News

The first Final Fantasy symphony concert to be performed in the United States has become a sell out in just three days.

The concert scheduled for Monday, May 10 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles will consist of songs from Square Enix's Final Fantasy series as performed by Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Ticket prices had started $40 and topped out at $120 US. The only place to find tickets now will probably be Ebay, if even there if one is lucky (lucky is a relative term as the price of such a ticket will probably exorbitant). The fact that the E3 Expo is also occurring that week in LA is thought to have contributed to the quick sell out.

Source: Games_Are_Fun


/****/

It be interesting to hear the orchestra and chorale's rendition of One Winged Angel. Maybe they will produce a CD of the performance.

Prime time television ratings may have taken a considerable blow from the video gaming industry this season, according to a recent article posted at CNN.com.

Nielsen Media Research reported that viewership among the men 18-34 demographic were down some 10% since last television season. It attributes part of this decline to an expanding video game industry.

Indeed, Sony has noted that over half of its prime time (8 p.m. - 11 p.m.) online gaming community consists of men aged 18-34.

***

I largely prefer gaming over television, especially online gaming.
I see online gaming with friends as a social event, and as so it is far more valuable to me than a television program--or its advertisements.

Nintendo boasts, Sony counters.

Nintendo has announced that their stock of Gamecube is starting to sell out in North America. The company has stated that the demand has been so high, particularly considering the holiday season ended months ago, that it is pulling units from other markets to send to the continent. Nintendo representative Perrin Kapaln is quoted as saying, "I'd say about 50 percent of our stores are out."

Last year at this time, Nintendo had to halt GameCube production because of a large overstock. What a difference time and a massive price cut can make.

Sony countered this announcement with one of their own: the 25th million Playstation 2 in North America has been sold. Sony is also proud of the fact that 2.6 of these units have been used online while Microsoft has 750,000 subscribers to Xbox Live.

/****/

I won't be surprised if the Microsoft makes an announcement about Xbox sales figures in the next day or two. If I were rich, I'd add a sales figure to each too.

And the forums sped up remarkably to reach 30,000 posts. The 30,000th post was made by i90east when he started the Mystery Treasure & Flying Star topic. Happy trails to all!

Pseudo bets were made on when the forums were reach 30,000 back when they reached 20,000 posts. Everyone was way off. February 21st was way earlier than anyone predicted — the earliest prediction made was March 12.

Anyway, congratulations, CoN. This will probably be the last news post made about post landmarks until 50,000 and/or 100,000, as they're not really news.

Square Enix has released another trailer for its upcoming computer animated sequel to Final Fantasy VII.

There are a few noteworthy things about this latest trailer. Firstly, both Vincent and Barret make an appearance. There is also an appearance by three white-haired characters. These apparently will be some of antagonists in the story. Finally, the trailer ends by showing September 2004 as the release date.

The kind fellows at Games_Are_Fun.com are hosting the video if you want to check it out for yourself.

****

While I'm not going to rush to the store or anything when this is released, the DVD does intrigue me. Hopefully, it does Final Fantasy VII justice. If it does not, that's fine. I'll just deny it ever existed.

Today marks the release of Phoenix Mozilla Firebird Firefox 0.8 (anyone else confused yet?) It has a new name, clearly, as well as a new icon and new branding stuff all over the place. We're assured that this name change is final, just like the Firebird one was. Let's hope some more open-source weirdos don't turn up to stymie this one with their complete lack of acceptance of two different software projects having the same name; especially since, after the initial shock and horror, the name is growing on me, and the new icons and logos are pretty neat.

But none of you care one little bit about all that, I'll wager. What might you care about? Well, when I announced the release of 0.7, one of the common questions was how to install Java and Flash. Here's the good news: version 0.8 for Windows comes with an installer, which means that, with any luck, both Flash and Java will recognise Firefox once it's been installed, and their installers/control panels will happily let you install them into the browser with no extra fuss. Another common problem has been downloading certain files from misconfigured Web sites, receiving a page of garbled text in the browser instead; this should now be resolved for the most part. Also included is a new download manager, which keeps all your downloads in a single window, and a new extension installer based on it. For Mac OS X users, the browser now also uses a more native-looking theme.

A bonus feature for me, and probably other Web developer types, is the inclusion of Document Object Model Inspector as an option in the installer. Previously it was necessary to compile it in yourself, with some modifications to the source code to make it work properly, or to find an unofficial build containing it.

I'm sure there's more exciting stuff in there I've forgotten about, as well, so head on down to the Mozilla Firefox product page today and grab a copy for yourself. I'll remind you of what I told you last time: it's a "technology preview", so don't expect it to be perfect, though in my and a great many others' experience, it's a lot safer and more stable than Microsoft's dated, insecure and generally lacking Internet Explorer. Still, if you're very concerned about using beta software, you might prefer the recently released Mozilla 1.6. Almost slipping under the radar with the excitement surrounding Firefox, its companion mail client, the non-renamed (as of yet, at least) Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 was also released today, and is definitely worth picking up if you want a e-mail client in the Firefox style.

All are great products, and Mozilla browsers are strongly recommended for viewing CoN (hence my excuse for writing these non-Squenix-ish software release articles, you see), though I'm sure you can tell which our favourite is by the tone of this article. For more reasons to switch (probably), check the old news article about Firebird 0.7's release.