News

In a surprise announcement, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada confirmed during Microsoft's E3 press conference today that Final Fantasy XIII is to be released on the Xbox 360, contrary to previous expectation that the title would be released exclusively for PlayStation 3. Wada spoke of his belief that this would broaden the game's availability to North American and European players, though neither he nor Microsoft's press release made any mention of a Japanese 360 release, leading to widespread speculation that the game may remain PS3-exclusive in that territory — news which no doubt has all six Japanese Xbox owners up in arms.

A Square-Enix press conference followed, during which producer Yoshinori Kitase and executive Shinji Hashimoto discussed further details:

• There may be differences between the versions due to the capacity difference between Blu-Ray and DVD. However, the current plan is to keep the content identical. One might speculate, therefore, that the 360 version may come on multiple DVDs.
• 360-specific development is set to begin following completion of the Japanese PS3 version, along with English translation.
• This is a relatively recent decision, largely based on the 360's wide installation base outside Japan. This seems to fit with the notion that the 360 version may not hit Japan.
• Uncategorised additional appendage FFXIII:VS will not be multiplatform. (Presumably just like FFXIII itself wasn't. Just saying.)

No release date has yet been announced, but Microsoft's press release indicates that the game will be available to 360 owners "at launch" in NA and the EU, which is presumably a quirky, press-release sort of way of saying it'll be out the same day for both consoles.

It's a good thing nobody bought an expensive, launch-era PS3 just for the promise of a Final Fantasy exclusive. Nobody did that, right?

Sauces:
Microsoft Press Release
Gamespot Story
Kotaku Liveblog (whatever that means) of the SE press conference
Tomato

Something bizarre happened to our host this afternoon, which has resulted in corruption to some of our data.

The most notable victim we've found so far is the data from our actual forum posts. I've manually fixed several serious errors in this regard, but there will continue to be unusual corruption in some old messages unless we restore an earlier version. Sorry about that.

If you spot anything else anywhere on the site which appears to be corrupt somehow, such as obviously massively inaccurate data (more so than our usual standards anyway!), odd symbols in text descriptions, or apparent programming code leaking out onto the visible site, please report to us as soon as you can where it is and what's wrong with it. We're still not sure how much this might've affected.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We're looking for volunteers to join SilverFork on the news team.

Your task as a newsposter would be to locate news stories relating to Final Fantasy and Square-Enix, and of general interest to RPG fans, and report on them for CoN's front page news.

We're after people with the following qualities:

• Enthusiasm about games to the point of enjoying searching out news about them;
• A good grasp on proper usage of English, including spelling and grammar;
• Prepared to spend time to ensure their news reports are of the highest quality possible.

You would be required to make a certain number of news posts per month - that number will depend on the number of staff we take on to the position.

If you're interested, please e-mail climhazzard@cavesofnarshe.com to let us know. Please provide a sample news article in the e-mail, exactly as you would post it to our news forum if you had the job. Feel free to ask any questions either by replying to this post or sending e-mail as detailed above (though if it is a general question with an answer that could well benefit other potential applicants, the former would be preferred).

We look forward to hearing from you!

If you're reading this message, you've joined us in the new world of (hopefully!) reduced downtime on our sparkly new server-box-o-thing.

Some folks will still be seeing the old location for a while as domain name updates propagate across the Electric Interweb™, so if they seem confused, that's probably why it is. Or they might just be stupid. It depends who you're talking to.

As ever, let us know if anything seems less than 100% peachy. Or, well, less peachy than it was on the old server, at any rate.

Happy Valentine's Day for tomorrow (or today, if you're from an especially silly time zone) from all of us here in the Caves. For some reason, we chose this day to launch our brand new Final Fantasy VII section.

Then we pulled it forward to today anyway.

Still.

We've deviated a little from the norm on this one. While you'll still find the game data coverage you've come to expect from us, we've focused on adding more in the way of guides and tips to this section. No longer are sidequests bundled into unexpected places in the walkthrough; you'll now find detailed guides dedicated to the optional and non-sequential elements of the game, written both by staff and various long-time friends of the site, who are credited on the section main page.

We're also trying out a new spoiler system for the section, and we'd love some feedback on it. It's not perfect — if you go and look at the last chapter of the walkthrough when you're still playing the beginning, you're still going to get things spoiled — but hopefully it should largely protect you from wandering into massive spoilers accidentally, unless you turn the spoiler option on to view the full section content.

Plus, as usual, you'll find a selection of fanart and fanfiction, and a few downloadables we thought you might enjoy.

As ever, please do let us know of any errors or omissions, or things we could improve, particularly things you think should be spoilered that we might not have noticed. And finally, a massive, massive thank-you to everyone who's contributed to the section over the stupidly long time we've been building it, and special congratulations to Mr Thou, whose work on the section leads him to officially becoming a CoN staff member as of today.

Enjoy! ♥

We've had some fresh reports of the dreaded "error 28 from table handler" coming back (along with the odd error -1). In fact, I believe it's happening right now.

Let me stress that this is only our fault in so much that we chose FuitadNET as our web hosting provider. There's nothing we can do to solve this short of harassing them. It's their problem that they let areas fill up that are necessary for the correct operation of our databases. We can't empty them, since much of their contents belong to other users - again, let us stress that this problem is caused without our mistake; the error belongs to the web hosting company and their staff.

Still, thanks to those of you that let us know. I'll reiterate my guidelines for e-mailing us from last time this happened:

It's better that not every member e-mails us: perhaps the folks in chat at the time could arrange for one person to send the e-mail. Keep the subject line "SQL Error" (change the '+' in the default subject to a space, if it's there) so we can filter the messages nicely.

Thanks for your patience, folks.