Liontamer

I think it'll just be mentioned in the writeup, much like http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01341/ EDIT: We have a winner! Yep; seriously whatever you come up with is cool. The title really just me being preposterous, so don't sweat it. Although on my site, I'll probably just keep the title that I have. So yeah, whatever you end up with is fine. -K

Haha, is that what's been holding you guys up? Well, I'd love the whole title, but if not then however much of the title you can fit in is fine with me I guess. Even if it doesn't make sense I PMed Kunal in order to see how he felt about the name so we could get this up. If you go with Kunal's preference, I think the best we can do (and still keep it sensible ) is Wild ARMs 2 "Lord Blazer, the Robot who time travels..." or "Lord Blazer, the Robot who time travels back..."; I'll leave it up to you.

This "zircon", he's white, and I've never heard of him, but I'll give him a chance.

Lockdown 2. We've already looked at it.

http://www.tzone.org/~llin/psf/packs2/Chrono_Cross_psf.rar - 106 "Reminiscence - Feelings Not Erased" (:00-1:50) & 307 "Time of the Dreamwatch" (1:50-4:10) I like the track, but the arrangement doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the source. "Reminiscence - Feelings Not Erased" is solo piano, and the first half here is basically a playthrough of the original only a bit more delicate and with more embellishments/accompaniment. Nothing really going on to distinguish it significantly from the original. Second half is a fairly straightforward conversion to some richer sounds than the original. The drum writing sounds way too similar and the melody's verbatim. 2:30 finally brought in some nice original material, and then combined it at 3:00 with piano playing the Dreamwatch melody for a little bit. But at 3:33 it was back to the conservative cover for the finish. I'd like to hear some branching out in terms of the instrumentation Reu uses for his cinematic-style writing. I suppose if it ain't broke don't fix it, but it really makes his material sound too samey and formulaic. The same criticisms apply for the tempo and mood, IMO. You can only eat steak for dinner each night for so long before you get tired of having the same thing every time. This was genuinely enjoyable, and I actually liked all of the sounds, but it's not interpretive enough or additive enough to significantly distinguish it from the originals. NO

Guys, what in the hell is the holdup? Stop making us look bad.

Another old 404 from January 25th, I finally got a copy from Stewart. Original letter is quoted with the new, working URL in place. http://www.zophar.net/nsf/castleva.zip - Track 9 ("Posion Mind") Opens up with some really basic, beginnerish-sounding thumping and distortion. The synth design is really really really basic, and there's not much going on in the way of texture to fill out the track beyond the backing beats and distortion. There's effort put into creating some limited dynamics by dropping some parts in and out over time, but the effectiveness is really limited. By 1:28, you've seemingly heard all of the ideas here and there's quite a lot of time left to go. Luckily we at least got something different on lead at 1:56-2:26. Some very simple phasing-style thumps built up the next/last section at 2:51, which was basically a rehash of the first part with some phaser/laser beam SFX on top. Should be (and it was) pretty difficult getting enough mileage out of a 7-second-long theme. 3:51-long with the arrangement, I didn't really have to listen to it to know it was gonna be a challenge here. So yeah, too repetitive, I'm not sure how you're gonna make an idea like it work. Israfel managed to pull off more with less with his Pac-Man mix though, so it's not impossible. The arrangement was fairly basic, but you at least changed the rhythm and tempo of the source. You gotta go for more variations in there to keep things fresh. And last but not least, I dunno when you're gonna get around to it, but your sounds are generally terrible. It's not that you need expensive stuff, but the synth design is so defaulty, thin, overly simplistic and poorly done that you don't have anything approaching a good texture. I'm not a hater, but you gotta step up that game, bro. This stuff has no chance. NO

http://snesmusic.org/spcsets/fzero.rsn - "Mute City" (fz-09.spc) Well, y'all know me, I'm generally not about the lo-fi. I felt a lot of subtle details got obscured on account of the production, and wished for something cleaner. I would have liked to have heard Gray tackle the source files for a production nudge, but the overall atmosphere was very good regardless. The arrangement on just the intro was excellent, from the guitar fade-in to the referencing of the source melody to the bass work to the percussion. The percussion work in particular was ridiculously well-written. Very very interesting to listen to on its own, I loved all of the different instruments and tones Jon employed there. I liked wet-sounding guitars on melody at :53 for a very nice laid-back, tropical vibe. Snappy percussion at 1:17 only added to the enjoyment. Nice chill section from 1:36-2:23. The arrangement never loses track of the source material at any single point, even during the guitar soloing when the bass keep working away at it. It'll satisfy both those who want their arrangements straightforward as well as those who want lots of additive original ideas and personalization. It's really the best of both worlds, and does a great service to the source material. Production was a hit on some level and IMO you do get a sound quality disparity with the drums vs. nearly everything else, but the writing was nothing short of A-grade/official arrange album quality. The progress on this one reflects a turbulent ride for Jon, but after hearing the WIPs for this one since a few years ago, I'm glad this one's finally seen the light. And Champion Vinyl? Stick with that name. YES

Just letting y'all know that I'm at Emory and will be doing tonight's finale as planned. Hope you enjoy the show, and I'll see you on the other side.

Ha, after being awake 47 hours straight in the past few days, my body did the only sensible thing and went to sleep. As soon as I got home, ZzZ. This fucks up my schedule, that's for sure. So if I can't do this show tonight, I'll have to scrap it, which I don't plan to do. So we'll handle things tonight at 2AM EST now that I've gotten some rest.

I'm gonna sum this up really quickly. Just like the game characters in the top right corner emphasizing the interests of this site, we use mostly VG avatars because that's the kind of fansite this is. We don't really care about uniqueness or the principle behind the avatar. It doesn't stop a fair amount of people from being recognized that way to begin with. We have this system so the avatars don't look big, clunky and ugly with people using 80 different dimensions or animated GIFs cluttering up the look of the forum. If we used GFF's system, we'd just be copying GFF, which is ultimately a lame idea. AFAIK, there will be sig limits under vB as well. But once we switch to vB, you know as well as I do that you can turn off viewing signatures entirely just like at GamingForce or any other vB-based forum, so why you're even complaining about them is beyond me.

OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST SWAP ONE BLACK FOR ANOTHER! WELL, OK... MAYBE. But in all seriousness, I'm probably too busy to do anything or at least have 0 idea what my schedule is until I get settled in Washington. But being a hop, skip and a jump away, I'll special guest star or some special dealie one time. I miss John in there already. Black power.

Looking forward to playing some of these on VGF in an hour or show. This should be excellent! Thanks, Roland!

Now that I think about it, I've been not looking forward to trying to do two decidedly long shows back-to-back like this at all, and that's definitely not the way I ever planned to go out. It'll be completely unenjoyable if I can't take calls tonight AND try and cram the finale in there when I'm already gonna be dog tired. So I'll just do the finale tomorrow night. Sorry if that makes it an impossibility for people that have work/school the following Monday, but I'll be doing right by me in order to keep myself sane and be able to relax a little more. I believe it'll have to to be Sunday late-night at 2AM EST, and it should be about a 4 hour show covering this final season's best-of-the-best. If I can swing midnight EST instead, I will, but I dunno about the availability. There. I feel better already.

Send it over, so I can check it out.

Home stretch, y'all. Now if for SOME REASON, I'm too out of it to do the finale show right after VGF84, I will come back the following night in order to do it, though it'll probably be very late like 2AM. Obviously not a preferable time there, but I'll have to make due with it. But the plan is to do the first show, MP3 it really quickly and then record the finale which is not open to any calls. This is so I can keep things done in a reasonable time and because the best of shows are about music rather than calls. Plus I'm sure VGF84 will have too many calls. Please don't be offended if I don't take your call. I hope you understand that it doesn't mean I don't appreciate your company or your support of the show. I hate to seem like I DON'T want to talk to people and talk about the show ending and all that, but my time is really limited in that I'm essentially screwed in terms of handling everything I need to do before I move if I spend more time at the station than I need to. Doing both shows will likely be in excess of 8 hours, and I'd really like to not push that amount as I have a lot of editing to so as well. Aight, we'll see you there, no? (NO!)

Nah, I would just say you don't know the standards.

Anything bashing the people instead of the song, as well as needless bitching about pixietrick's website loading blank (it has a white background and if you don't have Flash installed, the content will not display), OR begging/comforting/reassuring pixietricks in lieu of that emotional ("emo" for short) outburst of pessimism has been and will be deleted. Grow up, kids. In other places in this review thread, there have been some perfectly fine comments from people who have nothing good to say about the track. Like it or dislike it, listen to DarkeSword, just say your piece on the song and keep the comments focused on the song. If you don't like the mix, don't be a douche about it. Only the judges get to do that.

Bitch, plz. Voting auto-YES on retro sounds is just as stupid as you voting auto-NO (which you do).

Finally got it runnin'. Now getta goin'.

2:30AM it is, folks. See y'all there.

Just to let you know, I'm at Emory now. In case the 12AM show does in fact show up, I'll have my show starting around 2:20AM. If not, I'll start around 12:30AM. Happy listening.

I'll buy you some candy to make up for it. Feel free to try and get in before I start playing CS stuff, but that's about it. Not to be a douche, but I figure everyone's had a lot of opportunities to call during past shows since #61. I'm about ready to wrap the show up my way, and that way is with rather minimal talkies.

Hahaha! It is absolutely thundering and lightning...ing all over Atlanta tonight, so poor lil' ole me without an umbrella for myself or my computer is shifting the show over to tomorrow night at 2AM EST, which is the same time of week I did my last make-up show, so I know the spot is free. Hopefully the weather will actually be accomodating then, and whoever's there will be able to enjoy the show. I added a few more tracks to the VGF83 playlist that you're going to enjoy, so tune in if you can. Weather.com says: 7pm: Rain / Thunder 8pm: Rain / Thunder 9pm: Rain / Thunder 10pm: Rain / Thunder 11pm: Rain / Thunder 12am: Rain / Thunder 1am: Rain / Thunder 2am: Rain / Thunder

Monday night going into Tuesday, kids. That's why it says Monday night.