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Okay folks. I’m leaving for Otakon 2010 in about 36 hours, and thankfully my costume is finished. It took several days to do everything else, but I was working so hard I didn’t have time to write about it. So here goes!

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9 DAYS REMAIN

AAHHHHHH!

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25 DAYS REMAIN

Okay, I’m condensing a few days into one post because it is ALL about the stupid bodice. And it’s not even finished yet! AAAAH!

My next step, after putting in the zipper as described in the last post, was to sew the front pieces together. This was a bit tricky because of the cutout thing. I drew the shape of the cutout on the interfacing of the dark red front piece, cut out the interfacing along that line, and cut out the suede about an inch longer, so I could fold it over:

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34 DAYS REMAIN

On Day 3 I did exactly one thing: put a lapped zipper in the back pieces of the corset.

A lapped zipper is like the zipper on your jeans, it’s hidden by a flap. I found this video tutorial that is pretty clear and uses only normal 5/8″ seam allowances (as opposed to creating an extra piece to cover the zipper or whatever) to create the lap. It took a bit of time and was difficult, but it came out looking pretty great.

SUPPLIES
– lightweight separating zipper
– maroon thread
– seam ripper (AS ALWAYS!)

I picked out a beige separating zipper only because they didn’t have the kind I needed in dark red/maroon. I had a maroon invisible zipper (and even picked up an invisible zipper foot!), but the pattern called for a separating one, which will make it easier to get the thing on and off anyway.

Here’s the result of following the tutorial:

traineryuna_lappedzipper1

Nice, right? You can barely even see it!

traineryuna_lappedzipper2

Oh wait, there it is! Stupid beige. Oh, well, I’m glad it isn’t so visible normally. I was concerned about folding the fabric + the interfacing over like that (and it was harder to sew than it could have been because of the cotton duck crap), but I think the thickness makes the flap sturdier and covers the zipper better.

traineryuna_lappedzipper3

This is the inside (thanks, flash, for making my crappy seams invisible! Haha!). Since I can’t iron suede, I used my handy wallpaper roller to press the seams down a bit. It doesn’t work all that well. Anyway, as you can see, the zipper is not quite long enough (I am still debating whether to use bias tape for the edges or just sew the lining on normally… this would take 5/8″ off top and bottom), so I think there will be more hook-and-eyes in my future.

35 DAYS REMAIN

So, Otakon. It’s the biggest convention I go to all year, and this will be my third year attending. I have done two cosplays each year; the first year was Temari’s second outfit (from Naruto, naturally), and Shiki from The World Ends With You (the Nintendo DS game). The second year was Nausicaa, from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Red from Dragon Quest VIII.

My thing with cosplay is that I have to really like the character, or I won’t be motivated and the costume won’t come out well. Out of my costumes so far, only Red’s was a kind of unhappy with (though this dissatisfaction stemmed mostly from the hair, which was impossible to replicate with the supplies I had. I need to learn hair skillz!). For some reason, after last year I was unmotivated to cosplay in general, but now that I’ve started my costume for Otakon 2010, I am back in the game.

A friend recently started playing Final Fantasy X-2, which reminded me of how much I liked the game, especially all the neat outfits Yuna, Rikku, and Paine fought in. So after much deliberation, I decided to cosplay Trainer Yuna. It’s a colorful outfit that will be challenging to make but will be really eye-catching when it’s done. Over the next month I’ll be chronicling the process of making the costume. What follows are the first two days’ work of creating the costume.

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A friend of mine from the JPAG, Ryan Gan, interviewed me for his gaming blog, Sidequesting. I talk about why I write about inclusion and games, stupid excuses for not having female characters, and a bunch of love/criticism for BioWare. It was a lot of fun to be the interviewee for once. Thanks again, Ryan!

Also, that screenshot of Chloe and Elena is really funny to me, for some reason.

Crossposted at The Border House.

Last weekend, March 25-27, was the first annual PAX East convention. The Penny Arcade Expo has been running for several years in Seattle, but this is the first time it has come to the East Coast, and the first time I was able to attend. I’m going to write a few posts about the various panels I went to and the overall experience, and the first thing I would like to address is the “Girls in Gaming” panel that took place on Friday night.

The panel consisted of: Brittany Vincent (Editor-in-Chief, Spawn Kill), Julie Furman (Founder, SFX360), Alexis Hebert (Community Relations Manager, Terminal Reality), Padma Fuller (Product Marketing Manager, Sanrio Digital), and Kate Paiz (Senior Producer, Turbine), with Jeff Kalles of Penny Arcade moderating. The format was entirely Q&A, with no discussion and only short introductions before opening up the floor to questions. So it did not begin very well, though this was entirely the fault of the organizers.

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Crossposted at The Border House.

This post contains some major end-game spoilers for Dragon Age as well as some minor character-related spoilers for Mass Effect 2.

Between Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, there’s been a lot of talk about romance storylines in games over the past several months. They are still something of a novelty, and many people feel passionately about them, so it’s not surprising that they get so much attention. On the other hand, romance storylines tend to all progress in the same linear fashion*: pick a character you like, engage in some (sometimes adorable, sometimes hilariously bad, always entertaining) flirting, eventually have sex or get married or both. This is a shame because there is a lot of potential to really tug at players’ emotions by integrating romance more deeply into a game’s story and changing up the linear progression. (I’m focusing on BioWare-style romances for this post; for a take on breaking out of that structure, this column by Emily Short is a must-read.)

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Contains minor spoilers for Dragon Age: Origins and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

A great many games, particularly in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, seek to be epic in scope, or evoke a feeling of epicness. It’s an elusive quality because simply making a game very long or very large isn’t usually sufficient, and what makes a game epic may vary from person to person. One thing that I associate with epicness is not only the passage of time, but physical and emotional journeys, as well as change. Change is the key thing there: spending fifty hours in a static world doesn’t feel epic to me, which is why most of the Final Fantasy games that I’ve played don’t quite work for me on that level.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the first game I played that truly felt epic. And the epic moment wasn’t sealing away Ganondorf, or the heartwarming and fairly silly montage of happy Gorons and Kokiri at the end. That first real moment of awe came when I stuck the Master Sword back in its pedestal and left the Temple of Time as a ten-year-old child once more. What was so epic about that moment was the reminder of how much had changed over the course of the game. Ocarina of Time is one of very few games that has the guts to create a beautiful world, introduce the player to it, and then completely destroy it for the bulk of the game–and unlike Okami or Ocarina‘s successor, Twilight Princess, things don’t get magically all better once you finish a dungeon or defeat a monster. But going back in time in Ocarina is bittersweet: it’s wonderful to see Hyrule whole and happy once more, but upsetting to know what will become of the beautiful land and its people, with small hope of preventing it. Ocarina gracefully sets up the stakes of this epic quest, something few games accomplish.

But change doesn’t have to affect the entire world to be meaningful–it doesn’t even need to be physical. The change can also be mental or emotional, a sense that the character you inhabit has evolved or grown. No game I have played accomplishes that as well as Dragon Age: Origins. In the world of Dragon Age, Mages are dangerous and feared, and so have to go through rigorous training, which is capped off by a trial where the Mage has to prove she or he is able to resist the control of demons, or die. My first character was a Mage, and the beginning of the game involved overcoming her trial (called a Harrowing). At the time she was sheltered and naive, a wide-eyed idealist, talented but knew only a few spells. Over the course of fifty hours of play time, she changed, not only becoming more powerful as in most RPGs, but growing in character and personality: she made friends, broke a curse, slayed a dragon, fell in love, executed a war hero, been to hell and back. She saw the world in its beauty and brutality, grew up, became more cynical. So toward the end of the game, when someone mentioned her Harrowing, I had a real sense of scope for a moment, of how long ago and, more importantly, different things were at the beginning of the game. Everything had changed.

For me, in order to invoke that sought-after “epic” feeling, a game has to work to show me its scope; for me it is not so much badass moments of slow-motion Ogre slaying, but in quiet moments where the game shows me something or a character says something that makes me think, “Wow, that was so long ago and so far away, and so much has changed since then.” I think a game has to go beyond simply being long, and put players on a real journey. What about you? Do you enjoy “epic” games? What games live up to this label for you, and why?

Crossposted at The Border House.