News

Japanese gaming news site Quiter has some of the first Final Fantasy XII art and screenshots I've yet seen. We appear to have good renders of the male and female leads, some early screenshots, and a cluttered scan of the logo.

If you can't hack navigating through the pics in Japanese (it shouldn't be hard), an English-language mirror is available at RPGFan..

I'm filling in for the news staff at the moment, most of whom are having intermittent troubles getting to the site as described in my news post of a few days back. That said, here's my commentary: unless they stop using Tetsuya Nomura as the lead character designer, they're going to turn a lot of people off. Aren't we all getting just a bit sick of seeing the same character designs since FF7? Thank goodness Amano came in to do FF9 and 11.

In the past few days, we have had problems with some people accessing the site. When trying to use the site, the cavesofnarshe.com domain will load improperly or not at all.

If this happens to you between Tuesday and Thursday, please email me (rangers51 at cavesofnarshe.com) and describe exactly what happens when you try to access the site. Also include your ISP if you know it. FuitadNet staff and I are researching what is causing the problem and how we can work around it.

This is happening with all sites on our server, so don't worry that CoN is broken. Thanks for your help.

As Neal mentioned yesterday, these forums have now hit 20,000 posts. I promised the possibility of more fun stats today, and I just thought I would oblige.

The stats program for our website categorizes traffic to the site on several categories. Briefly, here's a rundown of how that works:



Why is this important, you ask? Well, it will help you understand the following numbers:



Now, you might be wondering why that info is important. More likely, you've already figured it out. But for the sake of argument, I'll spell it out here: each one of those numbers is the highest the site has ever recorded. Ever. The basic upshot is that October of 2003 has been, yet again, the biggest month for traffic that the site has ever had. Several months this year have had high numbers in one category or another, but October is the first month that we have ever set records in every category across the board.

In other news, while October was a relatively quiet month in chat, chatstats will show you one fun little fact; since we first started tracking chat stats in January of 2002, we have logged over one million lines in channel #narshe.

Thanks to all the loyal visitors, yet again, who have made this possible!

As you've already seen if you've read this CoN news article on the healing potential of video games, we have hired Phoenix as a new News Editor. Phoenix will be the third news staffer, working in conjunction with Administrator Elena99 and Moderator SSJ_Cloud.

Phoenix, as noted in his staff biography, is currently a freshman in Uni, having finished high school early. He has a good writing style, has been willing to help whenever possible in the months since his return to the site, and is an all-around good guy.

Everyone, please join me and the staff in welcoming Phoenix to his new position at Caves of Narshe. We're all looking forward to working more directly with him!

Thanks be to Gamers.com for sharing this with us from MTV and the parent company of Gamers.com, Ziff-Davis.

It looks like MTV and EGM might be planning a reality show based on the habits of hardcore gamers. No telling yet if it will be contest-based, or more like a documentary, but given the fact that MTV shows of either genre tend to be vapid and ridiculous, I'm sure it's bound to be a winner!

You can read MTV's casting call here, and more information will probably crop up on Gamers.com or MTV.com soon.

Fantastic.

The fourth Front Mission game was announced for Japan back on 4 September, the first new game of the series to be announced for the PS2. This is a franchise that I don't think ever really found its audience in the US or Europe, where the love affair with Mechs never really matched that of Japan.

You can read Gamers.com's take on the announcement, and then pay a quick visit to get a look at the first media released for the game. No word yet on the long-rumoured Front Mission Online.

This game has kind of a cult audience, and I doubt that a fourth game in the series, even if it makes it to US and European shores, will really be a breakthrough game for the franchise. However, Final Fantasy didn't really explode until it hit the seventh game of the series. Odds are that Front Mission will never be another FF, though.