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Hey folks. I've decided to continue on with the compo. I'll be posting Round 3 match-ups tonight, and Round 1 and Round 2 music together tomorrow night for voting. For those wondering about my family emergency, my mom passed away last week while visiting India. While I certainly appreciate any condolences you have to offer, please do not post them in this thread; I'd like to keep the thread on-topic. A "like" on this post would be fine, though. Thanks for understanding! I'm looking forward to everyone's entries moving forward.

We're not dead, guys! The progress is being made, the feedback from the panel was recieved and the musicians are making improvments based on the feedback. We'll post another update as soon as we finish this part of work, so stay tuned!

Me, Drumultima, and two scholars not on OCR (Dana Plank and Michael Harris) have begun playing through Final Fantasy VI while we talk about what's interesting in the music as we go along. The first quarter or so of the game is done and posted to YouTube here -- join us Thursday, 2/9, at 9:00 PM EST for the next session (likely to include the opera scene). Any particular things you're interested in hearing us muse over between leaving Narshe after Terra flies off and departing for Thamasa (as far as we're likely to get next time)? Let us know! EDIT: Our second session is up on both YouTube and Twitch -- we got as far as the escape from the Magitek Research Facility. Doug couldn't make it (thanks to the Northeast weather) so we called upon Julianne Grasso to sub for him.

https://www.patreon.com/GeoffreyTaucer I have a Patreon! This has nothing whatsoever to do with games or music; I'll be making juggling videos. These will be highlight reels, tutorials, and blooper reels. So if you want to watch me play with my balls and perhaps learn to play with your own balls, swing by, check it out, and possibly throw me a few bucks. My first video (a highlight reel of some of my recent practice sessions) should be going up in the next day or two.

A quick history on the show: Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway is a variety show that airs on ITV in the UK during the late Winter / early Spring. The TV duo (Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnely) are one of the most iconic double acts of the past 20 years in this country, having grown as entertainers that worked efficiently as a duo. A quick history on the game: Sly 2: Band of Thieves is a stealth / platforming videogame released on the PlayStation 2 in 2004, and the second game in the Sly Cooper videogame series. A lot of musical motifs in the second game, as composed by Peter McConnell (whom most guys that frequent here would recognize his work in Psychonauts and Grim Fandango among other Lucasarts titles), would go on to be recurring themes in the game's following sequels. The Paris theme in particular ended up shaping motifs for what would eventually become the main theme for the Sly series as a whole. What appears to be a re-recording of a fragment for the Paris theme can be heard as backing music during The Missing Crown Jewels, the new recurring mini-drama within the current season of Saturday Night Takeaway. The time-stamp for the musical fragment goes from 2:13-3:02. When I heard it when watching tonight's show live, my mind suddenly got blown and I had to type my baffled thoughts on Twitter within seconds. Now here comes the next interesting thoughts regarding all this - did someone at the show's production team at ITV or Mitre TV think they could acknowledge videogame music in such a way and highlight the score to a mainstream viewing audience? Could it be a case of just putting in the music without giving any form of loyalties? Or was there something else that might've been behind the scenes? Either way, I've heard videogame music being brought in through TV before but ITV was the last channel I was expecting to try and pull this off. Thoughts, assuming people outside the UK can actually see the first video link?

Hylian Lemon, you never cease to disappoint. I think it's coming out great so far. Definitely sounds like something that might come from F-Zero with the frantic direction you're taking it in (not to mention those sweet SNES-esque samples). I'm always a huge fan of your stuff and I don't think this will end up being any different. Or maybe the samples are more Genesis style now that I think about it.

Okay time for impressions. Event opened, we walked down a red walkway right to the stage at the far end of the room it was set up in, that was nice. There were 4 demo stations for each game on display that was playable except Zelda, which had about 16 or so. Anyways, to go in order of what we played (went with my fiancé). ARMS: Very intuitive controls. I picked the robo-girl and he picked Spring Man (really I just keep thinking MM when I hear that name). We went through the tutorial first. Very basic stuff. Tilt Joy-Cons to move, L/R dashes in the direction you're tilting, punch to punch, tilt to turn punch, ZL/ZR to activate Flurry which just lets you unleash a bunch of punches. That's basically it for controls. And then you get into it, where you get to pick which parts you want for each arm, and that's where the fun begins. You've got your basic fists, you've got the 3-fists-in-one that I had default as robo-girl, and then there's also a boomerang. In Flurry mode these get powered up and the boomerang basically becomes the Gale Boomerang from Twilight Princess. It's great fun, I can see it being fantastic for party mode. Next up we played Disgaea 5 Complete, which was pretty standard as far as Disgaea goes. Nothing really special to mention there. After this we also grabbed our tickets for Zelda because we had to get in a group based upon time slots. After that I went on stage to challenge someone in Quick Draw, part of 1-2-Switch. The way this works is both players get in position holding their Joy-Con down with their finger on the trigger (ZL/ZR depending on the Joy-Con) and listen for the audio cue. The game goes READY then STEADY... and when it says FIRE both players raise and fire to see who gets the shot off first. The game then says the exact time it took for each player to fire and even shows the angle the controllers were at while moving. I won the first game, but lost the second. Got a nice Switch hat. I was kinda on the fence about 1-2-Switch but I can see it's very well-made and will be a blast at parties. Next up was Sonic Mania, which I didn't even know would be there. This took just one Joy-Con set horizontally to control. Knuckles was unfortunately not playable in the demo, and we could only choose between Green Hill Zone and Studiopolis. I picked the latter and it controlled wonderfully. Took a bit to get used to the Drop Dash but it's well made, and the level design is wonderful. Even more hype for this one now. Then after that we played a bit of ULTRA STREET FIGHTER II. Did three rounds of this. First round I was Zangief and my fiancé was Dhalsim. I won in the 3rd round. Next up I was Ryu and he was Vega. He annihilated me lol, and he did again in the final battle between Guile and Blanka. After that we did some Mario Kart 8 Deluxe battle mode. I needed revenge. Picked Fem-Villager and he chose Waluigi. Course was randomly picked, and it was Battle Course 1 from Super Mario Kart. The mode was Bob-Omb Blast, where the only item you get it Bob-Ombs and you can hold as many as you collect because the point is to blow EVERYTHING UP JUST BLOW IT ALL UP OH THE HUMANITY IT ALL BLEW UP. I was in the lead for a short while (when you're in the lead you end up wearing a crown and it goes away once you lose that lead) and ended up 3rd overall (we were playing against 10 CPU). I'm sure that in the full game you'll be able to turn off CPUs entirely in Battle Mode because you can do that in MK8 already. After that we kept the explosions going in Super Bomberman R. Which is classic Bomberman action brought back to current consoles. So much fun. Also includes the whole "when you die you get to throw bombs from the edges" thing from some installments, and if you take someone out in this way you take their place and rejoin the fray. And if you land a bomb directly on someone while on the sidelines (you usually throw one space away, not in the adjacent one) you'll stun them. Great fun, and up to 8 players too iirc. We only had 4 though. Then we went to Puyo Puyo Tetris. They had us stick to the Swap mode of multiplayer, which would keep you in Puyo Puyo mode for 30 seconds then swap to the Tetris board for 30 seconds and then back to Puyo Puyo for another 30 seconds and so on and so forth until someone lost. And the board you started on wasn't always Puyo Puyo, it would randomly choose at the start of each round. Very basic fare for both of those, and if you had a combo going in one mode as it swapped it would continue and affect the other. So it's really built for those who are good at both. However, my fiancé was rockin' the Tetris board while I was rockin' the Puyo Puyo side so we balanced each other out that way. So it works. Lastly, we played our demos of Breath of the Wild. You start off doing a new game, and have to OPEN YOUR EYES. Then get the slate, get clothes and climb outside. From there you get to do anything, which we of course already knew. That's not the point of THIS impression. It's nice to be right into the game that quickly compared to other Zelda games that have absurdly lengthy intros *coughSScough*. I went right, found a stick, gathered mushrooms, then set the stick on fire and started a small grassfire because lol. Also apparently hitting apples with a burning stick bakes them, so that was nice. I then found an axe, cut down a tree, and entered the Temple of Time. Or the ruins of it, at least. Prayed to the statue of the Goddess Hylia, and then headed outside and tried to climb the temple. Failed. Walked 10 feet to the right and found a ladder. Climbed it, found a bow, and then jumped off... and died. Link's leg was bent in the completely wrong direction so that visual was well-done. Reloaded the save and then tried to climb down the ladder and ended up jumping off (not dying this time) and then found a Bokoblin base. Managed to take them out with the axe, including the really tough leader (this was in the skull rock y'all might've seen in screenshots being blown up). The leader kept leaving himself open long enough for my axe swing to connect twice and cancel his attack. He even leapt at me once and I knocked him like 10 feet away! Also stole his spiked club (which has like 3x the attack power of the axe) and killed him with it. Also when firing arrows you'll need to adjust for distance because the physics engine in the game is very well made. I killed a few more Bokoblins, stole their meat, and them climbed a rock... and then the demo time was up. And then we left because nothing else really interested us. My fiancé's playthrough consisted of him bumbling into the Talus Steppe thing (the giant rock golem) and getting murdered. He also successfully hunted a boar (headshots are the way to go, he says, as hitting them anywhere else causes them to flee, and you need to use a bow. Also be very aware of how much sound you're making, it tells you in the lower-right corner), and then fell to his doom and then drowned trying to catch a fish. Both of us were very pleased. But yeah we left after that. They gave us cookies with the Switch logo on them as we left. All in all, great games. Didn't really check out anything else (wasn't interested in them). The controllers are very comfortable and lightweight. Forgot to play in tablet mode cause I didn't think about it, OH WELL.