News

If you've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics recently, I hope you've been using the CoN game coverage section to help you out. If you've been using the section especially recently, you might have even noticed our unannounced beta of battle maps in our walkthrough. We've been working on firming up the quality of the maps for quite a while, and expanding their functionality, and now we're rolling out not only the battle maps, but a full maps section with maps for every situation and every location in the game.

These maps can be rotated and elevated to show you every view you get during the game, and we're giving you a birds-eye view as well to help clarify some of the trickier angles. You can also use these maps to see all of the available Geomancy and found items, and even starting positions for your party and enemies. We even created a new way of showing you the world map, using Google Maps, that you can zoom and scroll around to better find your desired town, castle, or out-of-the-way locale.

Tell us what you think about this new feature; we're pretty excited about it and would love to branch it out to more games in our series over time if you guys think it's as cool as we do. Last, a thanks to a modder named Gomtuu who created the original version of the FFT map viewer that we were able to modify and script to enable us to get these high-quality images and present them to you in a way like you haven't seen before!

The site's twelve now. As many of you know, this means that the Caves of Narshe is certainly what the media folks call a "tween," and I believe it; just the other day, Climmy threw a temper tantrum when I wouldn't buy him a Jonas Brothers poster.

He then proceeded to murder a bystander. The analogy only goes so far.

All that aside, the site is indeed twelve - however, to my eye, she's got the lustre of a site only half her age, and the vitality to boot. It's been a pretty shiny year for CoN, even though some might have wondered last year how many more good years we had under our belts. We might have even wondered it ourselves, and as such, we made the second half of 2008 the catalyst for change and carried that through to now. In terms of development, I think we turned the last year of the site into a pretty significant one, with the launch of the big new Chrono Trigger section. We'd thought about covering Chrono Trigger almost from the very day that we put Final Fantasy IV on the site, and as the stars aligned with the impressive DS port, we took the leap. The result was CoN progress like we hadn't seen in years, with a large group all coming together and really banging it out (in this case, "it" being the first major collection of data for the SNES/PSX and DS versions all in one spot). Not only did we do that, we also put together a new wallpaper section, giving some love to a section of the site that hadn't been loved in over a year and a half. It's the only place to find wallpapers designed with the CoN user in mind, and there are over two hundred wallpapers there among all sizes and designs. Not content with those two big projects, we even rolled out a new way to publish gaming news to you folks, including better ways to organize and browse and even a way to get you guys more involved by submitting your own.

You should think this was enough, right? Wrong, sucka. Got even a little bit more, going up today. First, we're broadening the avatar gallery with a wider array from our newest game, Chrono Trigger and a huge selection of pins from Square's big 2008 hit, The World Ends With You. For those of you who have a thing for CoN History, like we do, we also decided to put together, well, pretty much every page from every previous version of CoN and put it back online. It's goofy, sure, but no more goofy than the quality of the code on most of it, which I've managed to largely leave unadulterated. The CoN History page has links to all four previous design iterations just waiting for you. Please, visit and mock the skills I had back in the time of the ancients.

Finally, and I think this is the big one (hence it being last, and in friggin' bold, duh), is the return of a feature that people loved many a year ago: the CoN quiz is now back on the road and ready to abuse you, with a twist. Now the questions aren't just from our covered games - those only make up the first tier, called "Local" since the questions are, y'know, local to the site. We've got two new tiers of questions, "Regional" and "Global," which are pulled from the entire Square Enix canon and all of gaming, resepectively. So, if you think you know your stuff, there are quizzes open right now. Get started. And, hey, since we like giving away AmaCoN money, here's the new CoNtest for the rest of this year: whoever ends this calendar year (as of 23:59:59 GMT on 31 December 2009) on top of the Top Scorers page for all quizzes (with at least ten quizzes taken) will take home $25 in AmaCoN dollars or their local equivalent. Also, let me take this time to personally thank all the folks who participated in the closed beta for this new project over the last couple weeks; we made some significant improvements that everyone will appreciate, and we'll look to do more of that in the near future.

So, there we go, we have another year's worth of work in place. And it's surely enough to convince everyone that we, unlike most everyone else out there, have yet to give up the ghost. So we'll go into our lucky thirteenth year, knowing that the experience of the previous twelve years will keep us going with new projects and new ways to keep the site going and useful to you guys. We, of course, have a few things planned already to make things better. However, we have also come to learn that you also know what you want, and we're always willing to hear what those things are (even if we don't ever actually, you know, do them). So here's a thread perfect for you to tell us what you liked and disliked this year, and also to tell us what you want to see next year to keep you here and happy. As usual, while we certainly love CoN, it's a lot less lovable if the people who really make it fun, you folks, stop coming. So, I'll wrap up this year by saying that you should keep posting good threads, and keep submitting new content to the site, and that should the mood strike you this summer or any time hence, to come visit us in chat (which has been a bit quiet lately, which makes me quite bored at work), and throw some commentary our way about most anything.

And, speaking of work, well, I'm quite busy today trying to get through the most difficult of my office work so that I have time to put some more effort into CoN yet today. Cheerio, friends, and I hope to see you checking in quite soon to celebrate another great year of CoN with us!

We're at it again, this time on the interwebradiomachine. Longtime CoN member Kame, who also produces a radio show for Starmen.net, interviewed Tiddles and me together last Friday night. I'm suave and clever, and Tiddles is quite British, and we spent some time together talking about the history, present and future of the Caves of Narshe, as well as our thoughts on the Final Fantasy series in general.

If you like your audio with a side of masochism (for you), the broadcast is going out live starting at 11pm Eastern tonight at http://icecast.fobby.net/radiopsibk.ogg.m3u. If you can't make the show tonight, we'll be mirroring the interview ourselves as soon as we get our hands on the file. Hope you enjoy it, and if so, make sure to thank the good folks over at Starmen and especially Kame for being willing to put up with us for that amount of time.

Update: The audio is available from the CoN YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E8929AEF57787900

Source: Starmen.net

It appears that writing web code as my everyday job, instead of just managing people who write web code as their everyday jobs, kind of speeds up the CoN development process a bit, too. This is evidenced by the new feature we're rolling out today - the brand-new CoN news section. I'm not going to lie to you, there are a lot of parts of this news section where the enhancements might not be completely obvious to you visitors and members, but that's okay. There's also a lot of stuff that's obvious and useful, too!

First, let's say that you're particularly interested in news we've posted related to Final Fantasy VII or its spinoffs. Well, great, because now all the Final Fantasy VII news is neatly categorized into its own section, and you'll quickly be able to grab all of that and peruse it without having to also see me chatter on about the site. (Of course, if you love seeing me chatter about the site, you can do that too because all of the major types of news we post are also categorized.) Also to help out in quickly finding the news you want, the majority of our news posts also now carry post icons to give you a visual clue as to the main focus of the news. Of course, that's not the only way you can filter. If you've been out to see without internet for the last couple months, you might want to check out all the news we posted from June 2009 in order to catch up, which as you can see from the link is now totally possible. Hey, if you're really interested enough, you can even check all the way back to June 2002, the very first month of modern news at CoN, and every month in between. Hey, we even break it down by author, so if you just have the burning desire to news-stalk laszlow, we're going to give you the option.

Another neat feature we're giving you now is the ability to read news articles and associated commentary by your fellow members without having to go all the way to the forums, should you wish. Not only that, you can even add your own comments right there, too. As an example, check out this very news article that you're reading now. You can view this for every single news article we've posted in the last seven years, and if there are just too many comments, we'll link you right into the forums to view them all and post just like you used to.

Now, here's the biggest kicker as it relates to you guys. This system now enables you non-staffers out there to submit news to us, too. We know that there have been times where you guys have found news and we've been frustrated because you beat us to it; sometimes this results in threads being duplicated in the news forum, people not knowing where or how to post, and things like that. It doesn't have to happen any more, because we're giving you control to write up news just like we do it and submit it for our approval. If we approve it, your own username will show up on the site homepage and in the news forum just like ours, and we'll even track the number of user submissions we get from you guys and display it on every news article you have on the site. It's like postcount, but better! Even if what you post doesn't quite meet our editorial standards, though, we might be able to clean it up a bit for you, and if so you'll be credited right in the post, too.

So, that brings me to my new contest here. We want you guys to share news you find with us, and we're looking to help you get motivated to do it. So, for the next three months or so, we're going to keep special track of what you post and what we approve from your postings. At the end of September, we'll check to see who outside of staff has posted the most approved news items, and if it's greater than five, that person's going to grab up a $25 (or the equivalent in pounds sterling, Euro, or Canadian dollars) in an AmaCoN gift card. If we get more than ten people who post five or more stories, we'll give out another $10 to one of you chosen at random, too. And, hey - if you show up and rock our... socks... with the quality of your news posting, there might be an opening on our permanent news staff for you as well.

You might be wondering, "how best to get my news approved?" It's not too hard. Make sure you write with good grammar and spelling, make sure you post news that's really relevant to our audience (obviously, we focus on Square Enix news, RPG news, and news that impacts big portions of the console RPG audience like important corporate news), and make sure you cover lots of details in your post. Preview your post before posting it. Make sure your sources are accurate, and for bonus points, throw a little bit of your own personal opinion in there too. Follow that formula consistently and you'll be on the way to that gift card in no time.

Let us know if you have questions, we're looking forward to getting your submissions!

Coloring Dragons, a website dedicated primarily to the hosting and discussion of webcomics, has just published an interview of Rangers51 of the Caves of Narshe (yes, that's me speaking in the third person). The initial interview took place in spring of 2008, and I sat down again with them just today to refresh the content after seeing the interview recently posted featuring CoN member Orinocou. Will you find it interesting? Well, probably not, because as a CoN reader you have already heard me spouting off my philosophies for many a year; however, since this is the first time that I can recall being interviewed simply for being an awesome webbish guy, you might as well check it out.

Source: Coloring Dragons

After ignoring it for far too long, I've now gone through and reconfigured the wallpaper section of CoN to be database-driven; additionally, I've rebranded all the offerings so they're more recognizably CoN. What this means to you, the visitor, is that you can now search through all our wallpapers by size or game, and that we've expanded the total collection from just forty-one total wallpapers across all sizes and designs to over two hundred, including the first wallpapers for both Chrono Trigger and the site itself. So, please, install a wallpaper. Don't let my work be in vain.