K.B.

Ineffable thanks to those who serve for the countless sacrifices you make. With respectful remembrance for those who have passed, I pray for the safe return for those in harm's way so that we may never remember them on this day. Thank you for all you have done and for all you do.

.Ikaruga, Ace Combat 4, G-Darius, We Love Katamari

Don't forget about Queen Fury! Youtube: There are a lot of tracks that didn't make the ost, a typical product of trying to cram everything onto one disk. They're on the psf though: http://www.zophar.net/music/psf/legend-of-dragoon.html [side note: the psf is missing tracks 1, 3, 32, and 50 from the ost]. Some of the notable ones are (with arbitrary psf numbering): 901: Main Menu 911: Shirley Shrine - Fort Magrad 922: Long, Long Ago 923: Black Castle - Vellweb 925: Valley Of Corrupted Gravity - Gigantos 926: Wingly City 930: Queen Fury That's a somewhat arbitrary selection, since there are other tracks that were BGMs or played at significant events. I think tracks 916, 917, 924, 927, 929, 931, 935, 936, and 937 all qualify, and even then I'm probably missing some. Bottom line: it's worth checking out what didn't make the ost. The soundtrack is also uploaded to youtube. The videos feature several tracks apiece, but lengths are given for each track so it's not too difficult to skip to the one you want to hear. Quality is 480p. Tracks: I'm not as big into this game/soundtrack as a lot of other people seem to be, but there are several really good tracks here. So it would be great to see folks capitalize on this and make this album happen. Best of luck!

If we went to that, I think DS would die of asphyxiation.

Shit, pretty soon they're even going to make you pay for your alter egos. I'm out when they make automatic charges against the voices.

Added pic links to my earlier suggestions. Also revamped the list and the post in general. Post 22. Advocating for games that don't yet have a single mascot. Since I didn't mention it before, I dig this idea of opening this up for nominations and voting. Should be good regardless of what gets picked.

All of the following games are without a mascot. Listed as: suggested character - game appearances...... links to official pictures (no fan art) with white background (unless otherwise noted). *Cecil Harvey - Final Fantasy IV and related...... cg paladin standing in DS remake, cg dark knight standing in DS remake, art paladin standing, art dark knight standing, Giant Bomb gallery Bill Rizer - Contra(s)...... Neo Contra - cg standing; Contra III - Lance and Bill (small pic, dark background)... it's hard to find full-body art; I tried but couldn't find suitable character art from Contra 4 (which would be awesome to have) Quote - Cave Story...... the only thing suitable seems to be fan art, though a pic from one of the endings could likely be cropped and made to work Sarah Kerrigan - StarCraft series...... art infested kneeling, non-white-background pics at StarCraft Wiki and Giant Bomb Master Chief - Halo series...... Halo 2 - cg standing; Halo 3 - cg standing 1, cg standing 2, cg standing 3, cg standing 4, cg standing 5; non-white-background pics at Giant Bomb gallery and Creative Uncut, Halo 3 gallery JC Denton - Deus Ex...... can't find any official full-body art or good cg, only game-generated: cg standing (poor qual; black background) Manny Calavera - Grim Fandango...... no good-qual pics, could probably crop an in-game pic: cg suit standing, cg pea coat standing (meh qual; non-white, game backgrounds) Lenneth Valkyrie (/Platina) - Valkyrie Profile series...... VP1 - art standing (iconic pose; sleeve art); VP2 - cg standing 1, cg standing 2 (floating?) Harry Mason - Silent Hill(s)...... SH1 - cg standing Conker The Squirrel - Conker's Bad Fur Day (and remake)...... cg standing 1, cg standing 2 *Jack van Burace - Wild Arms (and remake)...... art standing Ashley Riot - Vagrant Story...... art standing (right leg is unfinished) Jade - Beyond Good & Evil...... can't find any official full-body art or good cg Wander - Shadow Of The Colossus...... can't find any official full-body art or good cg Rena Lanford - Star Ocean(s) (first appears in SO2)...... SO2 - cg standing (iconic pose; dark background); SO2 remake - cg standing; SO Blue Sphere - cg standing 1, cg standing 2 *Nights - NiGHTS series...... NID - cg prancing, cg flying; JOD: cg prancing 1, cg prancing 2 Chaz Ashley - Phantasy Star IV (and remake)...... can't find any official full-body art or good cg *Maxim - Lufia and Lufia II...... art standing 1, art standing 2 KOS-MOS - Xenosaga trilogy...... X1 - cg standing (black background); X2 - cg standing; X3 - cg standing, cg version 4 standing 1 (same pic with different colors), cg version 4 standing 2 Steelie - Marble Madness Ark - Terranigma Splinter or Shredder or Donatello - many games James Bond - many games Sly Cooper - Sly Cooper trilogy Shinra - Ikaruga Gordon Freeman - Half-Life series Ratchet - Ratchet & Clank series Developed and prioritized based on a combination of personal preference and notability. All but the last four games/series have at least one remix (moved them to the bottom for this reason alone). Asterisk was given to games that have/will have an OCR album (but do not yet have a mascot). Wolverine would also be kickass but I left him off the list since there are already X-Men mascots. I'll edit this later this weekend with pic links (edit: done). Fully agreeing with Joe Musashi, Guybrush Threepwood, and a TF2 char, in that order. Nathan Spencer and Rayman would be good candidates as well. Edit: AUGH! Fully agreeing with Nathan Spencer as well since there is a freaking remix project on Bionic Commando. Man, I need to stay up with the times.

Some of you are being presumptuous in your implication that used gamers would buy new if the prices for used games were raised enough to make them comparable with new games. I posit that many used gamers would give a middle finger to all companies whose games conform to this trend and refuse to buy any of their games/content. That's taking a page from the music piracy saga, but it's relevant. Regarding the argument that this could become an industry-wide standard: it could if there isn't a PR - and consequently, sales - backlash. But that's too slippery-slope and abstract right now to draw firm conclusions. As for it to pass that such locks could be applied not only to online content but to games in general: this would require an entirely new precedent that would defy our current notion of ownership. Well, ownership of anything the government doesn't want to be able to reach out and touch, but that's another topic entirely.

Happy birthday Jade! Hope your birthday is as awesome as you are.

Thanks for trying to save this thread from itself. I will be checking out that band. Frank Turner. Mentioning him since he's largely unknown on this side of the pond, and that's a shame that should be remedied. Singer-songwriter. Good tunes, mostly acoustic-guitar-centric, excellent lyrics. A tad whiny with the vocals, but his honest and impassioned delivery makes up for it. Not thrilled with the electric and polished sound on (most of) his third album, but I thoroughly enjoy his first two. A selection from each album (via lala popup): The Real Damage Long Live The Queen The Road Cheers.

I played it last year and the art direction was so impressive I actually took note of it. 2xEdit: this was regarding FF7. I'd rather play a game with ass-poor graphics and good cinematography than one that can convey every nuance of a facial expression and is so limited in its scope. I enjoy good visual art, but it's never a deal-breaker for me except in survival-horrors. However, I admit that I dislike it when games try for realistic facial expressions yet fall just short so it looks alien (cue valley theory). I'm thinking last-(sixth-)gen there, such as FFX. Those games also seem to spend a lot of time focusing on faces, which makes it all the worse. Edit: wow, nice redundancy, me. Gameplay is obviously another killer, but the worst offender is and shall always be GOD-AWFUL VOICE ACTING.

Clearly. Heh. And he compiles them for download. LAOS, you are a champ. I'll be tracking the progress on this for the next decade.

Actually, as evidenced by the OCAD thread, May is clearly Goth Month. All fun, no supprot.

tti lysdexia orlf I was gonna say if this album was really fast, then... but a one-year turnaround ain't bad shootin'. And nice work on the cover, Proto. Definitely captures the sonic/genesis vibe. With style.

YES. Thank you for that. Someone more famous than I once noted that with the advent of the CD as a medium for games, file size - and for that matter hardware capability - was no longer the harsh limiting factor it once was. As soon as music could be streamed (as opposed to sequenced), the only barrier was how much the developer/publisher was willing to invest in and wait on its music. If they had the time and the cash, they could make an entire soundtrack of live music and make the game span an extra disk or two to accommodate it. DVD, Blu-Ray, and so on has made and will continue to make this more possible, but it was the CD that broke down the doors. Not that this was the only notable development in vg music history, but it's a big one and you can hear the difference in games as they started to utilize this capability. Though it took years to change the music standard to streaming, it started fairly quickly. Case in point (as it's one I'm familiar with): Wild Arms, released at the two-year mark of the PS1, utilized several sequenced tracks with live instruments, most notably on the opening movie and the epilogue sequences. [For more details, check out the readme addendum on the minipsf library here (you can youtube the streaming tracks).] I wouldn't call Wild Arms a landmark soundtrack; it simply illustrates the point I'm making. Also, something about Guilty Gear.

Why hello, thread. Calling on the experts once more. Do any of you recall any memorable 4-way scrollers? I have memories of a shmup - more correctly, one level of a shmup - in which I descended and had to navigate both horizontally and vertically around obstacles (I remember stalactite/mite-esque fingers with narrow vertical openings), then scrolled horizontally and had to navigate accordingly, etc. This might be a case of jumbled memories, but it's bugging the hell out of me and I can't seem to google-query appropriately to yield results. I thought it was a Gradius game or clone, but based upon my earlier wikipedia-ing that doesn't seem to be the case. It was definitely for a console: 8-bit or more likely 16-bit. Help is appreciated; my nostalgia would owe you several rounds if you found it. Regardless, a big thank-you to the shmup community here. This thread, along with the reminders of gameplay and music from a few posters (you know who you are), burned in the back of my mind long enough to force me back into shumpstalgia. StarFox led to UN Squadron let to Sky Shark led to Gradius 3, and it was all downhill from there. Did my research on the decade+ I've missed, penned my lists, made a lucky find, and been at it ever since... with turn-based breaks as needed to lower blood pressure/preserve controller integrity. I doubt I'll ever get into it as much as you all, but I sure as hell appreciate the persistent reminders of what I was missing. I've rediscovered the hardcore gamer inside. Also: free play, wtf? Ikaruga, you sloot.

FFIX: audio fidelity and Monobrow got you covered.

People take note of open letters vs closed letters. It's simply a suggestion. It was stickied last year; this year it wasn't. There are other factors at play, yes, but when a thread makes it to the second page - or even most of the way down the first - it's going to be ignored. Anyway, this is the last day of the official April is Support OCR Month, so I encourage everyone who hasn't donated to pitch in.

Cripes, this spent what, three days on the second page? No good, man, no good. Spot-on with the bump though. Perhaps a sticky would have helped the cause. Just over a day left!

Pop music is as much a genre as indie music is. (it's not)

Who the heck is shawty hahaha.

Love is a cliche. Edit: damnit, Fratto.

This thread is incredible.

So, who else is intentionally dying at each new environment (land, underground, water, castle) so you can replay it with the other characters to find out what music was used?

Hahaha... Simon is so white they had to give him a double jump. Love it.