Melbu Frahma

Easily one of my top three tracks off the album. ladyW's had a front page post as a mixer coming for a long time, and I'm just thrilled that it came with such a gorgeous, effervescent track. I look forward to her next mixpost!

There goes my appetite for Thanksgiving. Of course, just posting a normal image of Miley might have done that.

This right here is why I won't do it. Right now, my wife and I are trying to save money to buy the one or two remaining large items that the house needs, as well as to insure we'll have a savings cushion for when we start trying to have kids. That aside, I could probably convince her to let me do it for a couple of months, if I could guarantee I'd get something I liked each time. Which I can't. I mean, just looking at the front page and the brands they have listed there, I'd have no use for a Capcom-themed box, and it would depend on which Nintendo franchises they'd put in the box as to whether that would work for me or not. And I wouldn't much care for a zombie-themed box, either, and it looks like that was the October box. It's a neat idea. But I think it's too broad of a spectrum for my liking.

Looking forward to today's release, everyone!

Bah, beat me to it. Great little mini-sode though.

Swear to God, that was my first thought. Looking forward to this round's entries! Last round's were all so... tasty... crap, now I want stuffing.

Rory took me a long time to warm up to, but I finally did in the last couple of episodes he was in. But for the longest time, yeah, I agree, wasn't the hugest of fans.

I think I've enjoyed his run more for the companions than for Matt himself, although I don't think he made a horrible Doctor. But Amy, Rory, River and Clara were definitely the high points of his run.

I can agree with this, with the added on statement of: Do not play FFT first, but DO play it at some point. It's definitely one of the FFs that deserves to be played by everyone, even those who aren't huge strategy/RPG fans.

I wish I was. Gotta be at the wife's family's place for a family shindig. But happy birthday anyway, my Doctor.

VI. Or VII. Probably VI.

Nice trailer guise.

I'm actively curious, to her mind, where the line is where something stops being a marker and starts being (as you said) a physical reality. For instance, do we count Anya from Gears of War being smaller and more slender than her male counterparts a marker, or a physical reality? What about Pokemon - with the addition of genders of Pokemon in the second gen, do we consider the use of the symbol for male and female as markers by her definition, or does it get a pass because it was originally used to save space on the cartridge? Do we count the female characters in Final Fantasy Tactics having different, more "feminine" clothing than their male counterparts in each job as a marker, or a social reality? There's a lot that sociologists would consider a "marker" of gender that, I would argue, does not imply an inherent sexism on the part of the game designer who uses them.

I was actually just thinking that a show featuring various prominent artists throughout the community giving tips/tutorials on basics would be excellent content to develop. Maybe you could frame it along the lines of a "How would you X?" show - get a different musician each week, pose them a common problem that musicians come up against, i.e. "Your instrument sounds too grainy - how would you fix it?" or "The vocals you've recorded are too tinny - how would you fix that?" or whatever, and then the spotlighted musician would spend 5-10 minutes explaining how they would go about fixing it. (Besides re-recording, of course.) It'd be a fun little show that wouldn't take too much effort to produce or time out of the participants' schedules.

I don't think the PS4 has dealt the Wii U a deathblow (yet). Nintendo has too large of a hardcore fan base, and there's a lot of older parents who still see the Wii line of consoles as the "kid friendly" option to be killed that easily. But I agree this might be a sizeable set-back for it.

Gotta second this - I've often dreamed of seeing a M&M6/M&M7 combined arrangement album.

Really hard for me to point to an exact moment when I really got hooked on it. I have really early memories of loving the minimalistic soundtrack to Magic Carpet, and the great music of Descent (which I first ran into back when it was just a demo and called Descent: Destination Saturn), but I don't think I really, truly fell in love with the stuff until I got my hands on Pokemon Red. I would just stand in routes and cities walking in circles so I could listen to the music. Even then, I'm not sure I was aware of my love for the stuff. I think it took Uematsu's magnificent soundtracks to Final Fantasy 7 and 9 to really open my eyes to the fact that there were really talented people in the VGM industry making music, and the always-underrated Final Fantasy Tactics soundtrack was probably the final drop of cement that truly anchored love for the stuff. And when I finally got around to listening to FF6's music... well.

This, a thousand times over. I'll play the heck out of any side missions/completion grinds that'll give me a little more important story content (mainly character development), but sidequesting just for sidequest's sake isn't interesting to me anymore.

Some guy made an automatic shiny finder. Thoughts?

AFAIK, there's a project or two ahead of this one anyway. I think the Sonic CD project might be ahead of it, and I know for sure that Super Mario 64's already through eval, so that's almost certainly coming first. Although, I never did get around to listening through the OCR Talkback episode that Fishy talked about this project in (because a solid hour's a hard thing for me to spend in one place these days), so I don't know what the last thing he's said on it's status was. Short version: It'll come when it comes, and only Fishy and the site staff have a real idea of when that is. (Well, and the project staff too.) Be patient!

I'm liking the Beatrix love I'm seeing. Now if only I could convince someone to use Tifa's theme....

I was joking. I'm actually quite happy to be super weird.

I know.

^ Seriously. He made a pretty tamely-worded post. And as djp himself said, it's probably something that needed to be discussed. He definitely didn't deserve everyone jumping on him with the "lol you're an idiot time to make fun of you" manner that he got from a lot of people. This was no "I got killer studio chops" guy - he was expressing a genuine concern for the direction of the site's future, and, by extension, every member of the site. Do you see the difference there? I hope so, I truly do. Having said that, I gotta say I disagree with his post, although I can see where he's coming from; I would hate to see OCR become the video game industry's gun-for-hire as much as the next guy, or abandon its Remixing roots for primarily licensed work. I seriously don't think that's what's going to happen to the site though. As djp, Liontamer and the rest have said, this was a one-off project that OCR was approached on, it got the site some much-needed exposure, it strengthened OCR's relationship with a major company in the industry which in turn, in a small way, legitimizes by implication every piece of free music ever released by the site. Not that OCR needs legitimizing to us core listeners... but to someone viewing us from the outside, having Capcom say, "Hey, not only are we cool with what your site does, we like it so much we want you to make an album for us!" is a powerful message of implied, tacit support for the site. Personally, even though I won't be buying the album - I've honestly never been a fan of MM music - I still support it wholeheartedly. It was a big first for the site, a great opportunity to work with a company that made some of the music that this site exists to honor, and garnered OCR some great publicity.