire Kumun Shol. He claims that a vision of a higher being told him to seek on Klencory the “lost crypts of beings of light.” These entities were supposedly created at the dawn of time to protect organic life from synthetic “machine devils.”"

Shol has been excavating on Klencory’s toxic surface for two decades, at great expense. No government has valued the world enough to evict his small army of mercenaries.

Klencory can also be a destination for the Normandy in Mass Effect 3, at which point its entry has been updated to read:

Klencory is famously claimed by the eccentric volus billionaire Kumun Shol. His once-ridiculed visions of “beings of light” protecting organic life from synthetic “machine devils” don’t seem quite so far-fetched now. His private army of mercenaries are well-established on the planet, waiting for husks to come knocking in on their door. In all likelihood, they will be obliterated by the molten metal of a Reaper orbital bombardment, on its way to somewhere important.

So because of this planet Codex sounding similarly similar to the actual Mass Effect ending people are saying “Woah! This was the planned ending all along!”

This is probably red herring as we all know the original ending was supposed to revolve around dark matter…

Interestingly enough in the same link as the Klencory note Screwoffreg ‘relayed’ his prediction for Mass Effect 3.

“There are two endings I wouldn’t like for Mass Effect 3. One being a random GOD LIKE force that saves the Galaxy or another being that to defeat the Reapers, everyone has to become a primitivist and destroy the Relays, Citadel, etc. Both would make me pretty unhappy as those endings have been done to death.”

Touche dude.

ME3 DLC New Ending Official Press Release!!

After a huge amount of internet angst, our bads, protest cup cakes Bioware has announced a DLC that will give a new ending for Mass Effect 3.

Here’s the official Press Release from Ray Muzyka, CEO of Bioware.

“As co-founder and GM of BioWare, I’m very proud of the ME3 team; I personally believe Mass Effect 3 is the best work we’ve yet created.

This past three weeks have incredibly painful to receive feedback from our core fans that the game’s endings were not up to their unrealistic expectations. Our bad.

We owe it to the fans who have stood by us for 3 of the greatest games Bioware has ever made. To that end, I’m pleased to announce that Bioware will release DLC on April 31 that will expand on the original ending to give insights into the themes raised and our stoic fans more closure.

The team and I have been thinking hard about how to best address the comments on ME3′s endings from players, while still maintaining the artistic integrity of the game.

Given Casey screwed the pooch with his bold but flawed approach, I’ve brought in some real talent to add some dimension to the ending. Akiva Goldsman, writer of films such as A Beautiful Mind, Cinderalla Man and Lost In Space has come up with a great ideas.

We think given Akiva clearly knows a thing or two about space movies, he should have a crack at explaining what all the different explosion colours meant.

We’d have got that dude that created Lost but apparently he’s back in his meds.

Mass Effect 3 concludes a trilogy with so much player control and ownership of the story that it was hard for us to predict the range of emotions players would feel when they finished playing through it. The journey you undertake in Mass Effect provokes an intense range of highly personal emotions in the player; even so, the passionate reaction of some of our most loyal players to the current endings in Mass Effect 3 is something that has genuinely surprised us.

The DLC will thus be released for free when you buy the already released ‘From the Ashes’ DLC.

ENDS

Also the internet abounds with rumour that Martin Sheen has been paid a second salary to come in and do some new scenes.

ME3: Is this the best Miranda cosplay ever?

Miranda from Mass Effect. Is this the best version of Miranda ever? Vote with a Facebook like!

How a Halo blogger reaches out via Twitter

Here’s a post I thought I’d write for Twitip but it appears to be a dormant site so here you go…

A fair while I ago was delighted that Twitip chose to publish a couple of articles I wrote, ‘You know you’re addicted to twitter when’ and ‘The Angels and Demons Guide to Good Twitter Etiquette’. Since that time I’ve just got on with the job of blogging and using twitter to reach out to my readers. I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.

How a Halo blogger reaches out via Twitter

Halo is a massively popular series of games for the Xbox 360 and I’m a bit of a Halo nut and soon enough I created Gears of Halo, a blog dedicated to promoting and sharing the ‘fan boy love’ for Halo and other video games I enjoy.

The blog has been steadily building a faithful audience and I believe a stong part of this reader growth is due to using a dedicated Halo Twitter account.

Here’s the lessons I learnt on the way.

• Bite the bullet, forget your general twitter account and create a new account directly for your blog. It allows like to match to like – people who are only interested in your subject but not what you did on Saturday night will appreciate it.
• Follow movers and shakers in your subject niche. I go for two sets of people. The producers of the video games and their industry associates. Another other group to target were the other fans who are clearly ‘talkers’ about Halo games. I know they sometimes check my site out and occasionally give out a RT.
• Link your blog posts to your twitter account so when you publish a post, a tweet announcing the fact is made to your followers. Set the tweet so it’s clear it is a ‘New Post’ tweet. I use Twitterfeed.
• Retweet news that other twitter folk come up with or create. This could help you noticed by the watchers and lurkers as being being someone with your finger on the pulse. When it’s time for you to show off your “L33T skillz”, they may just give you a RT.
• Come to the party. In the Halo universe and other genres there are plenty of colourful characters – some have taken these over to the Twitterverse and tweet in character – playful engagement with these types of twitterers can help get you noticed in your subject area. Check out the famous Darth Vader twitter account as an example. The twitter force is strong with that one!
• Write a blog post about the Top Ten People to follow on Twitter in your niche. Let those people know about it and being flattered, they might just retweet the post giving you more exposure. Trust me, it works!
• Aim to have more people following you than you follow yourself. It’s a ‘people like them so I’ll like them’ psychology. I suspect there’s some kind of mental accounting people do when deciding whether to follow someone – having more followers than you follow might suggest your audience is more than just your friends and thus are worth following.
• That said, anytime a follower engages with you, consider following them back. It may help cement their loyalty to you, your twitter account and perhaps more importantly, your blog.
• How do you get more followers? Make it clear on your blog you have a twitter account. Invite people to follow you. I have a note at the bottom of every post, suggesting people follow.

It’s my conclusion that as a result of having a dedicated twitter account with followers that are specifically interested in your website’s subject matter, you’re more likely to get more readers of your posts than without it.

Those readers are perhaps also more likely to engage with you on the site, for instance, they might leave comments.
Lastly, as your ‘authority’ as an being an expert within your subject niche grows, so does the chance that that authority will create more authority by way of new followers and increased through-put readership of your blog.

Now, how l33t are your retweet skillz?

Gears of War: Exile canned by Bleszinski

You might recall the stir that hit the interwebs last year when it was noticed that Gears of War: Exile had been trade marked.

It was supposedly going to be announced at a trade event but that got axed. It was rumoured to be a Kinect based game.

Gears of War producer lead guy dude Cliff Blezsinksi told Gamepot “Let’s just bury the hatchet now, Gears of War: Exile was an unannounced game that I can’t give any details about that has since been cancelled.”

So there you have it, we’ll just have to see if any thing Gears related is announced….

OXM suggests a new Halo 4 gun?

The May 2012 OXM UK mag cover features the big green fulla – with a new gun? HT/ HBO

Why the Halo movie failed by Jamie Russel

Here’s a pretty succinct article by Jamie Russel on why the Halo movie fell over. It’s acutally from his book: How video games invaded Hollywood

The short answer is money but it’s a good read. Here’s a snippet from the article:

What was apparent during the Halo deal-making was that Microsoft was far from home, perhaps even surrounded in enemy territory. In the middle of the Halo negotiations, as all parties sat around the table, Shapiro recalls the discussion between Microsoft’s Hollywood liaison Peter Schlessel and Jimmy Horowitz, Universal’s co-president of production, taking an aggressive turn. “Schlessel was getting really tough on some of the terms with Horowitz: ‘Come on, don’t be a jerk, blah, blah, blah…’. It was getting really heated. The guy from Microsoft [Steve Schrek] was like, ‘Wow, this is really good.’ Then we took a break and Schlessel goes to Horowitz, ‘Are you coming over for Passover?’ Because they know each other. You don’t have those kinds of relationships in videogames. In Hollywood you can be getting at each other but then you’re playing golf together the next day.”

Even after the deal was struck, the misunderstanding over how the movie business operated continued to be a problem. Microsoft wanted a big-name director, but Peter Jackson, helmer on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, decided to sign on as a co-producer alongside Peter Schlessel, Mary Parent and Scott Stuber.

Jackson wanted his new prot g , an up-and-coming commercials whiz kid called Neill Blomkamp, to direct. With Jackson’s fee running to several million dollars the studios knew there was an advantage in hiring a cheaper, less well-known talent to sit in the director’s chair. Microsoft was reputedly not happy with the decision.

Frankie chats about managing the Halo canon

Frankie chats about how the Halo fiction and it’s various forms has been shaped to link together as one universe but to also be satisfying on their own merits.

What’s this all about?

Filming for something perhaps? Image found over here.