News

Since I wasn't able to close the contest on time, I figured at least I could spend part of my Saturday making sure the winners were on time!

Thanks to all those who entered, all those who told their friends to enter, and even those who just wanted to enter but never got around to it; the CoN Summer Fanart contest is now over as I announce these two winners. We're not sure when we'll run another contest, but as long as you keep an eye out here (perhaps subscribing to our RSS feed might help), you will be sure you'll be among the first to know next time.

Now, on to the winners. We only got enough entries, sadly, to offer up two prizes; one goes to the overall top scorer among our judges' responses, and the other goes to the entry that we judged to be the most creative in concept out of them all.

First, let's discuss our victor of the most creative prize, a ten-dollar gift card to AmaCoN. Our artist's work for this prize caught us off guard. It's deceptively simple at first glance, but as you start to take it all in, you start to appreciate the different levels at which it's clever. We really quite enjoyed the way that the photo cutouts present different characters than the actual subjects of the piece, and the little detail of Umaro ripping his cutout right off the deck instead of stooping over gave us a genuine laugh when we noticed it. So, congratulations to Galsic, taking home the prize for most creative submission! You can view his new art in our gallery right now, or view the thumbnail right here!



And, our only other prize to be given out today, the grand prize of this contest, a forty-dollar AmaCoN gift card, goes to an artist who has been around CoN forever. His entry was also very clever, so much so that he nearly overtook Galsic to capture both prizes. The format he used allowed him to tell a full story and while it doesn't necessarily have the bold color and sharp detail of some of our other entries, the story both fit our "Vacationing Heroes" theme, and showed a significant amount of effort in laying out each panel. Not only that, we found it darkly humorous to boot, with a payoff at the end that you might not see coming. Once you see the piece in our gallery, you'll know right away that it could have come from only one guy here at CoN: congratulations to Narratorway for taking home top honors this time around. Surely you now want to see his winning fanart entry, so don't let us stop you once our thumbnail below sinks in a bit!



Again, congratulations to our winners, and thank you very much to everyone who supported our new fanart system with an entry. We appreciate every one of you and if I could afford to give you all a prize I happily would. Please keep submitting and keep bringing your friends to not only submit to our galleries, but also to see the great work we already have in place. Hope to see you all again here soon!

Some of you might be wondering why there hasn't been any announcements of the fanart contest as yet. If you're not wondering, with hope you are now. The reason is twofold, and neither is terribly impressive. I'll get to those later, though, and put the important info up here:

We're extending the art submission deadline for eleven full more days (plus a few hours) - you now need to have your art in on October 31, Halloween.

Now for the reasons, should you want to know:

1) I, fortunately for me but unfortunately for CoN, had to change jobs right before the contest was set to close. Up until right now, I've barely been around while I did all the things necessary for me to leave my old job and get settled in my new one, and that precluded me from doing anything for the site that required much effort besides clicking.
2) We honestly, frankly, are low on entries. This works out poorly for me, as I really did want to give out lots of prizes and see the new fanart system become a fast success thanks to all you folks submitting. However, this can work out really well for you, as if you've submitted, you have a pretty good chance of getting some prize!

So, with those two things in mind, you have my mea culpa on reason number one. However, I do expect that you artists out there will kick in some more art in the very near future to make up for reason number two. Get started, I want to give away prizes.

Well, I suppose a couple people did.

It looks like some villains tried to plant malicious code on the site a couple of days ago. Luckily, it didn't work very well - in most cases, the most visible consequence would have been pages failing to load correctly in Internet Explorer. (If you saw that happen, it doesn't mean you were infected with anything - in fact you definitely weren't attacked by any particular page where you saw that happen.)

Even so - if you visited CoN, or anything else hosted on cavesofnarshe.com between August 28th 00:00 GMT and August 30th 12:00 GMT, you'd be well advised to give your computer a once-over with a virus and/or malware scanner, and you should definitely start using something that's not Internet Explorer, even if that IE is 7. Go with Firefox, is what we say.

We don't yet know how this happened, though we have a hunch that it wasn't our issue at all - but we'll be making every effort to find out and prevent anything similar from occurring in the future.

In keeping with our standard of keeping just a few years behind when things are released, today we added a series of RSS feeds to CoN. For those of you who aren't yet familiar with the concept, Really Simple Syndication allows us to collate the newest content from CoN and publish it so that you can see it from just about anywhere, using a variety of different software (of course, we here at CoN like to use Firefox' Live Bookmarks feature).

We're offering feeds for news, newest fanart, and newest fanart comments right now; simply click the links above (or in the URL bar of most modern browsers, or from the homepage, or from any fanart page, et cetera) to start getting our content pushed right through to your RSS reader. And, if you have more content that you'd like to see from us, let us know and we'll do what we can.

After too much waiting for a game that doesn't require any real localization at all, Amazon.co.uk now has a release date for Final Fantasy IV DS; it's September 5, 2008. Of course, that's coming up in just over three weeks, which really makes sense given that there wasn't any real localization necessary. As usual, AmaCoN tries hard to get all preorders to you on the actual release date of the game, so you won't have to wait: order now.

The other new release dates for the day are for the new Harvest Moon games, for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii, subtitled "Island of Happiness" and "Tree of Tranquility" respectively. While the Harvest Moon series has always been a bit niche, even for a series that has been going on for over a decade, I know there are quite a few fans who might be looking to pick these games up; if you're one of them, you can preorder now for a DS release on August 26 and a Wii release on September 16. Not only that, Amazon preorders for these games pack in farm animal plushies as bonuses. So, uh, get your farm... animals?

I'm going to keep this pretty short this year, for a lot of reasons. For one, in some ways this has been a pretty long and trying year for CoN, and there's no reason to dwell on stuff that's not awesome. For another, I know that a lot of you out there reading this are borderline illiterate, so why should I make life any harder for you than it already is?

Half of that statement above is certainly true. If you're not sure which half, you're likely in the "illiterate" group. I know that, for me and a pretty significant number of my staff, the last twelve months have been pretty trying both personally and professionally. For me in particular, CoN is both; so when we have a bit of a quiet year, like the one ending right now, it feels like quite a blow to the gut. Now, that said, it's not all doom and gloom for the magical CoN crew. We did pretty okay—I mean, we're all still mostly here. Right?

Seriouly, though, we're still a vital and active site, lack of obvious illustrations notwithstanding. Our daily average hit statistic has been trending up for the last year, which is something that really has never not been the case. We still pull a ton of traffic, and we even have managed to pop into the Alexa Top 100k again recently, several times, in fact. We even reached as high as about 84,000. Many of you might recall from way back in 2004 how big a deal that was; well, now there are even more sites on the internet, and we're still reaching higher into those rankings than we ever have before. For the statistically-minded, and especially for me, that's kind of a big deal. As CoN's "competition" slowly continues to slide into obscurity, we continue to assert our place as the one place where you can still find good data, and not be surrounded by people who just don't care any more.

It was a pretty tough year for new Caves development, so I know those of you who ache for more game coverage are probably pretty disappointed right now. We did, of course, manage to blast out the highly-touted Final Fantasy IV upgrade last October, which frankly is a jewel among our coverage. It's technologically advanced, and covers fifteen years of FF4's life. It even gives us a toehold into the truly excellent Nintendo DS remake, launched just nine days ago in North America. If you're a fan of our visual arts offering, too, you should see our new fanart section. Launched just last week, this new section does everything faster and better than the old one, and it will allow us, as it catches on, to get more new fanart to you guys much faster than before, and from many more games. For a site that isn't necessarily "about" fanart, I think we've put together a pretty wickedly robust offering there, and with it being so easy to rate, comment and submit, we definitely want you guys to get more involved.

So here's what we're going to do for 2008-2009. I'm going to quit my job (well, actually, I might just lose it, but it sounds like it has so much more bravado to say "quit," right?), and we're going to streamline our operations to make things faster and more efficient. This will take place via changes to staff, a reorganization of how we handle our projects, and simply by taking more knowledge from what we've done in the past. Our problem has always been that there is just so much fantastic stuff we want to offer you guys, we get bogged down. It's time for us to refocus our work and really work with you all to give you what you want as close to when you want it as humanly possible. We know we're good, and we know you're good, and we all know the site's good. So let's reinforce that fact over the next twelve months, and let's make sure that for all nine of us out there who still enjoy Final Fantasy, all nine of us are thinking of CoN with regards of how to interact with the community.

You all can still help, too. While we might not be looking for full-time staffers for quite a while, those of you who can help collect data, or test things, or do lots of various stuff, can always help and I will try to give more of my time to welcoming you to do it. There's nothing we do that's truly difficult (well, at least not the parts that we'd let anyone touch anyway!), so all you need is a bit of free time and the willingness to understand how things are done, and preferably the opportunity to hang out in chat and not make an arse of yourself while doing so. And if you can't do that, there's always AmaCoN. Even if you have never shopped online in your life, I would wager that you know someone among your friends or family who does. Get them to use AmaCoN; if you're not sure how, just ask. It's not a lie when I say that CoN gets more done when more AmaCoN money comes in, because the more money brought in to pay the site's expenses, the less time I have to spend soliciting freelance work and the more time I can use on improving the site. We want your money, of course. Who doesn't? But at least we want you to get cool stuff from it. We haven't asked for handouts since like 1999. Seriously.

All in all, we still feel that we have a lot to celebrate with this site. We want you to celebrate with us. Every (decent!) post you make is a little bit of celebration. So is every line of chat. So is every rating or comment on a fanart, and so is every time you tell your Facebook friends what a cool place CoN is; heck, you can check out our brand-new Facebook page to make it even easier to share! Help us celebrate the truly one-of-a-kind thing that is the CoN for the next year, and we'll meet again in 365 days to discuss our progress. And one final note, the big news this birthday is not just here. We've got new contests that will be posted... well, posted just below!

—R51

CoN Summer CoNtests

And here's your contest information! This summer, starting of course today, we're going to be running two contests for the creative folks here at CoN. One will be for new fanfiction stemming from one or more of our currently-covered games, and the other will be for fanart of characters from any Square-Enix game, depicting them on a hypothetical vacation. Submissions are open now, and will be open for some time. If you are interested, or know someone who is, check out our main CoNtests page to get more information. Remember, the only prerequisite to enter is that you be a CoN member.