Callas

Ten Carat Hill, IIRC. You'll need your first Ride Pokemon from the story to access it, but it's on the first island.

And now it's April. (Is raising a dead thread frowned upon around here if there's no active one?) Totes need to rebuild another town and stuff, I guess? If you don't have enough minions, add me: 4399-0814-0577. EDIT: I guess I forgot how the game works and friends don't become town minions. But if you need someone for the ability link in a week or two, add meh. (Gotta crush the demo first 'cause 100%.)

Holy hell. I recognized melody's handle from several other remixes, particularly elegy of the solipsist, but I wasn't prepared at all for the level of excellence in this one. I don't have the musical chops to describe why it's awesome but it's certainly not subtle about it.

Didn't even know about this connection when listening, but definitely noticed some similarities. Terrific album. All the singers have great performances and the English lyrics are well-fitted to the material and the music. I should have recognized Shigihara's enunciation before reading the credits. Thematically conservative; no transplanting of originally tender arias into rowdy square dance rhythms, for example, but I love it that way. Never enough room for all the greatest hits on these albums, but if you hit a couple old chestnuts like Schala and Zeal, you could fill the rest of the disc with bleating goats and I'd consider it a good buy. Standout track is "On The Other Side", which when paired with Shigihara's earnest vocals comes across as bittersweet as a lover departing for the war in an old black-and-white movie.

Another shameless bump for the Xenogears stretch goal. (I swear I am not affiliated in any way with the artist, just very excited.) When I think of pairing up the Xenogears EP with Humans + Gears, well, my heart does some wonderful but medically-concerning things. Two thousand bucks to go, less than two weeks. Hope this hasn't flown under anyone's radar here on OCR; I need my Mitsuda fix...

On the front page, under "ReMix Comments" there's a text encoding mismatch for: EarthBound 'Dialima tu Kafé' Chrome says the HTTP response's Content-Type doesn't have a charset but the HTML does as UTF-8, so I'm guessing some server-side content generator is just messing up the text encoding. It believes the charset it's reading with is ISO-8859-1, and is helpfully transforming it to UTF-8. However, the charset was already UTF-8...

Just came back to check on the KS. Crystalis medley stretch goal? Someone else knows about Crystalis? SUCH HYPE. And it's already funded. Going back to sleep now, the day can't get any better.

It was a joke on my part, not a complaint; I forgot the smiley and the </joke> tag. Nothing wrong with drumming up a little interest in "what might be". Lots of business promises never get fulfilled despite best intentions (some of them are never even intended to be fulfilled - personal experience in the software industry) and that's just the way it could go. We can still hope for clear skies and smooth sailing while planning for rougher weather.

Frankly, there's a lot of good fan music (orchestrated and otherwise) for all these games; it's not like they're obscure cult favorites. But every time "Orphan" plays in particular, my imagination goes nuts threading together a montage of Metroid history to fit with the music. I don't want to sound trite, but in that sense many of MC's tracks are "more than just music." So regardless of the game's popularity or musical fandom, I have extra excitement for your work. I'll tide myself over between releases with missed gems such as Corrupted Souls, which I was unaware of until I revisited the Kickstarter page just now.

Well this is a no-brainer. Metroid Cinematica was on repeat for about a week straight at release, and last played was... oh, yesterday. What a coincidence. Anyway, pledged, looking forward to the release, and how dare you tease me with promises of Zelda and Final Fantasy albums so far in advance?

This is good. How good? SO GOOD.

Added Sir Nuts. 4399-0814-0577 Bought a 3DS for this game and have barely turned it off in the last two weeks. The story-lover in me says "meh" and the completionist screams "YEAH!" Won't be long until everyone has all max-level jobs and I can get around to beating the game...

Wasn't wasted time at all for me. Reminded me very strongly of the opening minutes of the Secret Of Mana+ album/track, and also of Ruined World. Not bad company to keep.

TL:DR; if you are interested in a single-player and/or story-driven game, SWTOR honestly offers about two of them (your choice of class for each of Republic and Empire). There are six more available but they get bogged down in the repetition of traditionally grindy MMO content. I played SWTOR at release for about 3 months, and another 3 after they went free-to-play. The storylines for each character are good to great. The biggest problem there is that they amount to maybe 10-20% of your experience while playing, and the other 80-90% is shared with every other class on your faction. That means if you play a Smuggler, you get a fantastic experience until you finish your story. If you then play a Jedi Knight, you are desperate for each crumb of new story as you wade through the 80+% of the game you already played as a Smuggler. Playing a Sith Warrior might help somewhat, since although the planets are the same terrain they're not the same game for both factions. But even then, the Sith Warrior and Jedi Knight are the exact same class (only the spell icons and names have been changed to protect the Lore™), and so you'd be playing the same game but getting a slightly different story. The whole game (as you're leveling) is sadly set up to offer less and less interest as you play more and more. I do recommend subscribing as long as you're actively playing the game. Just be careful not to be every company's favorite player - the one that pays but doesn't play.

Careful what you wish for. Remember the gaming era we are in. "Lieutenant, as the second Death Star's engineers are doubling their efforts and their budget, our fighter wings have not received their traditional funding. All craft are now equipped with a functional but unbecoming pair of laser cannons and four missles. Individual pilots will now personally ensure their craft is outfitted with armaments befitting the operation and the might of our glorious Empire, by purchasing weapons and advanced systems with their own TIE Fighter Points." Quad-lasers (99 TFP) Ion cannons (149 TFP) Proton torpedos (2 ea., 29 TFP) TIE Defender hull, cosmetic upgrade (599 TFP) "As a final note, again due to the lack of resources outside of the Planetary Destruction division, even these purchases will break down between missions and need to be replaced. Good flying, Lieutenant."

I just can't get all that depressed about this. I mean, it was clear Disney wanted to cash in on Star Wars with market saturation, and EA is a fantastic company to help them do that. Seriously, EA has saturation down to a science. Of course EA's going to make mediocre-to-garbage games, and they'll sell like mad. But it's not like Star Wars has a great track record in gaming in the first place. The good independent series (Jedi Knight, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Knights of the Old Republic), are balanced out with a half-dozen crappy spin-offs per movie (Jedi Power Battles, every 1990s 2D platformer). And of course there's always Force Unleashed versus its sequel, or the amount of unfinished content in KOTOR 2, to prove that EA would be far from the first company to completely screw up a guaranteed hit license. EA just does it so well, and so consistently (SimCity, Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 3, their entire sports game lineup), that it's easy to think the bar has fallen so far. Nope, it wasn't really that high to begin with.

When I was a wee Callas taking his first steps, and his first steps as a gamer, I had some edu-tainment program on the family computer. One of the games in it was an alphabet game where a train pulled flatbed cars with letters on them, instead of, say, boxcars with hobos in them. As the train rolled along, it merrily sang the ABC tune, but some of the flatbed cars were empty, and you were supposed to type the missing letter. But if you got the letter wrong or you typed when you weren't supposed to, it unleashed a low, dark klaxon of frothing anger. After the first mistake in every game (and sometimes before, in anticipation of one) I'd run frantically into the laundry room and try to block out the horrible horn underneath the nearest pile of dirty or clean laundry. Of course, with nobody left to type even some of the remaining letters, the once cheerful melody of my ABC's turned into a staccato of terrifying failures. My sobs lasted far, far longer than the last twenty-or-so letters.

Shulk (Xenoblade Chronicles) Pit (Kid Icarus) Arthur (Ghosts'n Goblins) Lots of deserving competitors. Let's pick some series that aren't yet represented, 'cause Mario has two character entries and more than 10 series entries already. EDIT: Ryu's out (well, he won a while ago apparently) and Arthur bumps Pit up. I thought the Red Demon was already a mascot but apparently not?

Voted on Steam 'cause that's free. Not backing the Kickstarter yet though. The two trailers certainly look and sound pretty, but the depth and challenge of gameplay looked very shallow and scripted without any true agency given to the player. Drop a ball in a bucket two feet away, bridge magically forms. The logs in the "dry" state were conveniently laid across the valley path, and in the "floating" state they don't react to wind and water motion or player weight. Pretty sure I saw the logs clipping through each other as the water rose, too. The Kickstarter should talk more about your team's experience in making games, and also more about the design and complexity of the puzzles. Right now there's lots to suggest it will be beautiful, but not much to suggest it will be fun.

I hope the others paying attention to this thread will give you your due, because this is impressive. Maybe they're waiting to actually get through the whole thing - this is an intimidating collection at 100 tracks and almost four hours! I won't manage to listen to it all before the weekend, but here are some of my impressions so far. From the original music side of things, Destined to be Immortal is a fitting boss theme (and not just because of the Dalton allusion). It sounds very much like the unused second "generic battle" theme from CT. Gentle Timberland sounds like an homage to the forest music of CT, but with some Xenogears influence. Social Breeze reminds me a lot of but I couldn't describe why. Time Protection Unit is another good one although it sounds like another boss battle, not a character theme. Finally, it's tough to separate the beloved memories of the CT soundtrack from your remixed tracks, but you did a beautiful job with the instrumentation on Unyielding Promise.Nice job!

I'm no musician, but I know what I like. This, I like!

I did get a little excited about something official, but I wasn't disappointed in the least. Looking forward to the full release!

Did you all just respectfully and rationally defuse the drama bomb that shows up near the end of all these competitions? Gentlemen, I salute you.

This man is a musical hero. Happy birthday and many more, sir!

Are pancake and lizard jokes outlawed now too? Those could totally bias the final round. The Chicago Bulls don't get butthurt when someone's fantasy league has them losing in the semifinals. Keep calm and stay professional, mixers.