The Lost Worlds will officially be five years old in two days. This new version you are seeing is its birthday present, which I've been working on since last year. Some of the changes you might notice are:

• A brand new design, including reorganized navigation.
• Nearly all of the content has been rewritten and updated.
• Nearly every screenshot has been recreated at a higher resolution or better quality.
• Concept art no longer has watermarks.

What you may not notice immediately is the entirely new system I'm using to build and maintain the site, which will make it much easier for me to keep it up to date and add new information.

Oh, who am I kidding? You're here to see the deleted material from Defiance. I've finally revealed everything I know to have been planned for that game but which ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe when you're done looking at that you'll have time to see the other improvements.

Speaking of Defiance, there is no official imagery currently available to go with the newly-published information. So I am announcing the first ever opportunity to have your fan art displayed on The Lost Worlds. I have always liked fan art, but couldn't think of a way to work it into the theme of the site. If you would like to illustrate some of the Defiance deleted material as you imagine it, please send a copy in PNG or JPG format to fanart@thelostworlds.net.

A few areas and articles are still unfinished. The Library and the Technical Documents section are offline while they are rebuilt. Some of the lesser material from each game is still being reworked into new articles, although this is mostly limited to things like demo versions which do not contain anything not present in the full game. The archived update posts have not been imported into the new site yet. There will be additional updates in the next week or two to help fill in the gaps and provide some new information as well.

Along with the overhaul of the site are two things you should be aware of:

• The new contact form. My old benlincoln@speakeasy.net mailbox is going away in the next week, so if you want to get in touch with me and don't have my new address yet, please use the form.
• The Download_Policy is no longer just a suggestion, there is now an automated system in place to protect against the small minority of visitors who abused the ability to freely download files. This will not affect the vast majority of visitors, but please read the policy to make sure you're not inadvertently violating it.

I hope all of you enjoy the new Lost Worlds as much as I have in creating it.

I just finished a utility for the PC version of Blood Omen 2 which allows for a whole bunch of cheat and debugging options to be configured: Blood_Omen_2_Control_Station. This utility replaces the older BO2 Hax0r and BO2_INVCHEAT programs, as it includes all of their functionality and much more.

I've added the first of the fan art to the Defiance section - two excellent pieces by CharletDukaine in A_Shield_for_Raziel, and one less than excellent piece by myself in Placing_the_Soul_Reaver_in_Avernus. Be warned - if no one else submits art, I may be forced to use my own for some of the other articles.

This much-delayed update is now (mostly) ready. The Library is now back online (with the exception of the magazine lists), including a number of "Special Exhibit" articles. The article on German_Special_Editions includes a number of previously-unavailable pieces of artwork, and the Retail_Action_Figures article covers all of the released figures including NECA's Kain.

There is new fan art in the Defiance section - Edge of the Coin shows us what The_Resurrection_of_Vorador and Umah might have looked like, Raina Audron envisions The_Sanctuary_of_The_Clans, and A_Return_to_the_Soul_Reaver_Era is depicted by Asrael Shannara.

I have also released the first version of a Soul_Reaver_2_Trainer that I wrote in .NET with a bit of help from Andrew_Fradley. It allows access to The_Debug_Menu and Camera_Control in the English 1.02 PC version of the game. There are a bunch of wallpaper-sized screenshots in the camera control article to show off what it can be used for.