News

Arinela Kociko

10/01/2019 by

Our next Featured Artist is young illustrator Arinela Kociko!

Arinela is currently studying History & Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She loved painting from an early age and in the last couple of years, she began experimenting with creating comics. She attended freehand drawing lessons as well comic book design seminars at Ornerakis School of Arts and subsequently joined their 3-year comic book program as of this year. In the past, she had taken part in two group art exhibitions in Athens.  More recently, she participated in the group comic book exhibition “Όπου και να ταξιδέψω η Ελλάδα με πληγώνει” (“Everywhere I go, Greece hurts me”), having as inspiration the famous verse of George Seferis’ poem, “Με τον τρόπο του Γ.Σ” (“In G.S.’ way”).

Make sure to visit Arinela’s profile on DeviantArt!

Special Guest: Maul Cosplay

23/10/2018 by

We are proud to announce Maul Cosplay from Germany as one of our Cosplay Special Guests for Cyprus Comic Con 2019!

Ben, aka Maul Cosplay initially started cosplaying as a hobby while he was working as a film stuntman. After 10 years of cosplaying, Ben decided to become a professional cosplay promoter. Some of his well-known projects include: Geralt of Rivia from CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher, Soldier 76 from Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch and Snake from Konami’s Metal Gear Solid.

You can follow Maul Cosplay on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Ben has created his own costume and stunt promotion company named Defcon Unlimited, where he produces his cosplays, props and photo-spots on a high-quality level for video game promotion. Ben’s main focus is keeping his character as authentic as possible which is why even the smallest details are crucial to him. One example is when he travelled to the exclusion zone of Chernobyl to find the right atmosphere and mood for his cosplay of Joel from The Last of Us in 2017.

As one of the most talented stage combat fighters of Europe, Ben has also gained some attention through his performance as Darth Maul in a fan-made YouTube film called Darth Maul Apprentice which you can watch below.

 

Although Ben chooses characters with badass attitudes, he prefers to be within the crowd during conventions, talk to fans and followers and he tries to spend as much time as possible with everyone around him.

Last but not least, Ben loves Disney songs 😉

Maul will be available for meet and greet at his booth in the special guest area. His lectures, workshops and activities during CCC19 will be announced in the near future.

Introducing: Evistoria Games

27/09/2018 by

Following our last post, we want to introduce the second game development studio, ‘Evistoria Games’, that will accompany us at the Athens Game Festival on 20th-21st of October 2018 at the Helexpo Maroussi exhibition.

Evistoria Games is an indie game development studio which was founded in 2017 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Evistoria Games’ founders are passionate gamers themselves who sought to share their love of story-telling games through engaging worlds with other people, whilst also promoting local talent and their various projects. The Evistoria Games team is currently working on the development of two different games.

The first one is called ‘You Shall Not Break’ and it’s a clicker game where the main objective is to heal the tiles by clicking on them and prevent them from breaking. As you earn more points you, get to unlock new awesome helpful items and you get to play through four different environments. ‘You Shall Not Break’ is set to be released in Fall 2018 and it will be available on Steam as well as on iOS and Android devices. You can try out the game and win one of the 20 weekend passes that the Secretariat General for Media & Communications of Greece has donated! Just visit our booth at the ‘Up to You(th) Festival’ on the 29th of September, where Evistoria Games will be accompanying us and give ‘You Shall Not Break’ a go!

Check the trailer for ‘You Shall Not Break’!

Their second game is called ‘Yenefan’, a single-player action-adventure RPG, where you can take control of the four characters – Larvi, Taslar, Melliora and Delphic – each with unique abilities, to fight against a variety of enemies in order to find the Four Elemental Crystals that have fallen onto the world of Yenefan. ‘Yenefan’, which is a larger scale project than YSNB, is planned to be released initially on Steam but it will become available for consoles on a later date.

If you want to find out more about Evistoria Games and their amazing projects, check out the links below!

Website: http://www.evistoriagames.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evistoria/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/evistoriagames

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evistoriagames/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/evistoria-games/

Middle-earth: Shadow of War Review

20/09/2018 by

 

‘’Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It’s the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 10, 2017.’’

 

The game looks stunning! You get to explore gigantic maps while riding mythological beasts, fly through the skies on Drakes (dragons), climb and manoeuvre around buildings which all adds to the addictiveness of this game. Very similar to the Assassins Creed game mechanics, but somehow fully realised. If you take Assassins Creed and add to it the Lord of the Rings lore, you get this game: monsters, conquering nations and the overall classic RPG element that is missing from many games nowadays. It’s such a vast tale filled with familiarity, but also wonder. You’re going to see characters you’re familiar with but also plenty of new ones. It’s structured in a legendary narrative that combines many different storylines instead of having a single simple story. The different quests see you fulfilling many story points that ultimately bring about massive repercussions for the Middle-earth, but you can uncover those for yourself. You’ll do missions set around the world of Lord of the Rings. Each nation is crafted excellently, serving a major purpose for the story and to give you a fantastic experience.

Shadow of War is immense, and the upgraded combat and movement system is varied and fun and if you get the expansions it’s even MORE immense!The developers of this game gave their all into its creation, to the point where you can personalise your own style to the letter by unlocking a wealth of new abilities across the massive skill trees. Also, any game that allows you to control a dragon’s mind and ride it him around in an open world, breathing fire into other monsters like some sort of medieval GTA..it’s a triple A game in my book. There is also the online conquest system, that allows you to play online with other people and attack their fortresses. Oh that’s right…fortresses, the most fun part of this game is the conquest of the nations: attacking each nations Overlord by the Orcs you conquered with your own hands and when you’re done with the main game, you can focus on getting the best of the best orcs to make the best of the best fortress in order to defend and attack others in a sort of online but not really fully online experience…but in a good way that makes the game shine!

There are so many things to do in this game, you could easily spend 100+ hours on purely side quests to get a bunch of useful legendary equipment for the more grind/completionist crowd of gamers.

The only negative I can think of for this game is the Orcs personalities, which as I’ve noticed from other people’s reviews it’s something they loved, having hundreds of unique Orcs and people voice acting so many lines over so many Orcs…and the Nemesis system which actually allows the Orcs to remember you if they killed you before, this is absolutely fun and charming for the first dozen hours of the game , but after that it sort of becomes repetitive and you want to say to them ‘’Oh shush already! Just let me kill you!’’.

Aside from that nitpicking, it’s one of my favourite single-player games of all time, and I recommend it to anyone who is on a budget and can only afford to buy 1 high end game a year. I would rate it a solid 8/10. A masterpiece. 

Review by: Savvas Constantinou (DragTV)

 

Introducing: Gnoús

15/09/2018 by

As you may have already seen, this year Cyprus Comic Con has partnered up with Athens Game Festival which will take place from 20-21 of October at the Helexpo Maroussi Exhibition Centre in Athens.

Cyprus Comic Con will be present there promoting the local game development teams and we will also have with us two talented indie studios which will be accompanying us.

The first game development studio we want to introduce is ‘Gnoús’. Gnoús was founded in 2016 in Nicosia, Cyprus. It is an innovative platform of video games that enable detection of dyslexia and other learning disabilities whilst also helping professionals map and improve children’s mental abilities.

From a scientific perspective, Gnoús’s products are distinguished by the direct connection between ‘assessment’ and ‘remediation’. As Gnoús has put it “assessment is conducted by evaluating an array of well-defined abilities and provides a profile rather than a single point score. This enables users to design remediation and brain training programs that are personalised to the specific characteristics of the child’.

In other words, while a child is playing and having fun, Gnoús measures certain brain parameters that are related to the child’s potential to learn. For example, the capacity of a child’s memory, the speed of its thinking, its ability to plan and execute tasks, etc. These abilities have been scientifically proven (for children between the ages of 5-12) for their capability to predict learning difficulties and abilities of a child.

The results that Gnoús games provide allow consumers to directly tend to the areas of their brains that need it the most. Furthermore, these results can also identify an individual’s stronger modalities and abilities in order to help them improve those or even give them advice career specialisations.

 

Meet the team! From left to right: Acpa Ksidea, Katerina Fotiou, Marios Podinas

If you want to find out more about Gnoús labs, check out the following links!

Website: http://www.gnous.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/GnousLabs/about/?ref=page_internal

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gnouslabs

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gnouslabs/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gnous/