News

While the title of this news post is a joke, its contents is not. One would have to be living in a 1950s fallout shelter to not have heard of the horrific tsunamis that have devastated much of southern Asia after a 9.0 earthquake on December 26th. The death toll is reaching 150,000 and continuing to rise.

There has been a great human response to the disaster and gamers from Ultima Online and EVE Online are trying to do their part to help.

Ever laugh over someone selling a virtual item for selling a virtual item from real money (and even harder at the person who actually bought it)? Many UO players are selling their in-game items in order to raise funds for donations. EVE Online, on the other hand, has set up a section in each player's account where donations may be made.

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If you would like to make a donation, you can do so to the Red Cross through Amazon.com . Every little bit helps.

We've had some fresh reports of the dreaded "error 28 from table handler" coming back (along with the odd error -1). In fact, I believe it's happening right now.

Let me stress that this is only our fault in so much that we chose FuitadNET as our web hosting provider. There's nothing we can do to solve this short of harassing them. It's their problem that they let areas fill up that are necessary for the correct operation of our databases. We can't empty them, since much of their contents belong to other users - again, let us stress that this problem is caused without our mistake; the error belongs to the web hosting company and their staff.

Still, thanks to those of you that let us know. I'll reiterate my guidelines for e-mailing us from last time this happened:

It's better that not every member e-mails us: perhaps the folks in chat at the time could arrange for one person to send the e-mail. Keep the subject line "SQL Error" (change the '+' in the default subject to a space, if it's there) so we can filter the messages nicely.

Thanks for your patience, folks.

As predicted in our November 5th news update, Nintendo DS sales have been phenomenal, with over 500,000 units sold during the console's first week on the American market.

To help keep up with this tremendous demand, Nintendo expects to recruit an additional assembly firm (making a total of three) to manufacture the consoles. Nintendo has also revised its initial DS sales target, now aiming to have 5 million units sold by the end of March 2005.

The Nintendo DS became available in stores on November 21 in the US, at a retail price of $149.99.

Sales began in Japan on December 2, at a similar price of 15,000 yen.

European sales are scheduled to begin next March.

Information about features of the Nintendo DS may be found at Nintendo's Official Website; additional information about the sales and release of the Nintendo DS, along with hardware specifications, is available from UK-based news website The Register.

Do you live in Illinois? If so, come Feb 19th, you may be able to go to the Final Fantasy Symphony Concert, featuring music by the ever-popular Nobuo Uematsu. (Source:RPGamer.com)

"The two-hour program will be produced by Uematsu, and conducted by Grammy award winning Arnie Roth, who is the music director and principal conductor of the Chicagoland Pops. Scenes and scores from the games will be seen on massive screens.

Other tour locations or which scores from the games have not been confirmed at this time."

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I think this is very exciting. There's a link on this page that gives details about purchasing tickets.

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.