It's hard to believe that it's been close to a year since I posted an update to The Lost Worlds. There is a good reason for that, and I'm going to have some exciting news to share soon. But enough about that for now.

Tomorrow (13 October 2009), Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will hit store shelves. Uncharted 2 is the latest game that Legacy of Kain director Amy Hennig and designer Richard LeMarchand have been working on for Naughty Dog. The original was a truly spectacular adventure game, and based on the previews I've seen of this sequel it looks to be even better. I've had my copy pre-ordered for quite awhile, and I cannot recommend more highly that you check it out.

A few months ago, Daniel Cabuco (another former long-time member of the Kain team) sent me some original texture files from The Undercity and The Temple, one of the major areas deleted from the original Soul Reaver, and they are now available on that page. Thanks Daniel!

In other prerelease/deleted material news, Raina Audron (a fan of the series in Slovakia) has put together a really comprehensive and interesting comparison between two different beta versions of Soul Reaver and the final (retail) version of the game.

Legacy of Kain: Prodigal Sons is one of the more promising fan efforts I've seen over the years. Creating a complete game is still a daunting task, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Jake Pawloski's project turns out.

As part of this update, I've removed the download-limiting functionality from TLW. It was causing a lot of people to have trouble downloading the Soundtracks, which I apologize for. As far as I can tell, it was something related to differences between PHP4 and PHP5, because I switched hosts last year and that's the only change I'm aware of (my old host was using PHP4). It could also just be that PHP is a terrible language. All I know is that the scripts worked fine on the old host, but not on the new one. This new host doesn't cap my bandwidth, but if the crazy Russians or Brazilians (or anyone else, for that matter) start downloading the same thing over and over again I will just outright ban them from the site because I don't want to aggravate my provider unnecessarily.

Removing that functionality involved performing a complete rebuild of TLW using an updated version of Charon, the batch software I wrote to create and maintain the site, so if you notice any bugs (broken links, etc.), please let me know using the Contact form. Note that you may need to clear your browser cache in order for the site to display properly, since some of the links and code are different now.

Finally, I know it's a little late in coming, but for those of you with access to a PS3, I'd recommend giving inFamous a look. I actually bought and played through it when it came out earlier this year, and I was blown away by what a solid adventure game it was. I noticed a lot of aspects that made me think that the design teams were big fans of Soul Reaver, even though the setting (a modern-day city) is very different on the surface. I don't want to provide any spoilers, but this feeling only intensified the further I got into the game.