News

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

After too much waiting for a game that doesn't require any real localization at all, Amazon.co.uk now has a release date for Final Fantasy IV DS; it's September 5, 2008. Of course, that's coming up in just over three weeks, which really makes sense given that there wasn't any real localization necessary. As usual, AmaCoN tries hard to get all preorders to you on the actual release date of the game, so you won't have to wait: order now.

The other new release dates for the day are for the new Harvest Moon games, for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii, subtitled "Island of Happiness" and "Tree of Tranquility" respectively. While the Harvest Moon series has always been a bit niche, even for a series that has been going on for over a decade, I know there are quite a few fans who might be looking to pick these games up; if you're one of them, you can preorder now for a DS release on August 26 and a Wii release on September 16. Not only that, Amazon preorders for these games pack in farm animal plushies as bonuses. So, uh, get your farm... animals?