News

Well, the Fanfic contest has closed, the result are in, and it's true to say that we didn't get many entries, but it's also true to say everyone who did enter has at least won something. Thanks to those who entered and a reminder for the next time to anyone else that the fact 100% of entrants won something is a good reason to enter future fic contests. Keep your eyes peeled (or even sign up to the RSS gizmo) in the future for any we do run.

The quality of the entrants made up for apparent lack of quantity, and the judges had a tough time in scoring the four quality fics entered into the contest by the three participants. We did not get any entries into the comedy section, for reasons unknown. Possibly the Large Hadron Collider providing us more than enough comedy by failing to work, or possibly just general credit crunch misery, but either way, there was no funny. We did get four entries from three people, and though sadly we can't give you a nice picture to look at like with the fanart, perhaps we can reverse the equation and have a thousand words equal a picture.

In descending order, our fourth place entry but third placed entrant, A Bards' Fallen Love earning a third place prize. The only non-FF6 entrant to the contest and the shortest, it is by no means a bad fic even if it was technically last placed, but Tesco was unfortunate to face very tough competition and only narrowly missed out on a higher placing.

The third and second places in terms of points went to The Shadow and About Being King. The latter story also won the General category, meaning that Lockpick wound up winning three prizes from the contest.

The winner overall in first place as well as the winner of the scene selection category however was Mirrors into Windows by MeaPortia, earning the overall first place prize in addition to the prize for the category win.

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks to them for entering. For those of you who are now reading the winners and maybe also browsing the rest of our fanfic library, perhaps you might feel inspired by what you read to submit your own fanfics to us or tell a friend who writes to do the same. In fact, watch this space. There might be something along to write fanfics about.

Since I wasn't able to close the contest on time, I figured at least I could spend part of my Saturday making sure the winners were on time!

Thanks to all those who entered, all those who told their friends to enter, and even those who just wanted to enter but never got around to it; the CoN Summer Fanart contest is now over as I announce these two winners. We're not sure when we'll run another contest, but as long as you keep an eye out here (perhaps subscribing to our RSS feed might help), you will be sure you'll be among the first to know next time.

Now, on to the winners. We only got enough entries, sadly, to offer up two prizes; one goes to the overall top scorer among our judges' responses, and the other goes to the entry that we judged to be the most creative in concept out of them all.

First, let's discuss our victor of the most creative prize, a ten-dollar gift card to AmaCoN. Our artist's work for this prize caught us off guard. It's deceptively simple at first glance, but as you start to take it all in, you start to appreciate the different levels at which it's clever. We really quite enjoyed the way that the photo cutouts present different characters than the actual subjects of the piece, and the little detail of Umaro ripping his cutout right off the deck instead of stooping over gave us a genuine laugh when we noticed it. So, congratulations to Galsic, taking home the prize for most creative submission! You can view his new art in our gallery right now, or view the thumbnail right here!



And, our only other prize to be given out today, the grand prize of this contest, a forty-dollar AmaCoN gift card, goes to an artist who has been around CoN forever. His entry was also very clever, so much so that he nearly overtook Galsic to capture both prizes. The format he used allowed him to tell a full story and while it doesn't necessarily have the bold color and sharp detail of some of our other entries, the story both fit our "Vacationing Heroes" theme, and showed a significant amount of effort in laying out each panel. Not only that, we found it darkly humorous to boot, with a payoff at the end that you might not see coming. Once you see the piece in our gallery, you'll know right away that it could have come from only one guy here at CoN: congratulations to Narratorway for taking home top honors this time around. Surely you now want to see his winning fanart entry, so don't let us stop you once our thumbnail below sinks in a bit!



Again, congratulations to our winners, and thank you very much to everyone who supported our new fanart system with an entry. We appreciate every one of you and if I could afford to give you all a prize I happily would. Please keep submitting and keep bringing your friends to not only submit to our galleries, but also to see the great work we already have in place. Hope to see you all again here soon!

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride and Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume both received release dates for the United States: February 17th for Dragon Quest and March 17th for Valkyrie Profile, both in 2009.

Dragon Quest V is a DS remake of a SNES game that was previously remade for the Playstation 2. It chronicles the story of a nameless hero journeying to rid the world of an evil demon's influence while searching for the truth behind his heritage and finding love in the process. Covenant of the Plume is the third game in the cult hit Valkyrie Profile series made by longtime Enix collaborator Tri-Ace. The story is of a young warrior whose father died in battle and was subsequently taken by Lenneth (the protagonist of of the first Valkyrie Profile) to be one of Odin's Einherjar. The son strikes a deal with the queen of the damned, determined to exact revenge upon Lenneth.

Both of these games will give DS-owning American fans of Square-Enix something to spend their hard-earned money on before spring begins.

Source: Kotaku

Some of you might be wondering why there hasn't been any announcements of the fanart contest as yet. If you're not wondering, with hope you are now. The reason is twofold, and neither is terribly impressive. I'll get to those later, though, and put the important info up here:

We're extending the art submission deadline for eleven full more days (plus a few hours) - you now need to have your art in on October 31, Halloween.

Now for the reasons, should you want to know:

1) I, fortunately for me but unfortunately for CoN, had to change jobs right before the contest was set to close. Up until right now, I've barely been around while I did all the things necessary for me to leave my old job and get settled in my new one, and that precluded me from doing anything for the site that required much effort besides clicking.
2) We honestly, frankly, are low on entries. This works out poorly for me, as I really did want to give out lots of prizes and see the new fanart system become a fast success thanks to all you folks submitting. However, this can work out really well for you, as if you've submitted, you have a pretty good chance of getting some prize!

So, with those two things in mind, you have my mea culpa on reason number one. However, I do expect that you artists out there will kick in some more art in the very near future to make up for reason number two. Get started, I want to give away prizes.

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.