Level 99

Two months from tomorrow...

My choice to buy or not buy Sony stuff is my own. It's the same deal with Activision with me: I really don't support some things. What did you expect from something this high profile? People want a piece of it. Most people who want things legitimately are the ones who want fraud and credit protection. Also that Anonymous thing, if true, doesn't really mean much. The association with anon is loose, and anyone could have claimed to be them. Doesn't mean it isn't true, but I wouldn't take that at face value either.

http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/dc-universe-online/news/sony-update-lawsuits-congress-absences-and-free-stuff/a-20110503173540877058/g-2008071616510625061 Canada says: "ONE BILLION DOLLARS."

If you're ready for that kind of eval, gotta change the status to Mod Review. I'll get back to you with some notes shortly.

http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/playstation-3/news/sony-announces-user-data-stolen-from-soe-servers/a-20110502172027553006/g-20060314115917309058 No, it is the part of the same attack. I understand zircon's position on this, but trying to calm the fervor and point out how these people who might have had their info leaked, who are frustrated, scared and sometimes even paranoid, are wrong is not a smart idea. Calling them childish for jumping a bit too far in the over-concerned category is also definitely not called for. What do you expect, Andy? I'm upset over this too. And despite what may or may not have been confirmed, it is always my plan to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Whether or not Sony is "evil" in the end is irrelevant: I know that I won't be purchasing another console or piece of software for PC from them after this. And free PSN+ doesn't seem like a lot to make up for it: I had no interest in PSN+ in the first place, and I'm not sure how many people did. The fact that SOE is now involved in the breach indicates that they're still not sure of the entire scope of this thing. You'd think that anything tied into the compromised system would be completely shut off. If it wasn't, Sony was being stupid. If it was, that indicates a much larger breach and could point to a coordinated effort potentially involving people within Sony. Their most effective deterrent to PSN infiltration thus far had seemed to be the "black box" style of just not revealing how stuff works. In any case, I will laugh so hard if they try to offer PSN+ to SOE folks that had their information potentially compromised.

Thanks for being patient. I was busy battling an army of robotic zombie toaster unicorns that took up camp in my back yard. Is the guitar at 1:08 supposed to be centered or is it really intended to be 100% hardpanned left? Your timing definitely sounds a bit better, I'm still hearing a slight delay swing. You know what might work? If you try adjusting the audio clip manually forward a couple milliseconds for the lead guitar from 1:38 to 1:48. My ears may still be tricking me but I think that's the only section I hear anymore that has a noticably negative backswing. Synth from 1:58 to 2:28 seems to be too loud, and is causing your master compressor to push the rest of the mix down. Might need to adjust the synth or remove it. One idea is to add a stereo widener to it so it doesnt sit dead center, nor be 100% panned over the rhythm guitars. Loving the drum changes and syncopation. This sounds nearly ready to sub. I'm really rooting for this mix to make it, the guitar is so raw and gritty. I really enjoy it.

Can you give a source usage breakdown? Due to the style, it is a bit difficult for me to pick out what you put where, and a breakdown would be greatly helpful in guiding me. Actually, to ANYONE wanting mod review, a source usage breakdown would be great. Production wise, I'm actually quite impressed. The intro drums could use use some additional parts and flare until it gets going, and the bass could be introduced a LITTLE better (full fade in instead of lowend coldstart). Once this thing gets going, it sounds quite enjoyable albeit a bit much on the sidechaining. Great usage of the stereo here, and I have no qualms about the instruments used. Seriously, you could bring this up to OCR quality for both source usage and increase the quality of the arrangement a bit by creatively incorporating a lead melody in here. The whole song sounds great as is but it feels like it is missing a lead, either a lead instrument or even a lead vocalist singing source melody with lyrics. I can hear your lead in some chunks of the more active sections, but it is very fleeting. Think it over, because I would recommend definitely working on this more to get it up to OCR snuff. PM me if you would like some more personalized ideas on lead usage, but please get a source breakdown here first

What he said.

Okay, here we go! First, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your first OC ReMix. You did a great job with that one. You take samples that might not be cream-of-the-crop and make them super-enjoyable and well-fitting within your desired soundscape. 186 seconds of alleged source out of a song 277 seconds long? I can dig it. You're right about the melody sounding more obscure during that middle section, but I can still hear it. You're okay on source usage here. Your mixing and mastering has gotten a LOT better, and I really like this, though there's a few production concerns I have. The 100% hardpanning of some of the instruments feels slightly odd, especially for those super-active strings on the left slide. I'm not saying do a center pan, but I'd be interested in hearing what would happen if you tinkered with changing some of the 100% panned instruments to ranges between 60% and 80%, having a little bit of stereo-bleed and balance. That might necessitate a small reduction in the volume of some of the instruments, but again, I'd be interested in hearing how it all comes together with a little bit less disparity in the stereo placement. Again, you do a great job with what you have to work with, but there's some places you can change and improve here. The harp sample you used to open up sounds likely dry and exposed. It an adequate sample, but I'd recommend turning up the wet mix a bit and lessening the delay's volume during the song: its a nice effect but ends up sounding a bit sloppy with the overlap of the playing versus the delay. The claps you use throughout, first appearing at 0:50, I don't think are working. Using sampled claps for anything outside of something like an 808 sample intended for electronica style is unbelievably difficult (I ran into the same problem working on one of my NiGHTS songs). The best thing to do is, if you can, do some recording with a mic of multiple takes of you doing the same clap rhythm over and over. Good quality mic is a must, and experiment with different angles, distances, and even objects - do a set of claping hands on your legs, etc. If live recording isn't a possibility, let me know, and we can figure something out. The piano could also be mixed in slightly better. It sounds a bit quiet considering all else that is going on around it during the bridge section at 2:23. Especially the low end, which really loses some of the oomph it could have. Might be the sequencing needs to be a slightly more humanized in the area of velocity, or the volume slightly brought up. I love what you've done with the strings in-general by the way. Very convincing sequencing! Those fast strums are incredible! If you can get ahold of a live flute player, my goodness would the flute sound incredible. It sounds passable as-is to me, but I can only imagine what it would sound like live. For the overall mastering, you've done a good job. I'd recommend maybe boosting the high end just a pinch to really make the chimes and high instruments shimmer. Great work on this, it is absolutely enjoyable and, with a few minor tweaks, should be ready to roll!

I was really hoping that someone would do a sony political cartoon associating the ps3's original price to something like "giving up your first born child", and then saying "your first born child has been compromised"

Episode 58 - Pushing Pixel Poontang This one has a_rival. I'll let the episode speak for itself. Needless to say, it is awesome.

Server timed out around 5-ish PM. I was in the middle of a French lesson, then when I went to restart it, inventory was broke. After 10 restarts and a settings reboot, all was well. Sorry for the incontinence.

We's cool dude, I understand the situation. Much appreciated being amicable. Also, I wanted to say Gol's changing of the thread title was absolutely hilarious yesterday, so kudos to him for having a sense of humor!

1) Where'd you get the info about the physically moving/plaintext/outdated software info? 2) I saw that blocking of class-action lawsuits too. Its about AT&T though, and is supposed to only apply to cases where arbirtration is a less costly, more effective method. Something like this is HIGHLY likely to be class action because of the vast amount of customers involved, as well as the high profile nature of the case. Edit: found the physical moving and plaintext thing, must have not made the mental connection. I might be overlooking the outdated software thing, though. I couldn't find that.

I'm sure if Steam EVER goes down (in our lifetime), that they will give people the ability to make a full backup of all their games and create a new offline steam client that requires no network activation whatsoever for steam-signed games. Granted that puts more responsibility on the user to back up their shit and keep it from getting destroyed/corrupted, but Valve knows how to do very good business practice. The only issue I see arising out of that would be the issue of DRM which, ironically enough, plagues nearly all physical media these days as well. So in the end, Steam users would likely be in the same boat as those who value physical, except the Steamers would have burned CDRs and the physical media folks get shiny boxes. Granted the above comparison only is valid for PC software, I have to echo the popular worry about the common usage of "release now, patch later" that ps360 developers have gotten into. Say 10 years from now, when PS3 is potentially dead and no longer supported with an online service, someone gets a PS3 and a copy of Fallout 3. If there is no online support to get patches, that game is going to be broken broken broken no matter what. In a case like that, physical media is...just as useless as a digital download? Edit: I liked it when developers fixed and finished games before they were released. I hate Day1 patches and DLC.

You know what? At this point, I'm not biting that. Don't take Sony on its word. Either show me how it was encrypted and open up your iron curtain of business and security practices (since obviously now you're changing them all anyway *wink wink nudge nudge*) or I'm going to assume that the encryption you're talking about was putting my cc number on a piece of paper with a sandwich on top of it, thinking no one would bother looking under there.

Alright, source usage breakdown helped me a TON here. Here we gooooooooo! Reviewing from an OCR perspective, I'll give you lots of credit for trying to mix so many of the source tunes together, it is a valiant effort. I can tell there is a lot of potential here, so give yourself a pat on the back for what you've done. However, there are three main problems: 1) The sound samples are dull and have poor sound quality. I realize you tried to intentionally make this sound fake, but there is a difference between something sounding fake and something sounding low-quality. In certain instances, low-quality samples work (see how well some of the chiptunes-style ReMixers on OCR use that kind of stuff). However, with the instruments that you're using, it doesn't quite work as-is. You're using violins, flute, saxophone, harpsichord, piano, and marimba throughout the mix. These instruments, through their timbre alone, are very difficult to use effectively with any intention of sounding fake. The drums you could have been fine with with some better processing, less repetition of the same beat and overuse of the scratch effect (that snare is also very wet-sounding and is at a weird velocity where it feels quiet). To get this up to scratch, you'd need to radically overhaul the soundscape with lots of instrument replacements, as well as additions: I'm not hearing a bass cover the low-mid frequency range, which gives the entire track a very empty feeling. If you want that fakey-feeling for the track, I'd highly recommend not going with traditional instruments sounds. 2) The sequencing is stiff, mechanical and repetitive. This also somewhat ties in to your intentionally sounding-fake idea. The majority of the track is without any kind of humanizing or offbeat usage: everything seems to fall dead on. Solid timing is a good thing, but stiff sequencing can kill arrangements. I'm not saying make things go deliberately off-time when not appropriate, but these instruments again, for the most part, sound better when they are humanized: some slight off-timings to give a convincing performance, and articulation of phrases that aren't super-quantized. The track itself has a lovely flow from one source to the other, including the sections where sources are meshed, and you've got a lot of great ideas on how to layer. Making things less repetitive and improving some of the transitions (like the one at 1:00 - you almost had it, that flute early start was great, but the sudden drum drop out reduced the effectiveness of it). That harpsichord melody is used a great deal and becomes a bit grating after a while, etc. Going through the sequencing as a whole with a fine-tooth comb, paying attention to detail and creating differentiations between sections would greatly improve the track. 3) The song feels unpolished. The combination of the above two issues, along with a lack of original material used in the track and, from what I can hear, little-to-no mastering detracts from the listening experience. Spice things up by throwing in some more unique, original stuff with the source usage, and get some practice in production by reading some mastering tutorials (thread for it is full of useful stuff!). The complaint that it is "boring" is somewhat valid because you want to make sure the listener is enjoying themselves, so adding your own flavor to the song and making it sound pristine will provide a better result. I realize a lot of what I pointed out may seem very discouraging. Do not misunderstand me, though: I enjoyed what I heard, and was able to easily pick out the things that were wrong with it. I really like when a bunch of sources come together to form a cohesive whole, as opposed to something that sounds like a medley. I myself use numerous game sources as cameos in some mixes, as it is effective in "spicing things up". I encourage you to really keep at this because there is a fantastic track just waiting in there to come out!

In a worst-case scenario, we are able to combine the results of the form with any other consent statements you get via other means. It is just much much WAY much easier if everyone signs the new thing, since the table it goes into is sortable and can be easily checked against a project's roster for consistency. Glad to see this project going well, too.

I think the OCR server should be blacklisted, not whitelisted. This whole "vouch" system obviously doesn't even seem to work. Let people in and if they fuck shit up WITH PROOF, ban them. It is not fair to force people to become contributing members of the forums just to have them get vouches, at which time they drop off the forums again because they're busy playing minecraft. It makes no sense. Edit: I meant to say it makes the "official" *cough* OCR server seem very inclusive and closed-off, and still have loads of drama.

The entire server is native american burial grounds. That wont stop us from enjoying the SPOILS OF VICTORY. /sarcasm

SO basically, what you're saying is: Crowbar and Gman need to apologize to Brushfire for constantly dumping on him and banning him from the server/irc chat. Brushfire needs to apologize to Crowbar and Gman for being rash and vindictive. Makes sense to me, now lets see who does what. Edit: also, for fuck's sake, stop posting Black Dynamite pictures. It is old and not funny and even getting on MY nerves. Edit edit: And no, that does not mean respond with observer or the cat high-five or any of that shit. Please, not more imagespamming, at least for a little while. Okay? Okay.

Holy crap I love this source. Needs 80's rock ballad ASAP.

I like how GamesRadar put things:

This should have been posted in Recruite and Collaborate in the Workshop Area. Mods will move it there soon. That being said, MUSHA has a killer soundtrack (as do most aleste games), so I wish you luck in getting something off the ground.

The old server still exists, and if there are enough people who want it, I guess I could spend hours maphacking to bring parts of the old one into the new, or maybe even run two versions parallel. We could always build a bigger, taller, better peen.