Strike911

It's been a super long time since I've tried remixing something... so avast, here is Linebecks theme... except more dramatic. HTTP://WWW.STRIKE911.NET/linebeck.mp3 I have a rough piano/orchestral rearrangement of Linebeck's theme from Phantom Hourglass. I had been meaning to remix it somehow and forgot about it until I started playing through Spirit Tracks when I heard the tune again. Linebeck is by far one of my favorite characters in Zelda and his theme is so jovial, silly, and memorable. I wanted to make a tune that was a little more dramatic. It's still got a lot of work to do, and I realize it cuts out at the end, but its because its not done! Ha! I'm liking the sound I'm getting from the piano. I'm happy so far with that part... took what seems forever to get just right though. The whole thing needs quite a bit of polish. I'm particularly concerned with the percussion and strings towards the end, with how they kind of just show up out of nowhere, so I need to work on building them up a little before their entrance. I also want to have at least a few instruments in there, and specifically, another instrument playing in the part right at the end... some kind of harmony, I dunno. I really want to explore different styles with this theme and create a final arrangement that is something you could imagine playing as a legendary sea captain sails by. Yes, I realize its completely out of character for Linebeck, but that's the fun. Anyway, what do you think? Ideas? Suggestions? I don't do the orchestral thing often so ... I probably could use a little kick in the right direction.

Yeah, someone ask that guy what the hell is going on with those lines of text. Now I want to know !!! He lives in Redmond... same name as the writer credited... he's the best lead we've got right now. Well, I seem to have concocted some kind of preliminary theory on this mystery... They might be talking about fledgling figures at the advent of the Ultra 64's development before it was known as the Ultra-64, or even the earlier "Project Reality." Project Reality occurred as soon as Nintendo had shopped around for a graphics chip. Pre-planning MUST have occurred before this where people decided what exactly they wanted in a new machine. And with the SNES out in Japan in late 1990, plenty of guess work could have been going on as to what Nintendo wanted to try and release for the future. I read that actual development of the machine started in August of 1993 like you stated above... but that excludes any pre-planning which would have had to occurred months in advance (if not a year or so). It's possible that early predictions felt that they could hit that millions of polygons number. The Ultra-64 was billed as a machine that would offer photo realistic worlds, I remember the buzz in old gaming magazines while I was in elementary school at the time. I think recently I saw a promo video on YouTube where a marketing guy even say it while demonstrating an underwater demo of a fish swimming. When "Project Reality" finally began after nailing down a 3D chip, Nintendo "boldly" believed that the machine would be more powerful than the time's most advanced supercomputers according to this site, (http://www.answers.com/topic/nintendo-64). If that's true, then wishful thinking even earlier was possible on such a ridiculous scale. Plus it's no secret that console makers start looking at ideas to create the next generation of consoles immediately after a new system has released. The SNES came out in late 1990 in Japan, and late 1991 for North America. That's a lot of time between then and 1993 that Nintendo could have been throwing around ideas for the future. I'm leaning towards the idea that the Cukeman is referring to pre-production predictions of what Nintendo's next-gen product would be. "Project Reality" officially came underway in August of 93, which leads me to believe that the company had some early projections up probably for bigwigs preparing for the next console release. Hell, crazy inflated numbers have always happened... Sony is most famous for it in the last two generations, iirc. All console makers are guilty of it, but I seem to remember Sony getting the most flak for it. Still millions of polygons is a silly expectation at that time, but with developers believing that they could get graphics that were better than what supercomputers were capable of ... then that number might be possible hopeful thinking for the company at the time. It's the only thing that really lines up with Link's Awakening's development cycle... still. One giant gap in this theory is how a writer could get privy to this information unless someone working on the new product wanted to put an Easter Egg in LA, or Nintendo was briefing the company on their new product, but... dunno. That's my theory anyway. There are a lot of assumptions and a few gaps, but its the best guess I can make outside of saying its just futurist gibberish from a silly NPC that someone coded in secretly. I would love to find out the real answer.

I'm starting to think its just a bunch of gibberish from writers that had a secret NPC. I searched the internet and the German translation of Link's Awakening included some of these vastly different lines, all of which were removed from the DX version that came out years later. Seems like the rest of the translations loosely carry over, more or less.

Beat me to it Thalzon. They could be talking about the Super FX Chip, but then again, if I recall correctly my tenure in elementary school, StarFox came out in early 1993 before Link's Awakening. But saying the Super FX chip is capable of displaying millions of polygons? No way. It could only allow for a couple hundred, max. N64 churned out like what? 100,000? I can't remember. I think the Gamecube bumped it up into the millions, but .... that was in 2001, sure the GCN would have been in development for 2 or 3 years ahead of its release. Which would have been 1998. *shrugs* Still that's 5 years ahead and TWO generations from when Link's Awakening came out. And I honestly don't think people at Nintendo, especially, would have the foresight to predict how many polygons systems would be capable of churning out 10 or 15 years later.

Isn't that image of the girl dancing from the game DJ MAX? Yeah, these are very cool. I'll try my hand at converting some of these animated gifs to individual frames for the display. Haha!! A Giant Flashing "NO" is DEFINITELY next on the list. Lmao. As far as animations go, anything that has more than 10 or 15 frames just takes too long. I tried putting in the Prince of Persia animation but I could only include the last part where he blocks and attack, kills the guy and runs away. I think that alone was 78 frames, all of which have to be manually inserted and converted to the right filetype... I used a macro but still, it took a while. The Cat puppet was easy since it was only 4 frames and I could put it in a for loop for like 8 times, so it looks cool. Ideally, any animations should be light on the number of frames and not require too much fast frame switching. The sign seems to handle slow moving animations better... keep in mind this thing was built in late 80s, so its not as advanced an animated GIF (teehee). The Prince of Persia animation looks sweet though when its running, though it took forever to calibrate it right. For those 78 frames it required about 300KB, which is a third of the space on the floppy. lol. STILL, if you find a cool animation that you don't think would be very difficult to implement please post them as they look really impressive on the display when they're going. I was seriously considering some of those crazy black and white pixel animations that those asian people made... but I can't for the life of me remember where they were on this here intertronz. Again, ideally any animations should be light on the number of frames (around 20-ish) and though the animation speed can be fast, ideally, slower animations work and look the best. Faster animations tend to have a slight flicker since I guess the LEDs are having to fire up constantly. The pics of the guys running and the fist of the northstar gifs will work perfectly and look cool, and I'll try to convert them later tonight, but the one with woman singing, while it would look very cool is just too detailed. It's so smooth that the frames for the animation would probably fill up most of the space on the floppy. I'm a little worried about putting large animations into the machine that require a lot of system resources since the RAM is so limited. So far so good though. I've added almost all of the stuff you guys have suggested in addition to lot of game title logos and animations that I'm a fan of *Cough* Phantasy Star Online, Snatcher, Metal Gear, and Zelda *cough*. Animations look cool on the thing, but pictures are good too... so if you have any suggestions for static images *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*! The floppy disk is only half full, so yeah. Good times. Awesome stuff so far everyone! EDIT: Well, after looking at those GIFs, the fist of the north star pic and guys running are both around 10-15 frames which isn't bad at all. The girl singing is only about 55 frames, which really isn't too bad either, especially after doing that Prince of Persia gif. hehe. I might consider tossing all three of those in. Where do you guys find cool animated gifs btw?

Oh My Gosh! I love you guys! <3 This is awesome. Some of these lines are great and the actual animated files are especially super awesome in a hundred ways. I'll have to take some vids of what it looks like all together. This is awesome guys, seriously. I love the catpuppet and the prince of persia thing. Omg!!! Too awesome for words!

Haha, true and fair enough. It's terrible that I forgot to add "Please, no penises." in the original message. haha. It would be kind of funny to see people's reactions to something like that though. Anyway, yeah, no penises (or any other various number of explicit body parts) I'd prefer not to have anything on the sign that is TOO offensive. A little bit of salty humor I can deal with, but nothing too sweepingly overboard.

So I acquired this rather large LED display. It took me a few months to fix it, but I got it up and running like new. It's basically a computer built in the late 1980s with a whopping 2MB of RAM and it essentially runs DOS from a Floppy Disk to work. While it's 100% old, it's also 100% full of awesome. I love this thing, its retro but still interesting enough to be in a techie's house. The reason I'm coming to you clever OCR forum goers is because I would like suggestions of sayings, quotations or images that would be clever/interesting/funny/witty to see on a hanging LED sign. It's a slide show basically. It's not being displayed commercially so it'll just hanging in my personal space, so worrying about being offensive really isn't the biggest deal. If there are any movies, tv shows, or games that had interesting signage I want to know about it! I've got a few already. That recreation of the "Pills Here" sign from the Airport from Left4Dead is an example of one of them I've got finished. I also have "the cake is not a lie" in there too, in addition to an image of the Virtual Boy WarioLand. The WarioLand image looks both silly and awesome all at the same time since its almost the same colors as the Virtual Boy's display. I think I also have an image of Chuck Norris and another of Mr. T. The actual resolution of each image is only 128 pixels by 48 pixels, so its really limited, and it only allows for 3 colors (black, 50% red, & 100% red), so yeah. Any images suggested have to be modified by me in Photoshop before I can convert them to the weird file format the sign uses to display images. That said, pixel art works perfectly. Converting images to smaller resolutions look great on the display despite the low resolution and the fact that it's only in two shades of red or black. It helps that images be high contrast though, where the subject matter is clearly visible from the background. Like the picture of Chuck Norris I tossed on to it clearly shows Chuck Norris and a giant American flag behind him, so it works for things like that. Your suggestions and comments will make me super happy. I'll throw anything on there that is interesting, funny, or just plain cool; sayings, images, whatever. Thanks. EDIT: OH YEAH, I forgot to mention. Outside of your typical slide transitions, it can do very rudimentary animation too by playing slides in order with a no delay (or at least a shorter delay than if you wanted to display something). It's fast enough to be pretty smooth too. It's a lot of work though, but something really cool would definitely be worth it.

My GOD! YOU'RE ON TO SOMETHING HERE!

Well, having listened to most of it (just about finished) the tracks that are redone are really stellar. A few of them took me by surprise by their quality, in that, they took an old piece of music and made it sound completely different just by making the quality better. That said, there are quite a few themes that feel like they have had little done to them outside of changing their instruments. I don't know that I agree with some of the choices they've made, and some songs do sound very midi-ish. There are a handful that sound like midi's with new soundfonts laid on top. And again, on occasion those instruments don't sound great on a few choice tracks. All in all, a cool download. While its true that quite a few do sound like a glorified midi rips, the few that are really redone are very fun to listen to. Some of the instrument choices could have been better. There were at least two times where my ears hurt from a frequency coming out of some of the higher octave instruments. A trip down memory lane.

Pretty cool. I was looking for some nostalgia.

Sad times. I really enjoyed King of the Hill, even if Luanne wasn't my favorite character, she was a staple in the series.

No spoilers here... The story wasn't as original as I was hoping for. I've seen similar variations of the fundamental story in other pieces of science fiction. I still enjoyed it A LOT though! The visuals and art style were amazing. The 3D visuals were like nothing I had ever seen on screen before. And some of the creatures really reminded me of creature art back in the old Phantasy Star Online days. I had a blast with this movie, and the world really did seem alive. I was skeptical about the hype that the world would draw its viewers in, but it really did. I loved this movie. The characters were really memorable, and... hell, there are guys piloting robots. Come on. What's not to love?

The ONLY link between District 9's content and the once possible Halo film was that Jackson wanted to do a scifi film. That's it. Halo fell through, but they wanted to make a scifi film, so they made District 9, and I've read official articles backing this up straight from the horse's mouth. The point of the movie, and its strong point, goes a little deeper than a spectacle to watch. It's not a popcorn movie... the subject matter is uncomfortable and the message is pointed. It's probably one of the smarter scifi films to come out recently, but its a heavily message-filled one. The audience must be prepared for it, and its not something you'd watch to make you be in a better mood. The purpose of the film isn't to entertain you so much as it is to focus on human nature; love, selfishness, racism, prejudice, etc. Aliens are just a convenient medium to easily exhibit racism/prejudice toward without being politically incorrect. The purpose of this movie is make you think. It's not the recent Star Trek film. It's not what Halo would have been. And I think I'm happy with that.

(totally agree with Muramasa, there are a few tracks that really are memorable. I guess not too many people played it though) I'm in love with the following soundtracks: Phantasy Star Online Episode 3: C.A.R.D. Revolution (Gamecube)- Some of the orchestra tunes stick with me to this day. I know to most it's the bastard child of the Phantasy Star series, but the music was fantastic and memorable. To this day I enjoy the soundtrack immensely. Then again, I was also one of those people that enjoyed the game (not as much as PSO, but it was a fun diversion). Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (Nintendo DS) - For a DS title especially, these tunes kick ass. The entire soundtrack is stellar.

wait wait, so if we want to enter this and never have before... ... is this a remix compo or do we make something original?

The comparison between GoW and Dante's Inferno is warranted. I don't think it's necessarily a "rip off" but Visceral certainly tips their hat at God of War's gameplay heavily, mimicking GoW's staple gameplay almost exactly. After playing the demo, this game's style and look (outside of cutscenes and the story) feels -very- similar to God of War's, even down to the style of the 3D environments and the way the camera works therein. Animations and movement in general also have a similar feel. Additionally, the way you take down large enemies is exactly the same, with the instanced QTEs, which are done almost exactly the same. The slow motion effect is also there. The upgrade system for new moves. Hey, GoW was fun, so more games with this kind of established play style will be enjoyable. It was pretty fun during my play through, although, I did kind of chuckle when you first meet the Grim Reaper (or whatever that was)... or rather how you meet him. Seriously... lull... AXE! haha.

... I don't want to be overly critical because I love fan efforts like these... ... but I can't watch this thing and take it seriously at all. They try to make it too epic and focus on aspects of the Zelda series that aren't really facets of the game's story or setting at all (outside of names). I felt similarly about MGS:Philanthropy, though it did a better job retaining some of Metal Gear's look and feel. Kudos for fans taking on such a huge project and seeing it through, but I feel as if a smaller scope would have helped make this project more successful, especially when you take the story so seriously. Instead of trying to make it feel like all three of the Lord of the Rings films in a little over an hour, why not focus on a more precise retelling of a snippet of the Zelda story. That would have been more interesting. This project, as it is currently, just feels as if the producers bit off more than they could chew yet they continued to chew and chew... and chew. It's hokey. And I can deal with hokey, but not when it takes itself THIS seriously.

It depends entirely on the game and what you want to play. Some games lend themselves to being a showcase of set pieces that you are guided to. Others allow more freedom. Does either make a game good or bad? Of course not. Sure Modern Warfare 2 & Uncharted 2 more or less tell you where to go and tells you specifically which corridor to go through to accomplish your mission. But is this really all that much more different from games like Super Mario World? Are we just more tolerant of games of different genres with levels that don't change or offer an open experience? You could argue that Super Mario World is exactly the same over and over again ... but you'll almost never hear people lump Super Mario World into that same category as Call of Duty or Uncharted. The entire argument in this thread about linearity leaves out open world games, and sandbox games in general, all of which the industry had been trending towards in the last few years. I don't think saying "games nowadays are more linear than they used to be" is a fair criticism of the gaming scene as a whole, because it isn't necessarily accurate. Sure a lot of high profile games are, but maybe its just because they're more accessible to fringe console owners that wouldn't label themselves hardcore gamers. There are plenty of games where a guided experience is enjoyable to me though. Is there a little too much guidance at times in some newer games? Sure, I can see that, but I think it's just a correction being made from games of old that quite literally told you nothing about where to go and how to proceed (outside of reading an instruction manual). Just like reading a good book, watching your favorite TV show, or movie, you can go back and enjoy it regardless... There is plenty of room for both styles of play in the marketplace, and they will both continue to exist regardless.

I don't think I've ever seriously cried per se, but I did get very teary eyed during the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4. I don't think it was necessarily the game's ending itself, though. I think it was the emotional experience of witnessing all the drama from the characters, all of which were staples in my life as I grew up over the last 10+ years, hell even further than that if you want to count earlier iterations of Metal Gear. The characters grew up too; they grew old, they changed too, a few died. It was almost like sharing an experience with a close friend. It was particularly moving because of the heavy investment I had in the characters.

*cries* I've got it installed and ready to go, but I promised my buddies that I wouldn't play the game until we were all together playing in the same place, Tuesday evening. . QQ

I fully approve the haiku suggestion.

Yeah, honestly, as soon as I started playing L4D2, I enjoyed the new cast, but I started thinking, and then I realized I really missed the old characters. I don't know what happened to Bill's voice actor though. There are rumors the guy died, but I can't find any official source anywhere. Anyway, not a big deal to get a new actor if that's the case. The more I play L4D2's demo, the more I want to see the old survivors interact with the new survivors. I miss Francis saying all the things he hates. *tear in eye*

Wait until you get the military sniper rifle that hold 30 rounds before you have to reload. That thing is wicked. Also, I enjoyed the demo but just now I have a new found respect for the game. I shot a zombie that was in a full sprint in the stomach and its intestines spilled out and strung along behind it as it died. Coolest/Most hilarious thing I've seen in a while. Oh, also if you type "upgrade_add" in the console and then one of the three options it gives you after, you can add laser sights to your guns, incendiary ammo, or explosive ammo. Interesting how it works. The Laser Sight really sharpens your accuracy and just looks plain cool.