News

And the forums sped up remarkably to reach 30,000 posts. The 30,000th post was made by i90east when he started the Mystery Treasure & Flying Star topic. Happy trails to all!

Pseudo bets were made on when the forums were reach 30,000 back when they reached 20,000 posts. Everyone was way off. February 21st was way earlier than anyone predicted — the earliest prediction made was March 12.

Anyway, congratulations, CoN. This will probably be the last news post made about post landmarks until 50,000 and/or 100,000, as they're not really news.

Josh and I have recently completed updating the CoN's fanart gallery, this time adding twenty new images total, with some from every game covered. We'd like to thank Narratorway, Kame, Rujuken, Figaro, Bluemonika, Gabe, Blackfauve, SilverMaduin, and Sethron, the artists of these awesome images. Please take the time to view the new fanart and also vote on them.

Have a great time viewing and voting!

Courtesy Gamespot

It has been reported that sales of the Playstation 2 console have exceeded 5 million and are continuing to increase, particularly with the holiday season. The article leaves much to the reader, however, about how this will affect game releases in the UK.

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I know from our UK forumgoers that very rarely does a game get a release in the UK before it does the US, let alone at the same time as the US. This news should demonstrate to game producers that the UK is a bigtime market for games and there's no reason to put off a UK release until later. All it does is frustrate gamers and make them lose confidence in the developers. The only game I can think of off the top of my head that was released in the UK before the US was FF:Origins. The only other game that I can think of that had an excuse for a delayed European release was FF9, where some dialogue was changed to add the UK's unnecessary vowels and all that jazz. What does everyone else think?

CoN forums have reached 20,000 posts, an excellent landmark. The way the posts are stacking up, it's anyone's guess as to when we reach 30,000. If I were to make a guess, I'd say around April or May of 2004, unless the number of posts continues to increase. The 20,000th post was made by the site webmaster, Rangers51, in the Dragon Quest 5 Remake thread.

For those of you that aren't reading this through the forums and aren't members yet, consider joining up.

Sixteen new fanarts were added to the database today, something I should've done for quite a while. I hate making this news because that means I've put off the update until I need to do a ton in one day. But check out the new art as well as the rest of the database in the
fanart section.

The database features new art from Katy, Narratorway, Zephir, Hikaroo, Kame, Luna Chan, Yuki Usagi, Denisse, Chris Soleto, and SilverMaduin. CoN's fanart gallery continues to grow into one of the biggest and best on the net thanks to everyone who submits, so again, thanks to all submitters.

Courtesy PC World...

The XBox's graphics will now be licensed to Microsoft by ATI.  Nvidia, the graphics company that previously worked with the XBox, has backed out, claiming that it needs to cut business costs.  Rumors have also said that Microsoft was looking for another graphics company in the first place.  Also, according to the article, it doesn't sound like Nvidia could have been very pleased with Microsoft, since "Nvidia was also left with a sizable amount of unusable inventory after Microsoft changed the security settings for the XBox, forcing Nvidia to absorb that cost."

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From the looks of things, it doesn't sound like this was a partnership made to last.  Both companies got a little greedy, and now it's biting both of them in the butts.  They couldn't agree on prices and had to have mediators come in to solve the problems with them.  Hopefully (for Microsoft), the partnership with ATI will be much more successful.

Unfortunately for Nvidia, this brings them out of the gaming market almost completely, and for ATI, it means they're now dealing with both Nintendo AND Microsoft.  ATI stock is bound to jump after this.