MindWanderer

Out of curiosity, is that a blanket "no" on fan mods, or specifically for Project M? Seems like it would fall under the "Games that are shareware, freeware, or personal projects may or may not be accepted at our discretion" rule, but I can see how accepting remixes of fan mods might put OCR in a weird position with the modded games' publishers. And out of double curiosity, would that "no" be blanket or case-by-case for games that are 100% fan creations, like AM2R or Pokemon Uranium?

I have a pretty sweet WIP from Chernabogue, so let's try to get everyone else caught up a little, hm? Next check-in deadline is: Sunday, Nov. 20 I'd like at least a proof-of-concept WIP from everyone at that point. If I don't even hear from you by that date, your claim will be dropped.

I've been getting back into it myself, but even older--I never finished Ruby back in the day, so I put it on my phone and finally did. Not gonna "catch 'em all" this time, though--that was a sane thing to do when there were only 150 of them, and I even did the 250 in Silver, but Gen III and up is nuts, especially since it requires trading across 4 games or more instead of just 2. What I'm working on now is LeafGreen, randomized. It's an interesting experience--not only getting Gen II and III pokemon in the Gen I setting, but how getting certain 'mon early is broken one way or another. Some just stomp everything, but some, like the quasi-legendaries, are terrible at low levels. It encourages you to use pokemon you wouldn't ordinarily make a part of your main team. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I have one, but it wouldn't be all that helpful to me. I need to be able to pull my phone out and putter around for small amounts of time, with little notice, wherever I happen to be.

Yes! Which is the other issue I have with most recent game soundtracks as well. And probably why even younger remixers still favor older games as sources.

I'm sick of not being able to do music stuff on my current schedule, but if I could do it on my phone, that could change. I'm trying out the free demo of Caustic 3, which looks like it has a lot of potential but also a drastically different workflow that what I'm used to (Reaper). Sequencing looks really awkward: for instance, zoom and note length are the same control, and you can layer only two simple effects on one channel. FL Studio Mobile is also a thing, but I'm not seeing a free trial, and it's a bit more pricey (Caustic is on the Amazon App store and I have coins, so I can get it for $4.75. FL Mobile is $16). Anyone have any experience or tips for remixing on Android?

I certainly did smile at this! After I turned my volume down, anyway--this is seriously loud, and the compression pumping is a bit much for my taste, even after the adjustments Gario asked for. Heavy but appropriate use of SFX, but most importantly, the fun Kris had in making this clearly shines through. Good stuff!

I'm getting 404's for all of the music links, and the player widget isn't doing anything.

UB02 Beauty lends a lot of credence to your theory that Ultra Beasts are related to humans. It's unmistakably similar to Lusamine in both look and pose. Dunno what the deal is with UB02 Expansion. Some folks have suggested it's based on Gladion, but I don't see it.

Is there any way to listen to the music? I didn't see anything relevant in this thread or on the website.

I wonder how much of the same mentality goes into games these days. I find so many modern games to have serviceable but bland and unmemorable soundtracks.

That brass-ish synth I didn't like before is still there, but the dissonance is much better. There are still a few clashes that could be addressed, but I wouldn't consider it a sticking point anymore.

The pieces of music I find most evocative in most of the games are of the "variations on a theme" sort. The main battle themes of FF I-VI, with their powerful, classic bass line were part of what defined Final Fantasy for me--I actually had a huge grudge against Final Fantasy VII for many years just because they took that out (even though it appeared in "Birth of a God", one of my favorites as well), plus they changed "Fanfare" for it. And I cut FF IX a lot of slack for exactly the same reason, only deciding pretty recently that it really wasn't as great as I felt at the time. Similarly, "Cry in Sorrow" (from FFIV), "The Dragon Spreads its Wings" (from FFV) and "Terra" (from FFVI) are the ones that draw the most reaction from me, because their recurring use largely defines those games to me. But what gets me every time is simply "Final Fantasy." When I hear that in a game, I remember that Square still remembers its roots, even if they keep trying to branch out.

Arrangement is lots of fun, but throughout most of the mix, it doesn't sound like accompaniment is playing with the melody very well. Lots of clashing notes. Are they even in the same key? The second half of the remix is much better in this regard, though. Also, the lead brass-like synth gets really old (0:33-1:22) by the time it goes away.

Oh, really nice arrangement! I was concerned at first when you called this a medley, but the sources are interspersed throughout, and feel largely like one song. 3:19, where Leave Time for Love kicks in, gave me goosebumps. Really want to see this on the front page. As you know, those are two really awkward transitions, that seem like the song was supposed to end, and then doesn't (2:33 and 4:45). The fact that it's 6 minutes long exacerbates this issue. I'm inclined to suggest just ending it at 4:45, even though I do really like the last minute, and the way it returns to Angels' Fear. Otherwise, I feel like that transition needs to be smoothed out. The first transition isn't quite as bad, but definitely could use improvement. The trick that you tried at 4:45 (to throw in sounds that appear nowhere else in the mix, like SFX, vocals, or unique synths) works best, IMO, when transitioning to a high-energy section. Maybe you could do something like that at 2:33 instead? Transitions from high- to low-energy sections usually just trail off (example), with no effect or riser. The staccato violins in the beginning (0:16-0:28) aren't doing anything for me. They sound really fake and mechanical. Keep working on it!

It was also used to make Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Gods Will Be Watching, and Gunpoint just to list some of the great games I know of. This might be even better than the RPG Maker bundle, though it seems to be much lighter on assets.

Seems like Sun and Moon are simply offset from each other by 12 hours. So when it's daytime in one, it's nighttime in the other. I don't totally see why that mechanic is interesting unless you're literally playing side-by-side with someone and comparing. Yeah, Lusamine totally reeks of "bad guy." Faba, probably but I'm not sure. I don't think the whole thing is evil, though; The rest of the organization might be duped by the leadership, or Lusamine might just go rogue. UB-01 looks like it's just the code name for the first Ultra Beast, whatever that is. Maybe this is a way to put huge bosses in the game and not make them catchable pokemon? I'd enjoy that. Every battle in the other games (that I'm aware of) is either against a trainer with a random assortment of unremarkable pokemon, or is some sort of story battle you don't actually engage in, or is more an issue of whittling them down carefully so you can catch them without killing them, which doesn't make for a cool boss battle. Some huge, unique critter that you need to just wail on with your whole party sounds like fun.

It's listed as the 47th free arrangement album. timaeus's answer is correct.

It would be easy enough to do in Audacity. It has cut-and-paste, so you can simply remove a part of a song and splice the edges of the gap together, or copy the corresponding section of one verse and paste it in place of another. This can work better in some songs than others, depending on how much the original artist mixed things up across verses. If you plan to do a lot of this in one song, probably a better way would be to use a DAW. REAPER will do what you want, and has an unlimited, unrestricted free trial. Set the project's tempo to exactly that of the original song and load the song into the editor, and you'll have the same cut-and-paste functionality, but also be able to snap the cursor to between measures.

Oh, yeah. A friend who moved to another state made me very jealous by playing Portal 2 with his daughter. But my daughter just turned 2 years old, and all our current friends' kids are no older than 4, so it's gonna be a while. Believe me, I'm constantly evaluating them to see when they might be able to handle even something as simple as a LEGO game. I have a long list of co-op games I want to try with my daughter when she's old enough, and hope she'll be interested.

Could be worse, you could be married with children. It's crazy difficult to make friends at that point, especially ones that have anything in common with you except that they also have kids around the same age. And of course making time for anything other than childcare is difficult to begin with. I could probably never buy another game again and still not get through my backlog--and that's just counting the really amazing games on the top of my list, and not the random stuff I got through Humble Bundles and the like.

It's growing on me now, definitely getting more used to it. I'm still finding it challenging to navigate, definitely a learning curve. It doesn't help that I don't have a lot of FPS experience. The version I'm playing is the Trilogy on Wiiware. Sounds like the consensus is that I should skip MP2 in any event? If it's even more tedious than the first one, sounds like a pass.

I liked the arrangement a lot, but I agree that those violins were a serious drawback--and I normally have a lot of tolerance for fake instruments, so that's saying something. The static glitching, on the other hand, sounds a little too realistic, just sounding like my headphones came loose for a second. Not pleasant at all.

I'd agree with that except that I also wouldn't have expected the endgame sequence of Zero Mission as something Nintendo would have done, and for exactly the same reason. Except that it's lengthy and is a big deal. Both are what I meant by "gimmicky sections" that I didn't care for. Finished the game last weekend. The difficulty tanks hard at the end, with the last several bosses being facerolls. Interestingly, all the secrets are much easier to find than in official Metroid games, but to make up for it, there's no X-Ray Scope and enemies don't drop Power Bombs, so you have to search for them intelligently. Also many of them are much more difficult to actually reach, with several requiring some fancy shinespark tricks that not all players will realize are even possible. And while I was at it, I started up Metroid Prime. So far, I'm really not enjoying it. The exploration route is completely unintuitive to me, and I'm having to backtrack a lot to figure out where I'm supposed to go. I have a very poor feel for first-person movement, especially jumping, so I have a hard time telling what areas of a room I can reach. I also can't rely on my old Metroid experience, since it's made by a different developer and have several different design strategies (like the Zelda-like sigil rooms). I'll keep going for a while, but so far I can't tell why it's considered such an amazing game.