News

While I usually put up a new set of quizzes each month, this month we decided to take a brief break to focus on bringing in new quiztakers. We're going to be working on a minor makeover to make sure that all of you reading this want to get in on the quizzes every month to compete against your fellow CoN members!

With that said, you all can look for the next new set of quizzes at the start of May!

If you have trouble keeping up with Square Enix news, your favorite Final Fantasy website is here to help by making it easier to keep up with everything CoN posts to the news section.

For a couple weeks now, we've been testing our ability to automatically post our news also to Twitter and Facebook every time a CoN staffer - or you, hint, hint - clicks that "Post News" button. After seeing good results, I wanted to make sure that all of our news readers and forum posters at the site knew the feature was there.

So, if you want to be notified in your feed every time we post the latest Square Enix news, publish news about the site, announce a contest, or anything else, it's easy and you have two options: either +Like the CoN Facebook page or follow @cavesofnarshe on Twitter.

Hope to see you there soon!

You may have noticed the addition of a new forum at the Caves of Narshe forums this afternoon - we have just introduced a new type of Final Fantasy Music CoNtest at the site. We're going to be taking submissions of your favorite Final Fantasy songs and sticking them in one giant bracket to determine which song is the ultimate favorite of our community.

Of course, it wouldn't be a contest without prizes, so make sure that you check out the introduction post for discussion and for full details of what's going on!

Source: Music Contest Introduction, Music Contest Forum

Just wanted to let you all know that Tiddles and I performed a bit of minor surgery on the forums today. It's really no big deal, it was just something that needed to be done to work out a long-standing kink on the news submission system. In fact, you lot won't even notice it, I don't think - however, part of the fix is that links that you put in your posts will no longer open a new window. Since everyone with half a brain now use a browser that has tabs, this is really no big deal: just middle click links like most people have been doing for years already.

This will impact only posts made from now on. Thanks for understanding the changes we needed to improve the site as a whole!

CoN member Death Penalty had a birthday last weekend, which we didn't get around to posting to the Greetings forum. We've all gotten a bit bad about that lately, haven't we? Of course, by now, you're probably wondering why that's any kind of CoN news. That's a good question, with a better answer: DP is, as of a few days ago, our newest staff member! He's part time right now, as he acclimates to his other new role, that of a college student, and we look forward to him getting started as both our new quizmaster and a copy editor for some upcoming projects we're working on.

Bottom line is this: DP's a pretty robust gamer, so you can expect some really good stuff coming up soon in our quizzes. With his help, we'll continue to beat on you and force you into poor scores for a long time to come, so be sure to congratulate DP on his new roles at CoN before you take next month's quizzes.

In other news, we gave a little bit of a bump for AmaCoN this week. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you can now add an AmaCoN search engine to your browser, and search for items any time you have your browser open. To use it, just visit AmaCoN. Once you're there, you can add the search to your browser by clicking the search engine icon near the earch box in the top right corner of Firefox, or, for either Firefox or Chrome, by clicking the link below the search box for your country. This is a bit of a clumsy process, I understand, but it should make things nice and easy for you, the shoppers, so give it a try and let me know if you have any problems!

Lots of stuff going on in the monolithic, despairing towers of Square Enix since the last tidbits. The biggest news of this week has been twofold - well, really only onefold unless you're in Japan.

First, as most of you already know but didn't submit to the news section, Dissidia: Final Fantasy is getting a sequel. It's going to come out next year, and it's apparently going to be called Dissidia: Duodecim, which I feel I must from now on reference as "Dissidia: Duodenum." Looks like Lightning and Kain are locked in as new entries, which is sure to please some people at least. For more discussion about this upcoming game, you can hit up the other, less news-posted thread.

Next, despite the Xbox 360 in a decided last place in this generation's console war in Japan, Squenix announced this week that they're porting Final Fantasy XIII to the console for the Japanese market. It's an "International" edition, and it's going to have an "easy" mode (because Westerners are stupid), and all the voice and sub work will be in English. Should be a pretty easy port, that said, hence the rumored release date of 16 December 2010. As one might possibly expect, a good number of Japanese gamers are up in arms about this turn of events.

Still on the topic of Final Fantasy XIII, you might remember that Motomu Toriyama implied at the Japanese launch of the game that downloadable content expansions could be in the cards, a first for a non-MMO entry in the Final Fantasy series. Nearly a year down the road, though, he's now backtracked, confirming that there once were plans for DLC, but now those plans have withered and died, like a summer blossom in mid-September (okay, so I took some poetic license there). I'm not sure how to feel about that. It seems that the single-player JRPG, as a genre, has survived for many good years without needing to bolt on extra content, and I'm not sure how dedicated the Square Enix teams are to adding new content while still keeping it relevant - were they to release DLC, I have a hunch that it would be primarily minigames. Or maybe Final Fantasy XIII Versus. Who knows?

Last week, Square Enix announced that their Japanese operation is pairing with an unannounced American developer for a new "AAA" game. For those not in the know, a AAA game is one of those that is also known as a "console seller," or a "killer app," one of those games that people fall all over themselves to buy and play. They've got big budgets and big expectations, and a lot of hype. This all sounds well and good, but the presentation announcing this was done as a Powerpoint presentation. Yeah, I know that's how most big games start, but doesn't it kind of melt your enthusiasm to know that the business folk are out there announcing how their goals include a "Metacritic score over 90," "intended for core gamers?"

In the not-news, I noticed the other day on Kotaku that Canadian popstress Lights cut her hair like Lightning. Yeah, nobody cares, but she's cute and so is her music. No sense not giving her a bit of play.

Oh, and speaking of not-news, I just yesterday finished up a hack to our beloved forums. You'll note that I've removed the IM client buttons from everyone's posts, so if you want to find someone's MSN, AIM, Y! Messenger, or... ICQ... you'll have to hop into their profile. However, you might also note that in their place I've installed a spot where you can put in your Facebook ID or vanity name, or your Twitter username, and those will now show up with each of your posts. I, naturally, have added links to both the CoN Facebook page and the CoN Twitter account for mine, because why on earth would you want to see what I myself actually have to say? Big thanks to Death Penalty for helping test this across all our forum skins, and for some quality feedback as well.

Source: SiliconEra, Kotaku