News

This time it's Fanart. We've got new fanart from another series of artists, including Aora, Ashe, bratkitty, riceNoOdleZ,
Silverfork, and SilverMaduin. Again, thanks to The_Pink_Nu1 for his help in preparing this new batch.

And, again, I plan to have another wad of Fanart ready to go in just a few weeks.

As you might recall from a previous news post, I promised a pretty good chunk of new media coming your way. Finally I got around to doing it.

Here's what you'll find:

• Final Fantasy I Official Art
• Final Fantasy IV Official Art
• Final Fantasy V Official Art
• Final Fantasy VI Official Art
• Final Fantasy I Downloads, including NES hacks, ROM editors, wallpaper, and audio files.

I took quite a bit of time assembling these sections, so I hope you enjoy them. Thanks also to Neal, Djibriel, Kappa, and others for their help in sourcing content.

As reported by NPR on Morning Edition this morning, a class action lawsuit has been filed by several employees of Electronic Arts against the company. At issue is the matter of unpaid overtime, the amount of which has led the plaintiffs of the case to charge that EA fosters a poor work environment. The story articulates the extensive work hours and health problems caused by the game industry's "dirty little secret" - exploitation of their developers. The class action suit articulates that other California creative employees are entitled to overtime when the employees in question do not have control over the "creative vision"; that is to say, the employees create only what they're told to create; the suit seeks that the developers be treated the same as orchestra musicians and workers in the cinema industry.

The counterpoint is that EA, and other game developers, do only what they have to in order to sell games and give gamers what they want. Budgets are tight to keep the games at certain price points in some cases; timelines are nearly always tight, as people expect their games to be available for the Christmas season, or at the beginning of the sports season for sports games.

The questions for gamers, really, are these: Are we willing to pay more for games so that the developers are compensated for overtime on months of 18 hour days, six days a week? Are we willing to accept that we might get the new Final Fantasy, or Tekken, or Madden, or any game developed in the US, a little bit later than what we hoped? Do the developers, as salaried employees, really deserve to be paid overtime; would the quality of the games be enhanced by adding this provision? It's clear what the developers think - we'll have to wait and see if the courts agree.

The story is 6:35 long, and can be streamed via Real Media or Windows Media Player 9. You can reach it at NPR's archive.

After a long downtime, we have some new media to share with you! First off, we've got new fanart from several artists, including lizsama, Kame, Rujuken, Silverfork, rikacmo, and Ashe. Thanks to The_Pink_Nu1 for his help in preparing this new batch.

Also up is some new Final Fantasy VI media. Thanks to Dong0, we have a Japanese commercial advertising (I presume) the re-release of Final Fantasy VI for the Playstation over there. It's MPEG and about four megabytes, so pick it up!

We hope to have some more media updates soon, so keep hounding us to finish.

If you're reading this, the site move is complete. If you find any errors, please let us know.

We here at CoN have always wanted to offer hosting to a few small sites that present good or innovative information to the Final Fantasy community; however, that has rarely been an option in our history.

As you've seen in the last few months, we've started to do just that. Now that CoN has a relatively stable and relatively permanent server to call home, we have extended a couple welcomes to our compatriots in the world of Final Fantasy sites, first Fierce Legends, and now, our second hostee, the Unoriginal White Sheet published by CoN member Master ZED. We know that this site is quite popular among the Final Fantasy hacking community, including those who don't hack but like knowing the inner workings of the game. We're pleased to help ZED to get away from his horrid old host.

In other news, we've added another new affiliate to the group - this is, I think, the third or fourth this year, an impressive number of top-tier sites who want to link with us. This time around, it's our first-ever foreign-language affiliate (and before you ask, we can say that because we don't consider bad English to be foreign). Everyone, please say hello to Final Craft, a German site with extensive coverage of PSX and PS2 Final Fantasy games. Give it a brief check, even if you don't know German.

There we go, that's our site update for the day. We're working on stuff around the site now, hopefully we'll have more to tell you soon!