As the name implies, FanimeCon (or Fanime) is the Bay Area's largest anime convention. But that doesn't limit the cosplay and fandom to the big-eyed, small mouthed characters typically seen in Japanese cartoons. With just as much personality and unique character design as anime characters, video game characters add a burst of color to the anime conventions. While not everyone is current with today's or yest ...

Set in the floating city of Utopia, where the residents get along regardless of race or job class (unlike those polarizing extremists living in the floating city of Columbia), Chillingo's Pixel People is a free to play iOS city building game. I personally started playing during lunch while waiting for the next piece of bad news from EA Games. The fact that I didn't need Internet connectivity to play the mai ...

While the story and visuals of BioShock Infinite can certainly be works of art, the box cover is anything but. It's a generic image of a male protagonist with a gun over his shoulder as he stares off into the distance. It's a safe cover design that appeals to the general gaming crowd, but fails to indicate the atmosphere of the game. Fortunately, Irrational Games has provided eight alternative covers for “B ...

While waiting for that new Sim City to work, I've taken to casual city building games on my iTouch to show off my city planning skills; namely My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and The Simpsons: Tapped Out. I figure that if I am going to waste my time building a virtual city, it might as well be a city based off a successful cartoon franchise or two.Rather than review them individually, I'll just compare ...

Vanguard Princess: Cheap and Cute Girl Fighting Fun Sometimes it feels that most video game concepts are designed by geek buzzwords onto Post-Its, sticking them to a wall, letting a blindfolded monkey throw darts at the wall, and putting whatever words that the darts hit into the game. That's not technically a bad thing, since most memorably quirky games like Katamari Damacy or No More Heroes and the occasi ...

Games That Hate You: “Aliens: Colonial Marines” While my sci-fi loving friends have loved Star Wars and Star Trek since childhood, my childhood sci-fi obsession was Aliens. I loved how the film visually benchmarked a lot of sci-fi military tropes, like badass space marines versus fearsome space aliens. But what I liked most about “Aliens” was how the film showed off the importance of never fucking around wi ...

I've been recovering from a series of oral surgeries for the past few weeks. Most of that time consisted of lying on my back, waiting for the general anesthesia to wear off, discovering how yummy Vicodin is, and thinking about what kind of work I could do while lying on my back completely drugged up. After being unable to think of anything beyond becoming a ceiling painter, I just played video games. By K V ...

Games That Hate You: "Spec Ops: The Line" Video games are typically designed with fun in mind. The fun can come from the feeling of accomplishment from completing various challenges or puzzles. Or it’s from getting immersed in a story that the player helps shape with his/her in-game character’s actions. Or it’s meeting fellow gamers and either playing cooperatively or beating them competitively. But occasio ...

Xcom Enemy Unknown Soldier Classes While researching alien technology will help level the playing field, it is still up to the brave XCom soldiers fighting in the field who directly turn the tide during the war against aliens in the hit turn-based strategy game XCom: Enemy Unknown. This Xcom guide will assist you in understanding the soldier classes and determine how best to form your team.  by K Valentine ...

XCOM Top 5 Items To Research In strategy war games and war in general, the side with better technology usually wins. One of the best examples of this philosophy is seen in the new XCom game “XCom: Enemy Unknown” where Earth’s elite soldiers defend the world against invading aliens. Initially, your titular XCom team will stand on relatively equal ground against the scouting alien force. But like previous XCo ...