Cosplay USA

One of my favorite websites for cosplay has been http://www.cosplaylab.com. It’s been around for 7 years so far and has thousands of members. It has a few features that set it apart, along with friendly members, relevant news, and contests.

The front page shows cosplay news from all over the world. Every month there is a look-alike contest for a selected anime character. Members can enter the contest by submitting a photo of themself as the featured character.

My favorite part about the site is making profiles/a roster of all my costumes. It’s hard to keep up with myself but I have most of my costumes listed on there. It also allows you to make notes on the costs, amount of time, and other construction notes. By browsing around you can get a good feel of the range of costs and time involved. Some take a few hours to complete and others may take hundreds of dollars and weeks to complete. You can also search costumes by member, character, or series to find the thousands of costumes shown on this site. I look at it as a database of cosplay. :)

I was thinking it would be a lot of fun to create a Flash game with cosplay fashions to dress a character in. There are a lot of pre-existing sites out there already. I’ve been playing with and moderating http://www.i-dressup.com. They seem to have just about everything pop culture like Hello Kitty, Bratz, fairies, clothing designers, and more. There’s even dress-up games for Project Runway designers. It would be cool if there were one more gothic lolita or cosplay inspired.

There are lots of sites like this. Gaia Online is also very popular. I used to play that a lot but then they banned me. :( Now I’m anti-Gaia. I didn’t think it was very fair anyhow… if you start later, it’s hard to acquire some of the older items and the cute things are just too desirable. Now that they banned me I’ll never even get back the things I paid for which is horrible. :( My monkey… and elemental hair and stuff… and the red goth loli wig. ;O;

MMORPGs are fun also. I spend a lot of time choosing and customizing my character. World of Warcraft kind of sucked because I couldn’t have red hair. The closest I could get was purple so that’s what I settled on; a Nightelf Priest with purple hair. I have a friend who is a concept designer for World of Warcraft and I pleaded to him that Bloodelves should have a red hair option. Then shortly after, I moved on from World of Warcraft so I have no idea if red hair actually became an option in actuality.

Flyff was awesome for customization. Since I was GM I had full access to items so I could be anything that they had. There were a lot of options not available to the public as well as some pay-only items. I really miss my rainbow troll-looking hair…

:( I miss all my costumes there, but at least I have screenshots. The game takes way too much time for my busy lifestyle and the items are too high of a cost if you ask me. I paid way less in Albatross 18 and had a lot more fun. Plus the people were nicer.

Albatross 18 is an online golf game in which you can cosplay while you golf. Like some other games, your stats improve with certain items making cosplay favorable. I dressed up as Kooh in real life for Fanime 2007. Then they had a Halloween contest and I won 1st place for the Fox Kooh including a Best Buy Gift Card and some in-game items. It’s too bad the costume isn’t very flattering though. :/ I always look fat because it’s bulky fur and shows only the bottom slope of my curves which is a zone of constant fluctuation. Kinda like Eggman on Sonic the Hedgehog. EW!

If anyone has any cool dressup sites to share, please comment. Also, if you’re interested in making a flash game or site I’d love to start a project. Unfortunately I am not inclined to programming but I can provide art and other direction. :) Discuss!