What happens when you mix Beetlejuice and Minecraft together? You get this epic roller coaster.

The author says the roller coaster was created in Creative Mode on the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft. I guess the console version of the game isn’t so useless after all. It took the author two months to create this epic ride.

After attending my first midnight launch for 343 Industry’s Halo 4, I was hyped to get Master Chief back into ass-kicking mode.

The story, in my opinion, is awesome; rich in Forerunner history and the relationship between MC and Cortana is outstanding. I can’t imagine the hell Cortana is going through with rampancy.  The campaign felt very short, but that’s what happens with a good story. It’s like a good book, you just can’t put it down.

After completing the campaign, the Spartan Ops episodes adds to the awesomeness by filling in some loopholes. They explain a lot of what happens before Master Chief pulls a Felix Baumgartner and lands on Requiem, and what Dr. Halsey thinks of the SPARTAN program years after she implemented it.

The griefs with Halo 4 lie in where most players will spend hours upon hours of their time - multiplayer. The player base is awesome compared to - ahem – other futuristic war video games; I haven’t come across many players that teabag dead Spartans or rage over the mic (I must admit that I usually play without voice, so maybe I’m just not hearing it). For the most part, other players want to win than cause trouble

It’s the lack of weapons and load-out customization! I have the same type of weapons in all  load-out slots except for minor differences in abilities, like the jetpack instead of the hard light shield. Maybe I swap out a something old for something I just unlocked to try it out but that’s about it – and I usually change it back. The idea is to use the weapons that spawn on the map, but once someone picks it up, it doesn’t seem to come back all that fast. Most of the time I use my initial load-out the majority of the match which is boring.

It seems 343 Industries really wants rank to mean cosmetic changes, however once you reach the level to see an upgrade, you still can’t use it. In order to equip your Spartan with cool new armor pieces you have to complete commendations and sometimes the requirements are not easy to figure out. Sure there is a list of all of them on another screen, with progress numbers and all of that, but you’ll need to search through a list of categories to find that commendation. The name of the commendation sometimes isn’t too helpful on guessing either. It would help a great deal to have the commendations’ progress bar or whatnot on the armor customization screen which will also add that sense of urgency to complete it.

It also seems there are very few maps in the game, but that just means a DLC is coming our way.

Overall the game is great, I enjoy having Master Chief back for another trilogy of alien ass-whooping. The only changes I’d like to see is more weapons for your load-outs in multiplayer – let me start with a shotgun, or a rocket launcher or a sniper – and an easier way to see my commendation progress at a glance.

There are three male protagonists in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V.

The long-awaited Gamer Informer cover story on GTA 5 has fans giddy with excitement and speculation. Fans use these characters in a “groundbreaking way” according to the December issue of the magazine.  Just what does that mean? We’ll have to wait for the 3 p.m. EST digital copy release.

In the 18-page story they will introduce us to the three guys in the picture, how we use them and go over the re-imaged map of Las Santos; the biggest open-world Rockstar has created to date.

I’ll keep tweeting new information and sum up everything up in an Examiner article, so keep a lookout for that. For now, check out the full cover image from Game Informer.

GTA V has a release date of Spring 2013.

The Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn live-action webseries leaves us wanting a movie!

Way back in 2009, Master Chief was supposed to make his big-screen debut, but do to politics between Universal, Fox and Microsoft the Halo movie was shelved. Peter Jackson, of Lord Of The Rings fame and hired to produce the movie, put it more tenderly:

 [Director Neill Blomkamp] had literally moved down to New Zealand to start work on Halo. The timeline’s a little bit fuzzy now, but I think we were working on Halo for maybe three or four months and then then the film died. It fell over due to various politics between Universal and Fox — it was a co-production between the two studios. We didn’t really see it coming until the last week or two when we just realized that these studios are not gonna be making this film. It wasn’t anything to do with the budget, because we hadn’t finished a screenplay. We were still developing the script. Neill was busy working with WETA doing a lot of creature designs, which were going really well … we just felt really bad because we’d found this exciting young filmmaker. The idea was to mentor him into a film and what did we do? Three or four months and then this hellish experience happens and the film falls over. So we felt terribly guilty and terribly bad about that.

Jackson and Neill turned the “hellish experience” into District 9 and the rest is history.

Thanks to the live-action Halo webseries, however, it makes the movie idea seem viable again. Microsoft has the cash to produce a good movie without collaborating with other production studios.

If you missed the series, I’ve put them all in this post below. You’re looking at just over an hour of sit-down time if you watch them one after another.

Episode One

Hastati Squad, the newest batch of freshman cadets at the UNSC’s Corbulo Academy of Military Science, pays the price for cadet Thomas Lasky’s tactics.

 Episode Two

Cadet Michael “Sully” Sullivan continues to decode the hidden ONI combat video as Lasky’s struggle with his place in the UNSC ignites with fellow cadet Walter Vickers. After a classroom confrontation with Captain Mehaffey and a challenge from Chyler, Lasky pulls Hastati Squad back from the brink…at a terrible physical cost to himself.

Episode Three

Just as Hastati Squad is confronted by a video of secret ONI super-soldiers, their war and their whole universe are changed forever by a much more deadly surprise.

Episode Four

While Corbulo Academy is being destroyed by the Covenant invasion, the surviving cadets fight bravely alongside their only hope: The Master Chief.

Episode Five

After a terrifying night of combat and loss, Lasky makes a life-or-death decision to help the Master Chief… but will it be enough to save them all from the Covenant?

Halo 4 is set for worldwide release on Tuesday, November 6, 2012

It’s your call

Are you anxious for a Halo movie? What do you think of the mini webseries? Leave a comment below!

Ever since the live-action Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn trailer, people want to see lifelike Elites. Well thanks to one creative dude, we have one.

Uh, dude, don’t look behind you…

This seven foot tall Elite is created by Pete Mander (far left in the above picture), a self-taught costume artist from Ontario, Canada. As he says on his blog:

For as long as I can remember I have always been into creating something from nothing, and after leaving school at grade 10, I then continued my own education, [l]earning about sculpting, molding, casting, airbrushing, welding and the list goes on, I use many different mediums to create costumes and props, most of it all based around science fiction films, novels and video games.

The Elite, however, is no ordinary costume. Oh no, it moves too! The jaw of the Elite responds to joysticks or can be synced with a sound clip.

Unfortunately it seems there isn’t any video of it assembled and moving around. However thanks to Device Magazine, we have some close-up pictures of it:

The upcoming mini-series Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn will begin on October 5. Here’s the trailer:

Maybe 343 Industries, the developer behind Halo 4 and partner in creating the mini-series, should give Mr. Mander a call? What do you think?

(P.S. You should really check out Mr. Mander’s YouTube account for more animatronic costumes)