News

Here's some news that seems to be all over the internet already, but happily won't impact, well, probably any of our regular readers. However, for those of you with ties to South Korea, note that the next time you visit you might not be able to play some games in the wee hours of the day.

The Korea Herald reports that the government is going to shut down various online games for six hour windows every night, with the windows being selected from three choices by each household. Apparently, homes in Korea have unique identifiers that are used for any sort of online registration, and this will allow the central government to shutter access as the central clock ticks over to the start of the selected window.

The government in South Korea is testing the system out now on four games, with another fifteen to be included in a few months. The entire list is unclear to me at the moment, though with the nineteen total games inclusive of "79 percent of the online gaming market," it would not surprise me to find that at some point Square Enix' online entries might soon find themselves under the restriction.

Source: Korea Herald

This just in: there is still no Final Fantasy VII remake on the books. Let's please move on. Of course, it remains Square Enix' own fault that these rumors persist and that fanfolk continue to press the issue, but, please. Let's start a Facebook group or something to tell them it's okay to not remake this game.

Proselytizing aside for the time being, we'll move on to the week's Final Fantasy XIII news. For one, you may have forgotten that at one time, it was going to be a PlayStation 2 release. I'm guessing that were that the case, it probably wouldn't have been on the original Xbox, but one could theorize! Anyway, the point of this now is that Yoshinori Kitase explains that the gear switching from PS2 to PlayStation 3 cost the team a year and a half of the game's epic development window. As an aside to that, he also explained why they decided to rile up half the fanbase by including Leona Lewis. Finally, this week we got confirmation that the Xbox 360 version would in fact be coming on three discs, which might not be fantastic, but it's still better than it could have been.

Quiet on the non Final Fantasy XIII front this week, with just a couple small things to note. First, Final Fantasy VIII is out on the PlayStation Network in the United Kingdom and European Union now. While I don't really share Kotaku writer Plunkett's fervor for it, if you haven't played it yet, it's probably worth doing at least once. And, finally for this week, if you remember footbigmike's tidbits last week, you'll know about the release of the Nintendo DS remake of Dragon Quest VI. That game sold like a wildfire burns - out of the first million or so copies shipped, ninety percent are already in the hands of gamers. And people wonder why they keep doing remakes?

Source: 1up, VG247, Kotaku

You might have noticed over the last few hours that some new content has appeared in the posts made by many of your fellow CoN members. It's all part of the new awards system we've added to the forums today, in which we're giving awards, much like gaming achievements, to all of our members who have been a part of making CoN great.

The awards right now fall into a few major categories:

• Winners of CoNtests and competitions on the site;
• Winners of CoN competitions, such as our yearly sporting competitions;
• People who have contributed significantly to the content of the site, either from working on a game section, or posting lots of fanart or news;
• Or just people who have been around forever...

You've probably seen systems like these before at other sites. The difference? Well, ours are much prettier! (And we're willing to take suggestions on new awards all the time.) So, if you got one or more awards and want to show them off, talk about the award system right here, right now. And if you don't have any awards yet, well, don't worry - we'll be giving more out all the time.

The answer is: yes, but only if you are really reaching. This week, you can find some updates to last week's Square Enix news, as well as yet another release for the oldest games in the Final Fantasy series. Beyond that, we've got some Square Enix business and employment news, a bit more Final Fantasy XIII hype, and even some potentially M-rated weirdness. And now we roll on, with our heads held high.

As reported last week, Birth by Sleep was the top selling game in Japan for the first time. Now, this week, it's the second time around. It's still beating New Super Mario Bros. Wii in week-to-week sales, but by a vastly smaller margin than before, largely because now it's the game's week two, not launch week. Given the install base for PSPs versus Wiis, I don't imagine this trend will continue all that much further before something, whether it's NSMB or some other newer release, will knock Kingdom Hearts off the top rung.

In case you haven't had enough of Final Fantasy I and II yet (note that you can play Final Fantasy I on no fewer than five American systems already), you will soon be able to take them with you on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you trendy fool, you. (Yes, I have both, but I don't use them for games. Also, it's well-known that I'm a massive hypocrite.) Not very many details yet, but it seems like the games will be based more or less on the PSP releases, but with a redesigned interface due to the necessity of using touch to navigate the games.

Squenix announced this week that they're looking to take on some debt. While the company has billions of yen in liquid assets already, but they also owe billions in debt, too (though not as much as they have on hand). When they sell their bond issues worth ¥35 billion, the additional cash can help to pay off the original debt, or it could also be used to go on another game-company-gobbling purchasing spree, or some of both. In another part of the company, composer Masashi Hamauzu has left the sound team of Square Enix. He composed music for a variety of games produced by the company, notably a couple releases in the SaGa family, Final Fantasy X, and most recently Final Fantasy XIII.

And, hey, have some promised weirdness. Apparently one of Vanille's models within Final Fantasy XIII is nude. Not entirely surprising, given that this is common practice as the modelers can then be able to more closely map clothing and equipment to the base model; allegedly, though, Vanille's model in this case includes detail in her upper half that isn't often seen in such things. Let's just leave it at that, shall we? And no link, you'll just have to go looking on your own (which, of course, I know you're already doing, and that will no doubt tide you over until the next tidbits).

Source: Kotaku, Square Enix DLG (on Facebook), Square Enix Music

Last week was another pretty quiet one, so I've lumped everything into another two week span. Plus, last Friday I was working madly on some other CoN development that I'll roll out eventually. Every tidbits, I start with the excuses. It's fun.

Let's kick it off with the best reason ever to go to Japan: a Dragon Quest-themed bar in Tokyo, opening next week. I would love to see if they have Slime-themed adult beverages. Please tell me there will be Slime-themed adult beverages. Perhaps a Green Slimetini.

From a different perspective in Square Enix corporate life, it's recently come to light that Yoichi Wada isn't pleased with the Japanese game retail industry and its xenophobia. Of course, some level of xenophobia in Japan is hardly anything new, so why should Square Enix care? Well, it's because now they're in charge of publishing games like Modern Warfare 2 in Japan. Now it all makes sense.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that Kingdom Hearts is massive in Japan, speaking of the gaming motherland. It's Disney! It's Square Enix! The buying queue will be massive! And, it was for Birth by Sleep; the newest edition of the Kingdom Hearts series, for PSP, came out last week in Japan and promptly sold almost half a million discs, blowing every other game out of the water in terms of that week's sales. Will it have lifetime sales better than the game it replaced at the top of the charts, New Super Mario Bros. Wii? Probably not, but it's still pretty impressive.

So, with all that non-Final Fantasy stuff out of the way, I'm sure you guys who aren't already miserable from thinking about Final Fantasy XIII want to hear more, right? Bam: here it is. First, here's the first new trailer with the Leona Lewis track and English voice acting, first linked to us by BlitzSage in the delicious knot of rage that is our thread discussing Leona Lewis' involvement in the Western game. Still want more after that? Well, Square Enix this week (for some reason) put some PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s on a bus in California and drove it around so players could get an early look at parts of the North American game. No word yet when or if the content on the bus will be distributed over Xbox Live or PlayStation Home for other users, but the bus tour ends tomorrow. 1up says the game seems to run just as nicely on the lowly 360 as it does the PS3, though this isn't exactly a side-by-side comparison. Honestly, though, did anyone think that Square Enix would botch the cross-platform nature of this game? It's been a lightning rod (yay puns!) ever since it was announced, and the experience on 360 is simply something that Squenix can't afford to screw up. Also, according to Kotaku by way of Japanese Final Fantasy site FF Reunion, Final Fantasy XIII could have been a lot longer. They cut so much out, in fact, that the scraps on the floor could have been reassembled to create another full game, according to art director Isamu Kamikokuryou. I've wondered aloud already: maybe that's how they plan on creating the seemingly-off-the-radar FFXIII Versus, eh?

If you're still up for this game, though, don't forget that it comes out in about seven and a half weeks. And we know this is true, because now we know it's gone Gold - for those not familiar with shipping software, that's just the industry term for "the game is done, yo." This even includes the lip-syncing as seen in the aforementioned trailer, which, as you no doubt all know, has sometimes been a bit wonky for Square Enix games. So, whether you're still excited or not, this is still looking like a big deal, and it's getting ever closer. Enjoy, whatever your perspective.

Source: Kotaku, GamePro, 1up

As I mentioned last night, the contest that was running for CoN Quizzes closed on New Year's Eve. If you can't remember all the way back to August to think of the terms, allow me to recap:

"And, hey, since we like giving away AmaCoN money, here's the new CoNtest for the rest of this year: whoever ends this calendar year (as of 23:59:59 GMT on 31 December 2009) on top of the Top Scorers page for all quizzes (with at least ten quizzes taken) will take home $25 in AmaCoN dollars or their local equivalent."

I checked the records on New Year's Day, and we had eleven people who took enough quizzes to qualify, from members among our very first to folks who have even yet to post at the forums. It's one of the latter who takes home the prize—congratulations to Tiael, who will soon have a PM in his inbox with information on how to collect. For everyone else, please talk Tiael into posting and becoming more of a part of the CoN community by congratulating him here!

The new quizzes for January/February 2010 are available now, so just because you can't win money now doesn't mean you should allow Tiael to remain at the top of the heap. Go now and take the new quizzes!