Katsucon 2013 Cosplay Candids

Expect a whole lot of pictures and features of Katsucon 2013 in the next few weeks, so let us start with a collection of cosplay candids taken all over Katsucon by the hard-working Adam Howell of Howell’s Photography.

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Animazement 2012 Cosplay show

Unicorn Satyr Cosplay by Kitten In Strings Jena

Red Zebra Photgraphy took these awesome pictures of cosplayer and model Kitten In Strings Jena and her Unicorn Satyr cosplay at Templecon 2013!

DVD REVIEW – Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Editor’s Note: This article is filled with spoilers!

Part of the long line of Direct-to-DVD DC Universe movies by Warner Bros, Animation and the graphic novel by famous comic book writer Frank Miller (300, Batman: Year One, Sin City), The Dark Knight Returns is a two part story, meaning they are two DVDs featuring an older Batman/Bruce Wayne where Gotham city has fallen after he has retired. A gang of teens called “The Mutants” have been terrorizing the city. This along with some weird dreams and being stubborn, Bruce forces Batman out of retirement to reclaim Gotham City.

This is not well received by the media, local officials and others who feel that the Batman’s way of justice is not good for the city while others such as spokeswoman Lana Lang agrees with the Batman’s tactics. Along the way, Batman is joined by a new Robin after the second Robin, Jason Todd, died (which tells you exactly where this story takes place). Meet Carrie Kelly, the first female robin. For those who have never read the Batman comics, Carrie Kelly was not the only female Robin. Stephanie Brown, Tim Drake’s (the third male Robin) former girlfriend also served as Robin for a short period of time. A confrontation is held between the Batman and the leader of the Mutants. Batman reclaims the city while the mutant gang of teens follow Batman and start calling themselves “The Sons of Batman.”

At the beginning of the second DVD, the actions of Batman awakens one of his greatest foes, The Joker. He brings chaos all over Gotham with a record death count. Meanwhile the new police commissioner has issued a warrant for Batman’s arrest and the government is also in fear of the Batman’s actions, sending the Man of Steel to take down Batman through any means necessary.

This animated adaption stays very faithful to the graphic novel and the animation quality once again proves why DC Comics dominates the animation scene over Marvel Comics along with the brilliant idea to base animated movies on the greatest comic book stories ever written. I highly recommend giving The Dark Knight Returns a watch.

Big Ones of 2013: Bioshock Infinite

Like every year in the world of gaming, with a new year come’s new highly anticipated Games. And the year 2013 has some heavy hitters. This year we will see a lot of amazing games coming out months apart.

Bioshock Infinite. The highly anticipated game from the 2007 Game of the year Bioshock, and from the genius minds of Irrational Games. This game time setting place in 1912, and in this game you play Booker Dewitt, a former agent of the Pinkerton Government Services, that fell into a life of gambling, & drinking. A Mysterious figure hires booker to rescue Elizabeth, a girl held captive in Colombia; in return all of Booker’s debt would be wiped clean. However little did he know that this job would take him to the Floating city in the sky Columbia, and that is just the start of his problems. Elizabeth has powers, powers that can alter the fabric of space and time. Which leads to a war in control for the floating city, with you & Elizabeth caught right in the middle. Now it becomes a race for your own survival.

The game features some familiar mechanics of previous Bioshock Games, however they have been revamped. The setting is amazing; Columbia is literally a Floating Paradise. Blimps, Buildings, and lush gardens occupy the city. Also you shall meet enemy types that may amaze you come in the form of the Heavy Hitters. These Enemy types will give you a run for your money, such as fighting the Motorized Patriots, robotic versions of our founding Fathers who will hunt you down, and use a high powered Gatling gun. The Boys of Silence are literal walking security alarms, they will alert all nearby enemies, however they can be avoided. The Handymen which are giant Monsters who use their gigantic hands, and brutish strength to hurl the scenery at you. And probably the biggest challenge you will face… The Songbird.

This 30 foot Mechanical bird like creature is Elizabeth’s guardian so to speak, and is responsible to keep her locked up, however when you free her this savage creature goes on the hunt to kill you, and reclaim Elizabeth. You will use a large variety of weapons to help aid you in your mission to rescue Elizabeth, however, in true Bioshock fashion, you will also use Plasmids. Plasmids are basically superpowers granted to you which vary in use. Such as Fire, Electricity, Telepathy, and summoning a flock of crows to attack your enemies. Not to mention getting around Columbia is even better due to the series of Skylines throughout the city. By using the Skyhook, you travel the city in an exciting fashion. This game has potential to be the biggest game of 2013, and you can get your hands on it March 26th.

Iron Soldier: The Greatest Video Game You Never Heard Of

When I was about sixteen, I wandered into my local toy store to find in the clearance rack dozens and dozens of boxes of the Atari Jaguar game console system. It was on sale for $30, KA-CHING!!! That’s mine now! You all know the real reason I bought this console if you were into gaming back then; I thought I had a chance to get a copy of Alien vs. Predator, which at that time was only available on the Atari Jaguar. I spent months looking for a copy of Alien vs. Predator… all hopeless efforts as it seemed Atari had no interest in making money and I was left with just mediocre $10 games from the clearance bin.

But then I found it, the greatest game I never knew about: Iron Soldier. What is Iron Soldier? It’s was an Atari Jaguar game about a giant robot that walked around cities and destroyed them, and you played as this robot. Before I bought this game there wasn’t a hair on my body, after I played Iron Soldier I had a chest full of hair, a lumberjack beard, and I smelled like diesel fuel. Naturally that is how much testosterone this awesome game injected into me.

The game’s plot? Not important.

Moving on to weapons, you start off with an assault rifle, I was going to say a basic assault rifle but there is nothing basic about it being the size of a school bus. Uh oh, so I just ran out of ammo with the assault weapon what do I do? Punch sh*t is what you do. Punching buildings and stepping over tanks as they explode beneath your feet of awesome steel. And just when Bank of America thinks they’re safe behind a reinforced skyscraper, that’s when you get an upgrade; a gawd damn chain saw to replace your fists. Time for some spending cuts Bank of America… to your face.

The weapon upgrades get even better: mini-Cooper sized hand grenades, a Gatling gun, rocket launchers, rail-cannon, and a cruise missile that you pilot around to crash into buildings and stuff. Oh, there’s also a stupid shield that I would never use because that’s for p*****s. I really wish they replaced this item with a flamethrower because then Iron Soldier would have been the greatest game ever made.

What the hell happened to games like this? Why are so many things off limits in game titles these days? Oh see those beautifully rendered buildings and scenery we blew half our game budget on? Yeah, you can’t touch those even if you’re a super soldier robot, the Hulk, or Satan. Iron Soldier had some lame graphics when looking back on it, but the focus of the game wasn’t to look pretty, it was to blow stuff up (actually everything up). I wish more game studios in 2013 would learn a thing or two from Iron Soldier. Maybe gamers don’t care about how realistic you make a dog peeing in the park, maybe we just want to set that dog on fire.

Sivir Cosplay (League of Legends) – Arisia 2013

Check out these great pictures of a Sivir cosplayer (with an awesome weapon prop) by Kendra Paige. These photos were taken by John Riley of Red Zebra Photography at Arisia 2013.

FanimeCon 2012: The Photography of Bill Hinsee

Wonder Woman Cosplay – Arisia 2013

Check out these great pictures of a Wonder Woman cosplay by Akane Saotome. These photos were taken by John Riley of Red Zebra Photography at Arisia 2013.

Did I Make The Right Choice? A Review of Mass Effect: Paragon Lost

It was once said that in space no one could hear you scream. Luckily for fans of the Mass Effect series everyone from the Terminus System to the Reapers which dwell beyond the Omega-4 Relay heard the outcry of gamers at the ending of Mass Effect trilogy and EA released DLC to correct the issue. Now this review isn’t about the Mass Effect games but you really do need a core knowledge of the games to understand Mass Effect: Paragon Lost, an American English language movie by Funimation and starring Freddie Prinze as James Vega.

It’s really nice to see Vega, introduced in Mass Effect 3, as the main character of this story both because his character has a level of respect that sometimes borders on hero worship for Commander Shepard but is always very cool, calm, collective, and militaristic. When Vega shows up at the beginning of the game he salutes Shepard, even though Shepard has been stripped of H(er/is) title and rank and does so because he wants to not out of obligation. While Vega rarely accompanied my Shepard on missions he was an interesting character to learn about and interact with.

The action of Paragon Lost predominantly takes place after Shepard’s death and during the emergence of the Collectors. Some of the aspects that the movie does superbly are that the choreographed fight scenes. There are loads of fan service in the use of real weapons and tech/biotic abilities being incorporated nicely throughout the movie. The Collectors look disgusting, disturbing and BADASS, and the soundtrack does an incredible job of incorporating existing ME music while still being autonomous and distinctly made for the movie. Some sounds and songs ARE taken directly from the games but it serves to tie the new music into the story better as opposed to just reminding you “Oh yeah it’s a Mass Effect Story!”

Unfortunately for all Paragon Lost did splendidly there were a lot of problems. Within the script Vega, much like in ME3, comes across less as an interesting character who happens to be a POC and more like Dora the Explorer saying and teaching a Spanish word here and there to show “No, no he’s Latino, see he speaks Spanish occasionally!” It would’ve been cool to see Vega and another character, maybe another soldier or even Vega’s Asari love interest Treeya Nuwani, holding a real conversation with him in Spanish. It would have added a level of depth to all Vega’s squad mates that was unfortunately missing. It seemed like a missed opportunity as there were too many humans for me to care when they died. Because the number of starting human allies was so large very few of them had intriguing and distinctive characteristics. There was the tech geek, the woman who rarely spoke but could shoot, a woman whom a man was in love with who gets picked off early on, the man who regrets losing the woman, the reluctant guy, the guy who hits on all the ladies, the scientist who isn’t interested in the main character but you know they’re totally gonna get together. Everything is archetypal, every story has been done, but in under two hours you gotta work your ass off to make sure each of them has depth enough for the audience to care about their demise/survival and I don’t know if the characters had enough time to breath.

In addition to their unfortunate lack of depth, all character designs were amorphous. No character ever looked distinctively like themselves from frame to frame. I feel like a drinking game could be had; “Take a shot whenever a character, regardless of gender, looks like Betty Boop.” There are moments where syncing voice to mouth movement is almost impossible, and I really don’t think it’s Freddie Prinze or the rest of the cast’s fault, you can tell Freddie Prinze is acting his heart out and the story itself really does give him a variety of actions and things to do, it’s just so sad the visuals REALLY don’t support the acting.

This also brings me to a few points I need to put under a SPOILER banner. There were three moments in the script that I had a hard time swallowing.

1. Treeya Nuwani is boring. She’s the damsel in distress which, if that’s the story ME:PL is telling, OK that’s the story it is telling, but I’ve heard the story of a big strong guy who needs to save a poor defensive frail woman about as many times as I’ve heard the story of a farm boy who has to go out and defeat an entire Empire. Maybe it’s because I’ve always played Shepard as female and the ME series has had some badass women (Tali, Miranda, Samara, and Aria T’Loak to name a few) but I thought the prominent badass woman was lacking.
2. Dude working for Cerberus is working with the collectors to activate a beacon which will tell the Collectors about their own past… What the what?! Collectors wouldn’t work with humans at all! EVER! Collectors exist to process humans! They’re like husks with more training and cockroach-like wings! If an emissary from Cerberus walked up to the Collectors and said “We’d like to work together,” he’d step one foot on their ship, maybe say “We’d-” and then get processed into Reaper goo.
3. The ending… He chooses to save Treeya and kill a thousand colonists. In saving Treeya he saves the data from the beacon. Unfortunately, as told to us in an almost minor bit of unclarified exposition within the ME3 game, the info is useless because Shepard is not only alive BUT just destroyed the collector home world… OOPS you killed a thousand people and saved your girlfriend only for it to have been in vain. While this quality IS one of the aspects that make this an ME story, they make sure you feel Vega’s agony while making the decision and how hard of a decision it is they gratuitously show Vega’s choice and the death of the mother and little girl Vega spoke Spanish to. This brings me to another point though, yes Vega respects Shepard and understand how hard it is to make decisions but if you had the death of THOUSANDS on your shoulders because you couldn’t save them would you nonchalantly say to the person who made their deaths meaningless a simple “I led a crew against the Collectors, all the while you were out stopping them at their core… It’s all good I guess though buddy.”

I understand that Vega’s got some emotional issues in ME 3 as well as dealing with this poor decision, but his decision seems more “I had to choose between the woman I cared about and a thousand innocent lives and I chose to kill the woman I love,” baggage more than “Dude… I killed a thousand innocent people,” baggage. Yes, he’s a Marine, and you need to look past yourself to accomplish your mission… but DUDE… too much to be believable.

I am quite happy they didn’t make all the woman HUGE breasted, they were all distinctly feminine but never went into that form of fan service, and I do hope if Bioware, Funimation, and all their subsidiaries continue to make one-off stories about those in the Mass Effect universe, the stories should reflect the concept art of the game a bit better, and include more badass females because I don’t want to continue to tarnish my taste of the Mass Effect series after the limited ending fiasco, because I know it CAN be incredible. Unfortunately for as much as Paragon Lost did well, there was too much it couldn’t do to keep it from being… well… Lost.