It’s time once again for our Friday comic book cosplay feature, spotlighting the best superhero (and villain) related costuming from the cosplay community.  We’re casting the spotlight onto those cosplayers who we think deserve special recognition for coming up with the best costumes, whatever the budget, and the photographers who capture them for posterity.

Gamma Squad is committed to giving a voice to the cosplay community that thrives in groups like our friends at TheSuperheroCostumingForum.com. Each week we spotlight our favorite costumes and each month we host a cosplay contest. We’ll be picking a theme for each month and inviting cosplayers, costumers and photographers to submit related pictures of their work to our Flickr group to be considered. We’ll then pick our top choices and post them on Gamma Squad for the adoration of all.

The theme for the upcoming month is:

• Super Villains and Diabolical Foes
  

For now, enjoy this week’s selection!

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So, Nintendo’s 3DS has had an up and down 2011 to say the least, but as we sit here at the beginning of 2012 things definitely seem to be more up than down. That said, the 3DS still has a way to go before it can call itself the equal of the original DS. The 3DS is a good system — the DS was one of the greatest of all time.

I have a feeling the 3DS may never quite match up to the DS, but delivering the following six things will get it as close as it possibly can…

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If you’re unfamiliar with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, we can’t blame you: not many people are into Canadian orchestral post-rock bands named after obscure documentaries about 1970s Japanese motorcycle gangs (seriously). Especially since they’re not only obscure, but insanely depressing!

But we’re assuming you know “Half-Life 2″, and believe it or not, the combination of these two things is incredibly effective. In fact, the album this track comes off of helped inspire “28 Days Later”, so for a bunch of pretentious Quebecois hipsters, Godspeed has a heck of a lot of nerd cred.

Assembled by a Kotaku reader, who took 100 hours to put it all together using entirely in-game footage, this might be the closest we ever get to a Half-Life movie, and it’s the most affecting mashup we’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s hard to believe the footage was designed around the narration and not vice versa. See for yourself after the jump.
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In 2010 Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man, left Capcom and it seems Capcom has decided the best way to get over the break-up is to burn everything Keiji left behind. That blue scamp Mega Man just reminds Capcom of the good times, so in order to move on he’s had all his upcoming games cancelled and been excluded from company crossover games like Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Such is the healing process.

Some fans haven’t been too happy that the past year has had zero Mega Man games instead of the usual dozen-or-so, and have taken to yelling at Capcom about it at every opportunity like a mother-in-law that just can’t accept the divorce is final. Well good news squeaky wheels, turns out the upcoming Street Fighter X Tekken game will have Mega Man in it! Just one catch — his design will be based on the infamously terrible American box art for the original Mega Man.

Clap……clap……clap…clap…clap…clapclapclap…bravo Capcom, bravo. A truly inspiring troll. You can check out a Street Fighter X Tekken trailer featuring 80s box art Mega Man after the jump.

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Spiders are about the last animals you’d expect to have blurry vision: after all, they have so many eyes.

But spiders, specifically jumping spiders, have weird vision. Specifically, they have weird depth perception. They’re perfectly still when hunting, so they don’t move to judge depth. They have four eyes, but their visual fields don’t overlap. So how do they judge distance and grab prey out of the air, every time?

Focus. Spider eyes have a layer that focuses each wavelength of light, but one layer focuses green light sharply, while a deeper layer focuses green light as a blur. In other words, if there’s green light, a spider has nearly perfect depth perception.

How will this help robots? By mimicking this structure, it’ll help robots better judge distances and thus make them better coordinated and better able to plan and execute a series of actions. It will also justify building creepy spider bots, and that’s the most important thing of all.

via Ars Technica

image courtesy Shutterstock

Throughout the month of April, Marvel series like Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four will have “Avengers Art Appreciation Variants” as their covers to promote the theatrical release of The Avengers in May. These covers depict The Avengers in the style of famous artists like Rodin, Monet, Seurat, Schielle, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and others, like the Joe Quinones piece above which references Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous lithograph Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. Besides Quinones, other artists contributing covers include Alex Maleev, Michael Kaluta, Gabriele Dell’Otto, Greg Horn, Gerald Parel, Steffi Schutzee, Christian Nauck, Girihiru, Stephanie Hans, Mike Del Mundo, Julian Totino, Khoi Pham, John Tyler Christopher, and Charles Paul Wilson III.

We have a sneak preview of fifteen of these covers starting on the next page. It just got classy up in here.

[Sources: SuperPunch, WIRED, Marvel]

(Click pictures to enlarge.)

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