News

In years past, CoN has played many a practical joke on its users. They were all hilarious, and everyone enjoyed a good laugh, mostly at the expense of those fooled. However, this year, starved of inspiration and a decent amount of time, we decided to do something a little different. A treasure hunt, if you will. Easter's coming up, and who doesn't like searching around for the Easter Eggs hidden in every nook and cranny of a house? Or, in this case, a website.

Today, we have initiated a small change to every page on CoN. It's subtle enough that we're breaking tradition to tell you about it, but we've decided to challenge you to find the pieces of our puzzle, and put it all together. Of course, no competitiveness is without rewards for success. At the very least, you can win a special CoN award, and possibly more. Throughout the day, we will update this thread (But not this specific post) with any members who have fully and successfully solved the puzzle. And believe us, we WILL know. We're special like that.

We have no current intention of giving away clues either. That goes for in the forums, in a PM, or in chat. You're on your own, folks - but if you choose to band together as one mighty force, then more power to you. However you tackle it, we masterminds wish you the best of luck.

Ready... set.......... GO.

You might have noticed over the last few hours that some new content has appeared in the posts made by many of your fellow CoN members. It's all part of the new awards system we've added to the forums today, in which we're giving awards, much like gaming achievements, to all of our members who have been a part of making CoN great.

The awards right now fall into a few major categories:

• Winners of CoNtests and competitions on the site;
• Winners of CoN competitions, such as our yearly sporting competitions;
• People who have contributed significantly to the content of the site, either from working on a game section, or posting lots of fanart or news;
• Or just people who have been around forever...

You've probably seen systems like these before at other sites. The difference? Well, ours are much prettier! (And we're willing to take suggestions on new awards all the time.) So, if you got one or more awards and want to show them off, talk about the award system right here, right now. And if you don't have any awards yet, well, don't worry - we'll be giving more out all the time.

As I mentioned last night, the contest that was running for CoN Quizzes closed on New Year's Eve. If you can't remember all the way back to August to think of the terms, allow me to recap:

"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."

I checked the records on New Year's Day, and we had eleven people who took enough quizzes to qualify, from members among our very first to folks who have even yet to post at the forums. It's one of the latter who takes home the prize—congratulations to Tiael, who will soon have a PM in his inbox with information on how to collect. For everyone else, please talk Tiael into posting and becoming more of a part of the CoN community by congratulating him here!

The new quizzes for January/February 2010 are available now, so just because you can't win money now doesn't mean you should allow Tiael to remain at the top of the heap. Go now and take the new quizzes!

We've been doing some behind-the-scenes work over the last couple weeks or so that you might have seen as you peruse the site; while we're not quite done with everything, I wanted to give you guys the heads-up both so you can enjoy the new stuff and also keep an eye out and report anything you see that looks funny while we continue to work.

The main thing that I've been working on recently is some updates to the way our still-new news section works. I've updated the main site RSS feed to now link directly to news articles, making it easier for you to read and comment without having to get all the way into the forums from the RSS feed. Note that if you subscribed to the old RSS feed, you can continue to use it, but you should really consider upgrading to the new one, as it will give you full stories and cleaner links to read and comment.

An added benefit to the new feed system is that we've also made RSS feeds for all of our news categories, too. If you have a particular interest in just one part of our news, such as News from Japan, you can RSS it directly and filter news via individual feeds.

I've also added a feature where you can share CoN news via Facebook, simply by clicking a couple links, so your friends can be as knowledgeable about the news we cover as you are. I'll be refining this feature in the near future, as well as possibly adding more functionality, such as the ability to tweet our news via your Twitter account as well.

Meanwhile, Tiddles and I, with some early help from footbigmike, Dragon_Fire, Hanyou, Del S and Olly, have done some tweaking to the forums. You probably won't notice most of the changes, as they're very specific to the server-side operation and security of the forums, but they do lay the groundwork for some other server upgrades that we're hoping to do quite soon indeed that will allow us to improve overall site security and possibly add other new features down the road.

So, please keep using the site just as you always have, and if you have any problems, let us know right away in the Errors and Troubleshooting forum. Thanks!

Not many tidbits to be had currently, now that the Tokyo Game Show has ended, so we won't strain you terribly this week. First, note that Square Enix has set a target of six million copies sold of Final Fantasy XIII in order to consider the game a success. In Japan. Apparently, Final Fantasy XII only managed to sell that many copies globally, and Dragon Quest IX has shipped only about four million in Japan—good numbers, but not quite to the scope of this new number. Note that this goal doesn't appear to include Versus, either, only the core game.

Why is this contradictory? Well, while the company aims for blockbuster numbers, they're also laying off a bunch of folks in Japanoville. The rumor is that between two and three hundred folks will be out of work soon; however, this has yet to be verified and it also could be people under the Square Enix banner who were only brought in via Squenix' recent spate of acquisitions and mergers. In any event, it's interesting that they plan to sell massive amounts of their next flagship game but yet are cutting back inside their own offices.

Finally in terms of Square, a kind soul has subbed the Tokyo Game Show trailer for Final Fantasy XIII. As you might expect, the translation isn't the best English you're ever going to see, but if you're in the strong majority here at CoN who does not have a conversational command of the Japanese language, it's probably all you're gonna get until the game's localized and out in the West next year.

I also note that the next set of quizzes are now up. If you haven't taken any quizzes yet, why not? There is still a prize to be won! And maybe a surprise after you take one, hm?

Source: Kotaku, GameTrailers

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!