News

No need to wait any longer, you can sign up to participate right now! We will be kicking off the actual participation in a couple weeks, but for now you can make sure your name is in the hat so we can assign you to your groups; plus, for us, we'll know what the prize pool is going to be earlier if we get all the signups early too.

To sign up, just go to the new special Quiz page — that's right, we're bringing back the quizzes this month for you guys to celebrate our Tenth Anniversary with us. But, like Laszlow said, this time you don't get by on your Final Fantasy knowledge. It's up to your knowledge of music, the staff, and some good old-fashioned detective work. Or random guessing, since you've got a 20% chance of guessing right every time!

Don't worry, though, because we're also giving you some hints, some cryptic, some not. To learn more about whose music you're angling for, have a quick look at our "About the Participants" page.

The more people we get involved, the more money we can guarantee will roll out of the contest. So get your friends involved. If they're not on CoN, bring them in, because anyone with an authorized Caves of Narshe account can play, not to mention participate in these very forums and use all the other interactive features of CoN.

Get started, and post in here to let us know you're in!

It's been a while since the last update, hasn't it? Let's not point fingers. We'll try to be faster next time, honest.

We've got 35 new pieces of fanart for you this time, from five of our six games: Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Tactics - some from our wizened veterans and some from first-time submitters.

If you head over to the gallery, you'll find some great fanart from:

• Galsic



• Ishigaki Mitsuo



• Kame



• SilverFork



• kittytreats



• Narratorway



• PrinceofDamycan



• Rujuken


• Zeromus_X


• EqwanoX


• Hikaroo


• CloudyFan

So, thanks to everyone who contributed, both new and old! Oh, and to Kappa and Mimic, who, along with me, put this update together. Enjoy!

By way of our lovely Scotsman, Del S (and not by way of his less lovely brother), enjoy a new collection of fanfics!

Today, we have a fanfiction update. And it's a rather large update when you look at it really... Ten fics from six people in three sections.

In Final Fantasy V, comes MogMaster's first of two offerings, "Battle on The Big Bridge." Following Galuf as he clashes with Gilgamesh, MG captures the personalities of both characters rather well: Gilgamesh is a complete moron.

In Final Fantasy VI, comes the vast majority of the update: Another from MogMaster, this time the grainy piece "The Roses of Death," following Siegfried and expanding his backstory as he fights through endless battles, on the field and in the mind. And if a serious and gritty long fic such as that isn't enough for you, Sherick's 23-part, 45000-word epic "Afterstorm: A Story of Honor," is the next offering. Set some time after the end of the game, the party reunites in the face of a new threat to the stability of the world. Both fics contain some violence, so be well warned if you're eating.

If, perhaps, all that might be a wee bit too hard hitting, there are two fairly light hearted and entertaining pieces from Bezdomny. The first, "Leisure," sees the party have some fun and games before getting on with saving the world. The second, "Words of Wisdom from Married Men," explores what it truly means to make one of the greatest commitments of all through the thoughts of the cast.

For a little look back into the in-game past comes L. Cully's latest offering. Of the usual high standard, "The Good Neighbours" follows a girl who should be familiar by the end as her life goes through continuing changes.

Next in the FF6 section comes onelowerlight's story, "The Final Battle," an intresting story capturing Kefka in all his arrogance and the party in all their courage. And last, but not least, comes Lothar Goldfist's first offering, "Reflections," a fic that explores ground dozens have dared to tread, but from which few find true success, and is in no way reliant upon that, providing an extremly stable and well written plot.

In Final Fantasy VII, comes a first for CoN: A crossover. Lothar Goldfist gives us another fic that knows where the landmines are, stepping around the booby traps of not explaining how it happens very well, or relying solely upon the crossover to move the plot forth, this fic uses the crossover as a foundation rather than an entire package to create an excellent piece of fiction.

And finally, an action packed fic, "A Warrior's Redemption" by Artlies. Following a legendary soldier of the Shinra army as he is given a questionable order too far, he refuses to follow the command, and makes his way home, leaving a trail of blood and carnage in his wake.

Read them, enjoy them, and comment here (or in the original threads!). And if you feel inspired, why not write and submit your own fanfiction work at the site submissions section of the forums?

It's probably old news for a lot of you by now, but if you want a PS3 anytime soon you're probably in a world of hurt. And yes, that goes for everyone, everywhere reading this. If you're an American, you're going to be fighting everyone else for only four hundred thousand launch consoles on 17 November. If you're Japanese, then, MAWAII - but you're going to be diving into a pool that only has one hundred thousand on their 11 November launch.

If you're anywhere else, I am sincerely sorry. You're not getting anything at all until March 2007, and there's no word yet whether Sony will be able to catch up with their projected two million units shipped by that time. Obviously the odds aren't looking that great, but you never know.

Wonder why this is the case? You'll be shocked. Sony's having problems with Blu-Ray production! Factory production issues are slowing the production of working drives for the units, and it seems that shipping of the console can't really ramp up until the lone optical media device on the box actually works.

Microsoft, of course, finds this hilarious - Neil Thompson, head of the Xbox group in the UK, had this to say: "We know how challenging it is to pull off a global launch, so it's not surprising that Sony has backed away from their previously announced launch plan, due to the unproven technology they are trying to pack in to their console." Someone might want to let Neil know that it's not as if his parent company has ever launched anything but Xbox on time, though, don't you think?

Sources: HEXUS.gaming

Xbox Today Canada

Thanks to some short-lived and mildly frustrating work, we've gotten our third site up under the CoN domain. We've added a second site dedicated to the internal workings of our favorite games, this time from our happy staffer Djibriel. His old site was pretty ad-ridden, so it was the least we could do to get him set up with something a bit nicer.

So, have fun at the Collapse of Heaven and Earth: http://tenchinohoukai.cavesofnarshe.com/

Thanks, Dji!

I briefly debated just re-posting last year's CoN birthday message. I'm awful lazy. After nine years I'm allowed to be, right? Caves of Narshe has now been a part of me for over a third of my life. I think I've earned it.

But really, the reason behind it is more that the results of this year are not dissimilar from those of last year. Some good stuff, some rough stuff, all the same stuff. Of course, I like talking about the good stuff. So, since I'm posting this in the news forum, let's start with our news coverage. Since last birthday, we've had three and a half pages of news posted here in the default forum view. That's somewhere on the order of 100+ threads started by our news staff in the last year, an average of one every three days or so. That gives you guys a lot of great information to learn and discuss, and it's all thanks to our great news team (all added in the last year!) - Silverfork, Karasuman, Laszlow, and Zero_Hawk.

We've increased our rate of fan media on the site as well, again thanks to some new staff, in this case Mimic, Kappa, and Del. Now you needn't see new art on the site only once a year, but more like twice. Or three times. Hey, you want more, you submit more! Really, though, we're as pleased as can be with the submissions we're getting both in terms of quantity and quality, so definitely keep it up and we'll do the same.

Chat recently has been pretty explosive, we're starting to turn around the numbers for that part of the site as well. If you've never chatted before with CoN or even anyone, it's actually worth your time. We've got people online most all the time now; I and the Britons of the site tend to anchor down the American morningtime (it's the best way for me to avoid work), and then a large collection of staff, members, and thoroughly random people stop by all hours of the day to join in. And after I take my old, decrepit self to bed, I assume it's some sort of scary after-hours sort of get-together. Climhazzard won't tell me what all goes on. It seems that what happens in CoNChat stays in CoNChat - unless it ends up in our collection of #narshe humor, CoNQMS. We're not all Final Fantasy all the time, and a visit to chat will definitely confirm that for you.

Now the site, the site. Well, as most of you probably know, we crossed the one-hundred-thousand post mark here at the forums since our last birthday, and we're rapidly closing in on 125k as I write this. We also have just crossed the barrier of 2700 members signed up. And now due to some upgrades to the signup process, we're pretty sure the new folks aren't spambots, either! So you new folks, maybe you might want to consider making your first post right here in this thread to give your congrats, and then head off to the Greetings forum to tell us a bit more about yourself.

The content areas of the site, where we still give you the best Final Fantasy coverage you can find for the classics, are still getting better. Of course, I don't have quite as much great stuff to say as in the last message about our content because frankly we've slowed down a bit from our torrid - as if - pace of adding Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy VII in 2005. We did, very recently, though, upgrade most of our Final Fantasy V data, improving by leaps and bounds what might have been our weakest content section. We have more to come for FFV, so stay tuned. Also, it's a thinly veiled secret that we're also doing some work on upgrading other content, notably Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy IV. And Djibriel has been hard at work behind the scenes with some Final Fantasy VI tweaks, too. You'll know more as we finish, of course. We do like to trumpet such things from the minarets and all.

And, of course, you'll actually be able to see all this great stuff as it finishes, because we've had six months of nearly rock solid server performance, too. That's a far cry from where we were 365 days ago, isn't it? Since we moved in late January, our downtime has been virtually nil - we've been, on average, up 98.5% of the time, and we've had 99.5% or higher for the last two months. You don't have to worry about not coming here due to downtime, or not telling your friends about us because they won't be able to get here anyway, because it just won't happen now. Reap the fruits of my out-of-pocket expenses.

I've decided to bury the boring stats bits a bit lower this year just in case I'm the only person who cared. But thanks to our increased forum traffic and reliable server, we're having a massive year so far in terms of traffic. July's numbers won't be final until about 24 hours after I've posted this message, but I've extrapolated the numbers a bit to find that July of 2006 will finish at about 80% higher than January '06 (the month in which the server was worst-behaved this year) in terms of pages viewed, and 44% higher for both unique visitors and bandwidth pushed out. Now, when you consider a more normal month, this time last year, we're up a more standard number, roughly 20%. While that may not sound like much compared to January, imagine a corporation that grows 20% a year, as we have done the last two years running. You'd be looking at one amazingly successful and wealthy business, let me tell you.

So that's where we're at after nine complete years of being both a site and a group of individuals brought together under one banner. We'll make ten years. After that, who knows? Fifteen? Twenty? Will we be here, from nursing homes, with our brainscan PCs, thinking out horrible topics about why Sephiroth could, like, totally crush Kuja even if, OMG, they switched outfits and Seph was in a hot bishie thong? Lord, I hope not. Let's, instead, just take each year as it comes and enjoy the things that make us different, and maybe even a little bit better than other sites out there in the ether? My staff and I are turning the corner and getting motivated again after a year of general downtime, so definitely stick around and watch what we've got coming up. We'll thank you for it then just like we're thanking you right now (thanks, by the way).

Enjoy the site in the way that we enjoy presenting it to you.