News

I'm not ashamed to admit it. CoN's Final Fantasy IV section has been a bit weak. It was always kind of the slow child of the group, even when the group consisted of only two games; the Final Fantasy VI section always overshadowed it in a pretty significant way, and in all honesty, there was good reason for it. Even after we added coverage for the PSX rehash of the game, we weren't talking about a collection of content in the league of the Rosetta Stone—as many of our longer-time members will no doubt recall, the entire section has/had long been plagued with errors from minor to simply stupid. It seemed for a while that even our improvements merely led to more errors over the years.

Things started to change in 2005 (Yes, 2005. Sad but true). Excitement over the first Final Fantasy series remake on GBA was as close to fever pitch as I can really remember, as Final Fantasy IV was getting new content and a new platform. We ached for this game, and we ached to cover it, even going so far as to find (by some miracle, I assure you) a Japanese copy of the game to begin collecting data. When the American version was released, we dropped the hammer on it, and began collecting data almost immediately. And, like I say, that was December of 2005. It's now October of 2007. And we now, finally, have something to show for it: the finest collection of Final Fantasy IV data for all three American releases (which, of course, includes all the European releases, too) that you will find in any single place anywhere. We took the last two years to completely rebuild the Final Fantasy IV section from the ground up. We rechecked and reconfigured the data for both the SNES and PSX versions, checking extensively on data sets to make sure you were getting correct info for both older versions. Beyond that, we dissected the new (...ish) Final Fantasy IV Advance cart to make sure that we could give you all the data contained therein, as well. We even upgraded the code that drives the whole thing, so you now get all of the high-end functionality you've come to expect from the Caves of Narshe, including rapid switching between game versions and extensive spoiler protection.

As usual around here, this is hardly the result of one man's work. When you visit the new Final Fantasy IV index page, which I suggest you do as soon as you're done reading, you'll see at the bottom a big, big table of people who have contributed to the section over the last two years. I can't list them all again here, but I thank each and every one of you for sticking to this even though it was quite the mountain of ordeals to get off the ground. Especially I want to thank a few people, though, for going well above the call: Del S, for a huge amount of data entry; Mimic, for a ton of editorial work towards the end of the process; footbigmike, for always being willing to do factchecking and link-clicking at a moment's notice; Sabin, for sticking with a task until completion, even though that task was brutal; and, of course, my greatest partner in crime/greatest critic Tiddles. Please show them and everyone who worked on this section with me your appreciation without delay—this is a big one in the win column for the Caves of Narshe.

But that's not all that's coming in new today. After a full year of providing links on-demand only, we're finally rolling out the real AmaCoN store, providing everything Amazon.com sells to you via CoN. It can be a bit of a long story to tell here, but if you live in the US, Canada, most of Europe, or indeed most of the world, you can now buy pretty much anything you might want, starting from right here, and CoN will get a little cut of the money. This goes for video games, books, electronics, textbooks for you Uni-attending folks, toys, even gift certificates. We've set up pages with lots of Final Fantasy stuff for you, but don't feel limited by that, because we have search boxes so you can find anything Amazon sells. So, please, start using it, and encourage your friends and family to do the same, especially with the holiday season coming quick. We use all the proceeds to fund CoN server costs and contests, so you not only get your goods, but you get a better, more fun CoN in return.

To find out more about AmaCoN, check out the AmaCoN main page; alternatively, feel free to check out one of our country-specific pages, for the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union, or Canada.

So we're still not blazingly fast. But we get there when we can.

We've got 35 brand new pieces of fanart this time round, from artists old and new alike. These awesome new submissions grace our
Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 5, Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 7
and Final Fantasy Tactics galleries, so mosey on over and enjoy great art courtesy of:

• 
  Cloudyfan
• Frozen_Aura
• Galsic
• 
  Kaine
• LilGrim1991
• 
  Narratorway


• PrinceofDamycan


• Rujuken


• Llucilla

Let's all thank them. And thank me and
Mimic, too, for putting this update together.

Ten years, but the same format for the anniversary message. Random discussion, personal message, future forthcoming fun. Don't skip ahead, please. This took me a while.

There are a lot of people out there who don't understand all the things that go into creating a website. Among those, there are even fewer who actually care, I'm sure. But for lack of a better topic, I'm going to give you a little taste of all the pieces and how they fit together. It's more relevant than you think, since the site is today celebrating a barely-precedented tenth birthday, and I think it's important for all of you to know just how we roll here. Plus it's good for my ego.

I've been a part of a lot of sites over the years, both epic and minute in scale. But the principles in play to make a good one are the same regardless of the size. You have to have someone in place to design the thing in a way that looks good and draws the user in. A good design is just designed enough to be fancy without making the site hard to use. Even more important than that is the content, of course, regardless of what some people might try to tell you. Trust me, those that say that presentation is better than content are those who have lousy content. To have meaningful content, you need to bring something to the table that's both relevant to your audience and is somehow different than what everyone else has. Kids, note that, it's why nobody reads your blogs.

Now, if you want to have a moderately successful site, you can stop there. Nobody would blame you - bringing those two things together alone is quite a feat. But you can keep going. You can market the site, to really give those users who show up something to tell their friends about and to keep them all coming back. You can make the site interactive, so it's not just people showing up to read; give them something to really wrap their hands around. You can begin to focus on refinement, not just creation. You'll learn terms like information architechture, the art of designing your content so it's neatly organized and webbed together in a way that makes it easy for your users to access everything. You'll figure out how to analyze metrics to make sure people are seeing what you want them to, and also that you're giving them the new things that they come to your site to find. And, you learn that from time to time you might have to just burn the whole thing down and build it back up from scratch.

This is relevant because, for the last ten years, we here at the Caves of Narshe have been trying like mad to do all these things in an effort to bring the best Final Fantasy content possible straight to you. Ten years ago, it was just me, sitting at a Pentium-60 with a thousand-page HTML book, and CoN was nothing more than something for me to learn a new hobby. Five years ago, it was a handful of us, most of whom are still here, rushing like crazy folk to get Caves of Narshe version 5.0, the look and feel that you'll now know as "Persona," online. And now, it's a thriving group of people dedicated not only to gaming and Final Fantasy, but also to bringing the love of the most classic Final Fantasy games to the masses. We haven't all been doing it for a decade (though, some days it feels like it, right, guys?), but we are still here because we do it better. All of it.

I think I thank you all pretty... much... every... year, but can you ever get enough of it? I have a lot to thank you for, really. You guys are the ones that come to the site and post at the forums, and come to chat, and generally appreciate the work that we all do for you here. That alone is a lot of the reason that we keep doing this. You guys are the ones that shop at AmaCoN, and every little thing that you guys buy helps pay the bills a little bit. Those of you who talk to me often know I'm cheap, so all those little purchases keep me motivated too! And some of you guys, well, you're the ones that tick me off and incur my wrath. And, in your own little irritating way, by God you all keep me around and active too.

So this year I want to thank absolutely everyone. Not just our oldest members, not just our newest members, not just my staff, but everyone who reads this. That includes you, GoogleBot. It's really a lot more personal than I think it's easy to say, but I'm going to try. Ten years ago, I had no idea that a collection of webpages was going to become a career. I was just killing time one summer, the kind of time you have to kill when you live in the middle of nowhere. Since that day ten years ago, caves and mines and holes in the ground have followed me everywhere. The site went with me to University. The site was there when I got engaged, and later married. The site followed behind when I moved halfway across the country. The Caves got me my first web job, and that was a bare three years ago. I daresay the site will be with me forever—even if one day it does not exist on the web, the education it provided and the people it brought to me will.

The lessons I learned in creating and refining this site also got me my current job, and I don't think anyone who knows me or my line of work would doubt that I've come to benefit significantly from that little turn of events. Take that full circle: I have a fulfilling and happy life, old-man grousing notwithstanding, and a major reason why is because I've been here at CoN for ten years.

I don't expect that you folks out there have had this sort of life-changing experience due to any website, let alone our humble little nook of the internets here. But hey, maybe you should stick around. Post at the forums. Chat with us about random things. Maybe you even want to help out at the site a little, who can say? Maybe in a few years you'll have the same depth of love for this site and what it means that I do. Or maybe you will go out on your own, and start checking out all that gibberish I wrote about a few paragraphs back. If you do, drop me a line ten years down the road. Let me know how it works out for you, and I'll be proud to know I played a small part, just as I hope you all are proud of the parts you have all played here over the years.

So, that's it. Ten years, complete and in the books. And the ledger says that on balance, a fine profit was had by all. But we're clearly not done yet. You'll notice today that our wizard Tiddles has just finished refreshing all the skins for the site and the forums, giving everything a fresh and time-consuming coat of paint. Of course, we've got the CoNtests running, and we plan to have more coming soon as well. The future, in fact the quite-near future, holds even more! We promise that even though it's now been ten years, we will keep you posted on the new stuff if you keep coming to check it out. At Caves of Narshe, we may no longer be just starting, but we're a long way from finishing.

We finally got to the end! After weeks of educated and completely uneducated guessing, it's finally time to present the winners of the CoN Name That Tune quiz game. We had a great turnout of over fifty participants, though not everyone was able to participate each of the three weeks, and the final round was incredibly close, with the difference between first and second place only a matter of minutes taken. From our final round of participants, I'm happy to announce our winners:

• First Place: The_Pink_Nu1


• Second Place: Sherick


• Third Place: FallingHeart


• Special Prize, drawn from all participants: Archetype

As promised, each winner is getting right away, via email, a gift certificate to be used at AmaCoN. As always, supporting CoN by buying everything you can through AmaCoN will feed the beast and allow us to do more and more contests in the future.

And speaking of which, we've got an easy contest for you now, again to celebrate this week's Tenth Anniversary of CoN. We've got ten four by six inch prints of the Caves of Narshe logo just waiting to be mailed to you, and all you need to do is click a button to be in the running to get one. I can't put the button right here, but here's the next best thing: a link to the easy signup page. If you participated in the last CoNtest, you're already in, so don't worry. We'll draw the winners on 12 August!

And one last thing for now: did you miss signing up for Name That Tune? Or did you participate, but want more quizzes? Well, everyone can now play for fun, all eight rounds of quizzes are now open to everyone, and will be for the next month. Just go back to the Name That Tune homepage and kick it back out!

More to come this week, so stay tuned.

The final round is now underway, again, sorry for the delay. This round will start immediately, and will run until 11:59pm GMT on 24 July, just to make sure that everyone has plenty of time. The final winners will be announced soon after, since I will probably be traveling for work on the 24th and 25th.

This is the round that will determine the winners, folks, so give it your all. We're taking ten of our best performers from the second round to have a shot at the big prize; your finalists, alphabetically, are:

alphasmart
archetype
Death Penalty
Dragon_Fire
FallingHeart
Nytecrawla
Sherick
Shotgunnova
Silver_Zombie
The_Pink_Nu1

And then we added two bonus participants, footbigmike and MogMaster, due to the fact that they won the two other groups in the second round. So, there you have it, the top twelve folks going for the big prizes, totaling $60 in AmaCoN gift cards!

If you're not in this list, though, make sure you participate in the final week anyway; anyone who participates this week can still be eligible for the $5 consolation prize. And, to help everyone out a little bit, we've updated the hint page to link to our last.fm pages.

Once we finish up this last round, everyone will have a chance to take all the quizzes they weren't able to take as part of the actual contest, and we'll have score leaderboards too. And after that, who knows? We'll try to set something up for you!

If you signed up for our contest, well, it's on now. You will have until midnight GMT (7pm EST) next Saturday, 7 July, to get your answers in. You've been broken into four groups, and each group gets a different quiz. The top scorers from each of the four groups will move on to the next round next week.

I'll send out a PM to everyone participating - good luck to every one of the fifty-two of you who signed up!