E3 is back baby. The rumor mill's been churnin hard and there's already been a few drops. I'm certainly excited about E3 again, and that hasn't happened in about three years.

So here's the topic for E3 links, video, discussion, whatever.

Gametrailers E3 section. Gamespot E3 live stream.

Just a few hours ago at the Game Developper Conference in San Francisco Nintendo revealed two games which sit at either end of the game idea spectrum.

On the completely stunned end of the spectrum is Rock n' Roll Climber, which looks to be a College game design project that somehow mistakenly ended up on Nintendo's release list. You use the Wii controller and balance board to climb a cliff, and then play a guitar once you reach the top... The unanimously negative comments on Kotaku do a fine job of summing up public opinion on this announcement.

And on the "it's about time Nintendo" end of the spectrum is a new Zelda game on DS titled "The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks". The visuals look very similar to Phantom Hourglass, and the boat has been replaced with a train... so the game may be lacking a bit in the creativity department, but at this point I'll take just about anything that somewhat resembles a real game from Nintendo.

[ Screenshots at IGN ]

Wow that was the longest downtime in Fourside history! By the way January 15th was the 9th anniversary of this site so it was a pretty lousy time for things to go wrong!

So anyway, here's the story for anyone interested in what happened. After several months of instability, the Fourside server finally kicked the bucket. At first glance it looked like the problem was leaky/bulging capacitors on the motherboard.

Unfortunately it wasn't that simple.

Plugging the Fourside hard-drive into another computer to retrieve data produced sparks and smoke, things you definitely don't ever wanna see come out of a hard-drive. Any further attempts to power the drive simply resulted in more sparks, and more smoke. At this point I was pretty sure I was never gonna see my files again. I had a few tiny backups from a few weeks ago on a flash drive, but much of my personal stuff would have been lost forever. I didn't give up though! After a couple weeks of research and much help from Dalton we solved the hardware issue by removing a cracked diode from the bottom of the drive. The drive would now boot, but the data was in pretty sore shape.

At this point I was ready to start running data retrieval and hard-drive repair software and wasn't really expecting to get anything at all off of the disk. Almost by magic however, when I tried the drive back home in the computer Andrew lent me I was able to view the files! Copying data was tedious as the drive was super slow and would occasionally return an error or simply freeze the computer, but I managed to get all of my important stuff back, including this up to date copy of Fourside!

First thing I'm gonna do now is start looking for a nice high-tech new computer!

Happy New Years from Fourside! In celebration I've made the site a little bit wider to fit better with higher/wider screen resolutions. A few things are slighty larger as well. Feel free to vote on the Poll and let me know if you prefer the new look. It's simple enough to go back if people just hate it.

Lately I've been feeling it's time to do an actual full redesign of this site. So much of the layout, interface, html and backend code is terribly out-dated. We'll see how this wider look goes first though I think.

It's about time we have a new post/thread!

Happy Birthday!

Yes the moment has finally arrived. Thanks to the efforts of some very awesome people, we are now able to play what may be the greatest game ever created, in english!

I'm stuck at work for another few hours so all I can do is sit and lose my mind, but for the rest of you, click below and get started! (And if you haven't played through Earthbound already, shame on you!)

[ Mother 3 / Earthbound 2 Fan Translation ]

And I am SO pre-ordering that awesome looking handbook these guys are putting together.