As always, one of our favorite parts of any convention is the sights and NYCC was full of them this year so we had to share them with the Flickcast audience. The level of dedication by the men and women who attend the con every year is staggering.

Some are picture perfect renditions that rival movie quality costumes like the Anakin Skywalker we saw wandering the floor. Others come from careful collection of legitimate television costumes and props like the classic Power Rangers Green Ranger. Still others take their own imagination and run wild with custom Mandalorian battle armor for both human and giant chicken alike to life sized Castle Crashers.

One of the things this gallery sadly doesn’t do justice is give an idea on just how huge NYCC was this year. Though it is yet to overtake the surrounding neighborhood like SDCC does, the New York Comic Con feels every bit as big and as important as its west coast counterpart.

The entire Javitts Center was filled with every major comic company to movie studios and video game publishers in every corner. This year the Flickcast was only able to spend a day on the Con floor but if things keep looking up for NYCC, we may have to tackle this show the same way we do San Diego Comic Con or E3.

Take a look below to get just a glimpse of the many sights at this year’s convention. See you next year New York!

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With Comic-Con in San Diego starting this Wednesday night with Preview Night and going through Sunday, it’s a great time to make sure you’re ready and able to find all the great coverage we’re going to be doing during the show. With that in mind, following are some links to where our content and coverage are going to be.

Of course, the main place you can find our coverage and content will be right here at The Flickcast website. See that link above that says San Diego Comic-Con 2011? Click that and it will take you directly to all our Comic-Con features, news, interviews, video and more.

We’ll also be posting items of interest to our Facebook Page and our Twitter feed. So, if you haven’t yet become our friend on Facebook or started following us on Twitter, now is a great time to do that! You can also find our video content directly at our video site.

This year’s Comic-Con promises to be better than ever so be sure to check back right here for all your Comic-Con news, interviews, photos, videos and more!

With E3 over, the next big summer event in the geek world is Comic-Con in San Diego. Every year, more than a hundred thousand people descend upon San Diego, taking over the city and enveloping it in geekdom.

There isn’t a corner you can turn without seeing a Green Lantern T-shirt or a bar you can walk into that doesn’t have a revised comic book inspired martini list. It is nerd paradise.

But, Comic-Con isn’t all Batmobiles and conversations with Jim Lee. There is a darker side to the Con that becomes increasingly apparent (and annoying) once you get there.

As much as we love the Con, there are a few things we wouldn’t mind living without for our week in San Diego.

Twilight

The past few years, Comic-Con has been invaded by screaming teenage girls and even louder overeager cougars in search of their first glimpse of the latest trailers of the Twilight saga. Twilight is not comics. It’s not even geek.

Ask any person on the street to tell you what they imagine a vampire looks like before Twilight came out and not a single one would mention “sparkles.” The vampires that most people love revolve around sex and violence, not good Christian values and celibacy. Real vampires don’t shimmer, they kill people.

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There’s been a lot of sequels to the Kingdom Hearts franchise ever  since the first game hit the Playstation 2 in 2002, and while Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep won’t be the last, it certainly looks to be the best Kingdom Hearts game we’ve seen in awhile. I fought the crowds and cosplayers at San Diego Comic-Con and made my way to the Square Enix booth, where I was able to play a few short (but very sweet) minutes of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.

Firstly, I couldn’t help but notice how vibrant the graphics were in Birth By Sleep. Maybe I’ve been playing too much of Kingdom Hearts: 356/2 Days on my Nintendo DS and I’m just used to lower resolution, but the PSP is definitely one powerful portable and Birth By Sleep looks great. I demoed the Lilo and Stitch level, Deep Space, and the backgrounds and characters were super detailed and vibrant.

In Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, you play through three different scenarios as characters Terra, Aqua, and Ventus. While playing, I found that the standard hack and slash gameplay was pretty standard and I was finding everything unfamiliar. But a huge problem I had with the gameplay was using the analog stick instead of the D-pad.

While this sounds like a simple change, it won’t be easy for someone like me who’s played a ton of similar RPGs like Final Fantasy on the PSP and is used to using the D-pad. I was constantly accidentally using the D-pad to run around and as a result selecting things I didn’t mean to, which was wasting some of the short time I had to play. This isn’t something that is going to deter me from playing the game straight through, it’s just something annoying that needs some getting used to.

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It’s official: Comic-Con attendees love dressing in costume and we love checking out their creative and sometimes elaborate outfits as much as you do. With scores of The Flickcast operatives covering the big show in San Diego over the past five days, we’ve started sorting through some of our best shots to share with you.

In case you missed any of our earlier coverage, check out our galleries already online (Gallery 1 | Gallery 2 | Gallery 3 | Booth Babes) to see for yourself some of the great costume and booth photos. If you’ve been to SDCC, you know there’s an overload of cool things to do and see. So we’re back again with even more Comic-Con photos for your viewing pleasure.

From Green Hornet to Wonder Woman (“Classic outfit” FTW!) to War Machine to Hit Girl and Kick Ass and everything in between, you just know that wherever you go on the Con show floor you’re in for the most innovative and most interesting costumes and booths to be found anywhere.

Check out the all new photographs after the jump. And be sure to keep checking back as we filter through our gigabytes of digital images to bring you all of the best of Comic-Con!

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One of the great traditions of San Diego Comic-Con are the huge numbers of attendees who come dressed in costume. Whether inspired by anime or manga characters, to super-heroes, to movie characters, Con-goers really get into it via their elaborate costumes.

The Flickcast team braved the crowds down on the show floor on Day 1 to bring you just a sample of what we saw. So take a look at our day one gallery and keep checking back for more photos from the Con.

Check out all the exciting photos after the jump. The photos are what make Comic-Con special and these folks have traveled sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles to be at the Con and dress as their favorite character. So, we like to encourage them by highlighting their pictures here.

Be sure to keep it right here for all your Comic-Con news, interviews, photos and more direct from San Diego.

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Welcome to this week’s On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage this week. Let is know if we missed something interesting. Otherwise, on to the links!

• Are you a Star Wars nerd? Do we need to ask? Here’s 19 Things You Didn’t Know about Star Wars.

• Here’s the opening to Transformers 3. Yeah, not impressed either.

• The Betty White conquest of Hollywood continues. Next stop: Community.

• Thinking about a DROID X? Here’s some first impressions on the device.

• See, Peter Jackson was just like you and made movies when he was a kid. Of course, his were way better.

• In case you missed it, the Harvey Award nominees were announced.

• Like hot chicks in leather with guns? Obviously, director Zack Snyder does.

• Here’s some photos from the vampire movie Priest. It doesn’t look all that great but at least there’s no Rpat.

• Like Star Wars? How about Princess Leia? How about hot models pretending to be Princess Leia in a modernized “Slave Leia” outfit? Yep.

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Even though we didn’t get a chance to attend Anime Expo this past week it doesn’t mean we can’t bring you some info on the event. Taking place from July 2-4 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the expo showcases the latest, greatest and most colorful Anime from around the world.

Of course, where there’s Anime you will find people who love to dress up as their favorite Anime characters. Our friends at LAist have put together a rather impressive bunch of photos that show you exactly what we’re talking about.

We can show you a couple of them here but for all the rest, be sure to head over to the site and their photo pool on Flickr to check them out. After looking at these photos and hearing some of the stories it looks like we ma have to add this event to our calendar for next year. Seems like it was a good time.

Check out a few more photos after the jump.

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Well, we’ve had a good week, but things are finally calming down after last weekend’s PAX East convention. We’ve been bringing you coverage of the show since Monday with details on Nintendo’s newest hand-held device, our first impressions on the upcoming Puzzle Quest 2 game, some of our favorite games from the show, and some info on some great new technology coming up in the near future.

With that said, there’s only one more element of the con that we haven’t touched on, which happens to be everyone’s favorite part. I’m talking about Cosplayers, of course! And there was certainly no shortage of them at this year’s PAX East. Inspired by their favorite videogame badasses, the attendees at this con were definitely dressed to impress.

There were some goodies, such as this guy dressed as Nathan Fillion’s “Captain Hammer”, and some less inspired. Check them out after the jump, and be sure to keep it here for future con coverage coming up in 2010!

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Gears of War aficionados and Cosplayers rejoiced this morning with the announcement of a full scale Gears of War 2 1:1 scale Lancer Assault Rifle from Triforce, LLC. Having already designed a Locust Drone Maquette, TriForce combined the talents of sculptors Erick Sosa, William Valenzuela, Jorge Martinez, Toi Ogunyoku and painter Paul Komoda to create a 40 inch long, 15 lbs replica of Marcus Fenix’s iconic half chainsaw, half assault rifle, all bad ass weapon from the Gears of War franchise.

“When working on something as iconic as the Lancer Assault Rifle you have to get every detail right, in order to pay it the respect it deserves. Working closely with the incredible team at Epic Games we are confident we have created the most painstakingly accurate representation of this intricately designed weapon,” said Drew Seldin, a spokesman for TriForce. “You can only make great pieces if you work with the best and our design team is clearly the best. All you need to do is look at what they created and you will undoubtedly agree.”

Epic Games, the creators of Gears of War is also very happy with what they have seen from TriForce. Chris Perna, art director at Epic Games said, “The guys at TriForce have outdone themselves with this fantastic rendition of the Lancer, and the attention to detail is amazing. They went through great pains and spared no expense to bring to market the absolute finest quality reproduction of the Lancer to date. Working with these detail-oriented professionals has been a pleasure.”

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