Shadow Wolf

I will now quote everyone in the thread. QFE. James Newton Howard kicks ass hard just for the flying theme in that movie, it was orchestral badassery i such a thing is possible. If it wasn't, he made it possible. Did the Kronos Quartet score the whole movie, or just the Summer Overture? Cuz that song is the sauce, at least. One of my best friends is a violinist, and the girl who played all the solo violin for that movie asked him to do a solo with her. His music teacher (more like mentor at this point, he's been playing for 16 years) told him not to because he wasn't experienced enough, and he didn't, and he'll probably regret it for the rest of his life. I think his teacher was a fucking hack. SHE asked HIM to do it. He should've ignored the guy. Grrr. That soundtrack owned. I guessed it was Gregson-Williams without knowing the first time I saw that, he's just that distinctive. Have you noticed that the raging chorus for Pirates of the Caribbean sounds almost exactly like the raging chorus from the opening battle scene in Gladiator? I think Hans Zimmer realized how awesome that bit was after the fact, and when he helped Klaus Badelt with pirates, he slipped that in there to give it the treatment it deserved. That Kinda makes Maximus Jack Sparrow's father, which is cool in a really nerdy way.

Hmm. I'm only 3 and 1/2 hours from Arlington. I am GOING to get to this one day. I just don't know if it'll be this year. Cuz I got's cero pesos. I don't know why I didn't come in '04, Williamsburg is 45 minutes from my house. Still, they're all in Virginia, so It's not incredibly expensive for me to get ot at any rate.

For anyone that uses Firefox and wants it, I just wrote a plugin that will put WoWUI, a popular World of Warcraft mod site, in the search bar as one of the available search engines. If you want it, it's at: http://wowui.incgamers.com/?p=mod&m=4881

Yeah, I've more or less figured out several ways to blend things together. Now how do I not suck. That's the important question.

I was afraid of that. More patience, I guess.

Righto, so I'm trying to learn to mix. I do not read music. I do not play any instruments. My only weapons are a full on copy of FruityLoops 7 XXL, absolute patience, all of the soundfonts available from Darkesword's website, and perfect pitch. (Ironic for someone who doesn't play anything, but by God I can tell you if you screwed up a note.) Anyways, I has questions. First off: Let's I lay down a soundfont channel for a solo cello in the piano roll. Any channel does this, but strings are especially noticeable. Anyways, By default it sounds like crap. The notes bite too hard on the attack and end with absolutely NO release. I know I can tweak all that in the envelope and get it to sound *fairly* decent. But is there anything else I can do to smooth the transitions between notes? Legato cello should sound like a musician is sliding their fingers up and down the neck, not hammering on and off. Suggestions? Second question: aside from turning grid snap off and editing note length in the piano roll by hand, is there a way to be more precise with the length of notes than 1/6th step increments? Maybe there's something musical here, but what if the end of my note lies dead center between 4/6ths of a step and 5/6ths of a step? Even the undiscerning ear can tell that length is off. So is there a better way to do things if you need to be able to adjust note length in miniscule increments?

^ Hammer Time? ^

Goddammit Drop. How do you pull beats like that out of your ass? Also, thanks for the samples. That song kicks ace.

WTF? It's not April 1st. Seriously, foreign MMO's are just weird.

Yeah Wangless! Old black guy reppazent!

Metroid. Way back in 2002 I had about a million screens of this neat new game called Metroid Prime. I was just learning to use Powerpoint, so I wanted some Metroidy music for a slideshow. A quick search brought me here. in June 02, and I downloaded Bluebase Incidental, a 30 second Brinstar mix that I'm pretty sure got removed in a mix lockdown at some point. At any rate, that was the first. Then in October of 2002 I just wanted some music, so I came back and downloaded Sunken Suite. After hearing that, I decided it was worth downloading the entire damn site if there was a chance I could find more music like that, and thus began my adventures. I've pretty much visited the site every day and downloaded everything posted since then. Every. Last. Mix. Still awesome. Aaah, the memories.

Awwww.... that site is so sweet.

Win. Pure fucking win just for the sarcasm.

As long as we're joking around...

Personally, I thought it was pretty damn epic. It definitely didn't sound like Uematsu. There was massive variation, and I just loved the whole thing. I can't get more detailed than that cuz it's been 6 months since I listened to it.

ROFL... I love anime, it's so easy to make fun of.

As long as we're on the subject, I'll just ask: If Mario's so hot for Peach, why does he still live with his brother? Hmmm? I think Mario will come out of the closet soon. Next thing you know we'll find out Samus was a man that had a sex change in an unknown prequel called Metroid: I feel trapped in my own body.

Q.F.T. There were a million more things I wanted to know after those credits rolled. Like how did Tifa's boobs get that big. I hope we do, cuz that shit really DOES need to be fixed.

I didn't cry when Aeris died, I was pissed. When I first played FF7, I was like "Why should I kill Sephiroth? He's getting rid of Shinra executives, clearing the swamps of large and dangerous snakes, and he's obviously a badass." Then he killed Aeris, and because I'm an ass, the first thought that ran through my head was FUCK THAT! I JUST SPENT 14000 GIL ON A NEW STAFF FOR HER! But right after that I was all sad because she really was awesome and I actually yelled at my TV for the first time ever. My battlecry of "It's ON now, you bastard!!!" could be heard down the street. But I didn't cry. Final Fantasy X now, I cried like a baby at the end of that one.

Two things. One, I'm talking exclusively about Final Fantasy in this post, because when people talk about Square changing platforms, they really mean Final Fantasy. Second, this is a long post: so here's the plot synopsis, keep reading if you like it: Truth be told, if I examine Square's business patterns since 1995/96, I don't think they've necessarily been 'loyal' to one system. Square seems to look for a balance of two things when they release their games: Horsepower and audience. It's also why their remakes of the older games are being done for DS instead of PSP. They can update the graphics like they want and the DS has a MASSIVELY larger audience. Square isn't loyal to anyone, they go where they can tell their stories the best and have them heard by the most people (Therefore making more money.) Frankly, I think it would be another catastrophic decision for Square to go back to Nintendo at this point in time. Examples? They chose to release their games for the Playstation One instead of N64 because it had the horsepower to handle 2400 Megabytes worth of cutscenes, soundtrack and games on a mere 4 discs. They could not have feasibly put Final Fantasy 7 on a cartridge, and the same was true of 8 and 9. Not to mention the fact that the PS1 had the larger audience. Flash forward to the next generation. They continue to release their games on the PS2 because once again, it offers the greatest balance of horsepower and audience. Final Fantasy AND the PS2 are intensely popular on both sides of the water. The XBox caters to an almost completely American audience, which made that a bad choice. A Gamecube disc can only hold 1.5 gigs, so they'd have to spend money on 3 discs per print. The PS2? Wildly popular and they can tell their story the way they want to on one disc. Score. So here we are in the current generation, and the story's the same as the last. The 360 still caters to a primarily American audience. The Wii simply does not have anything near the horsepower for Square to pull out all the stops and present the Final Fantasy they want to without giving anything up, however well it might be selling. So, there's the PS3. The graphics look better than real life, the discs hold 25 gigs. Have fun, Square. The price of the console is prohibitive? True, but that's OK, it'll have a price cut before they're ready to release, and Squaresoft games sell systems to the most tight fisted gamers out there anyways. I'm not a particular system fanboy, really. I buy what I need to play the games I want. But if Nintendo ever wants Square completely in their pocket again, they're going to have to provide a platform powerful enough for Square to push amazing cutscenes, voiceovers, music, and a long ass story at us without compromising. Because that's just how they roll, and if you can't do it, they'll find someone who will.

Aaah, screw you Tweek. Frozen Landscape kicked ass, but still, screw you.

The man in the black tophat was Teioh, may his name be cursed forever. He was a black Chocobo rider that randomly showed up in high level Chocobo races, and he was unbeatable unless you had at least a black Chocobo. Reason being that one part of the track went through outer space, and if you didn't have at least a black Chocobo, the damn chicken would slow down when it hit that chunk of track. At which point Teioh would rip past you for the win. Asshole.

There aren't enough different words for amazing to describe this album. I've downloaded every shred of music this site has posted since 2002, and this album is the finest example of remixing I have ever heard. I haven't finished it yet, but I have not found a SINGLE thing to complain about in 29 tracks. Furthermore, I still have nightmares and hallucinations about raising Golden Chocobos, and laughing men in black tophats, and the Chocobo song has been known to spur me to spontaneous manslaughter. The fact that it is entirely awesome is perhaps the greatest testament to the amazing job you guys have done. So, uh... thanks again Darangen, you had a chance to ruin the album and you didn't. Good job. But really. Amazing, flat out, top to bottom.

This may come as a nasty shock, but the newest generation of gamers today wasn't playing games in 1997, so the graphics of FF7 that we all call 'nostalgic' are more correctly termed 'outdated and crappy' by them. When they look at how far graphics have come, the Playstation is to them what the NES is to us, because they weren't there when it started. It's all about your point of reference. In other words, our mediocre pixels and graphics are their mediocre low polygon counts and cutscenes. I would definitely buy it just for a graphics update. It would be kind of like polishing your dirty smudgy TV screen so you could finally see what it was really supposed to look like. However, if they do remake it, I think they should let the localization team over here completely rewrite the script instead of just translating it. They've been doing that since Final Fantasy X, and I for one think it's worked insanely well. The script for Final Fantasy XII was beautiful because they weren't rigidly sticking to the Japanese translations. They never really did, but starting with 10 they were willing to completely ignore it to get the point across in unbroken English. Oh, and voice overs. Everyone from Advent Children would be fine. But I think if Tifa says anything like "Dilly-dally-shilly-shally" in a remake it's pretty much fucked.

Truly, I would find a good connection and download everything you can. You'll end up with literally years of music. When I first came to OCR in 2002, I'd never played any Final Fantasy. I think the first FF mix I downloaded was World of Piano by kLuTz... That got me interested, and over the next couple years I ended up getting every Final Fantasy Soundtrack, arrangement album and OC Remix I could get my hands on from the series, and it's all amazing. Well, most of it. Just shove it all in the pipe and download it, there's not much you won't wanna keep.