News

No, it's nothing to do with the Large Hadron Collider that may or may not either expose the building blocks of the universe in the name of SCIENCE, create a black hole that annihilates the Earth and most of the Solar System or at least Switzerland, or may even cause a resonance cascade and the eventual Universal Union invasion and conquest of our planet in under seven hours (And I for one welcome our new benefactors) but something of far greater importance. The end of one of our two CoNtests running right now is near.

To be exact, it's the Fanart competition where the end is nigh. That contest ends at the end of this month and is run to the theme of your favorite Square-Enix characters as if they were on holiday, or vacation for people in countries that upgraded the English language to Eng 2.0. Those of you with the ability to draw, doodle, sketch, and whatever else it is you talented arty types do to make little pretty pictures only have until the end of the month, about three weeks. To see the rules and how to submit, simply follow the link above. Or the one below if you want to live life on the edge.

For those of you with an infinite number of Shakespeares attempting to compile the complete works of Monkeys (Is this right? -Editor) and enter the Fanfic CoNTest, you've got quite a bit more time, a whole month more, and more flexibility with the three categories in that longer contest, but you're free to write a story about your favourite characters at the beach if you like. It could be General or Comedy. Or from FF7 maybe even Scene Selection thanks to Costa Del Sol.

So, in summary, time is running out on the CoNtests to enter, and possibly also for your freedom of expression for Final Fantasy Fanwork Fantasticness should the last LHC scenario occur as I think the... Combine are fans of Dragon Quest more than FF. Remember, you have until September 30th for Fanart, October 31st for Fanfics, and about two minutes for the kettle to boil unless you've got a really good kettle.

If you have any questions about the Fanart rules and submission, email your question to [email protected]. For Fanfic queries, email a question along to [email protected] or PM Del S, whoever he is, on the forums, whatever they are. Alternatively, for a faster response to questions on either contest, simply pop into chat and someone there should help you.

Links:
Fanart CoNtest Rules and Submission guidelines
Fanfic CoNtest Rules and Submission guidelines

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.

Tecmo, the Japanese publisher of video games such as Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo Bowl, and Fatal Frame, has not had a very good year. After releasing XBox 360 action title Ninja Gaiden 2, game designer Tomonobu Itakagi and several other employees sued the company for unpaid overtime work relating to Ninja Gaiden 2. Other headaches included disappointing sales for Fatal Frame IV and the resignation of several top company officials.

But here comes Square-Enix to the rescue! According to Kotaku, Square-Enix is planning a friendly takeover of Tecmo in a similar manner to which happened to Taito in 2005. If the takeover is successful, Tecmo would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Square-Enix, and if the wage issue is resolved, Tecmo's successful Team Ninja studio (Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive) would be making games for the big S-E.

Source: Kotaku

Also: wtf? Kingdom Hearts Gaiden?

Trademarked some time ago, Konami recently announced a new title in the cult-favorite Suikoden series of RPGs. The game is about 50% complete, and "Tierkreis" is a German word meaning "Zodiac," - a few sparse details about the game have been released (it stars a young main named Jail and uses a four-member party of sorts) but for the most part very little is known to the public and fan forums are blazing with rumor and anticipation. There is also no word on the game being published outside of Japan.

Source: RPGFan

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.

Chrono Trigger DS is coming to the United States on November 25, 2008, just in time to give North American games another thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but unfortunately also just in time for laszlow to pick up a new distraction from semester exams. Earlier information indicated a release in early December, but a new press release from Square-Enix gives us a new, definite time.

In other regions, the release date is still uncertain, with a "Winter 2008" release in Japan and an "Early 2009" release in Europe and Australia.

Source: Kotaku