MindWanderer

There are lots of different ways of going about it. Paper Mario TYD was a great example, brilliantly executed, and it works well for Mario, but I feel other series wouldn't do as well trying to mimic it too closely (and it would get kind of annoying if they did). Final Fantasy VIII was an awful example--the gunblade and boost mechanics were pretty silly. I wasn't impressed with Final Fantasy X-2 or XIII, either; frantic menu-selection is not "action." TBH I wasn't thrilled with the execution in Kingdom Hearts, either--I never used any items in those games, nor any spells I didn't have hotkeyed, for exactly this reason. What they might do is something like what I've seen in Star Ocean 2, Ni no Kuni, or even Dragon Age: real-time movement, paused menus. The problem with those is that it forces all but one character to be AI-controlled. I'd personally prefer a traditional turn-based system that just has more interesting enemies throughout; FF X was pretty decent in this regard, and FF XIII actually had enemies that would fit this bill as well. But it doesn't sound like they're taking this route. Same reason they made Advent Children and all the other FFVII spinoffs: people love the world, the story, and the characters. But a pure HD remaster would still suffer from the tedious random encounters, the opaque translation, and other aspects that haven't aged quite as well.

I'm not a fan of quicktime elements in general, and while it was neat to see them in a few games (Mario & Luigi the first couple of times, Sonic Chronicles exactly once), I'd really rather not see them again. And I really don't want a repeat of FFXIII, which only let you "control" one character at a time and was so fast you basically had to use auto-battle anyway. (Which was a real shame, as FFXIII was designed in such a way as to make random battles more tactical than in most of the other FF games.) But I agree that the "mash X to win" battles have seen their day. Basically, every fight needs to be as interesting as boss fights were in FFVII, and there needs to not be as many of them (and boss fights need to be more interesting still). That's an achievable goal. Little things like switching from melee attacks to lightning spells when the tail is up go a long way in making random battles more palatable. The worst is when they bothered to program enemies with multiple attacks and then made the distinction meaningless. Why does a SOLDIER choose randomly between shooting me and punching me in the face, and why do they hurt just as much?

For the most paper-like experience, you can't beat a Kindle. I hear the Nook GlowLight is pretty good, but it is backlit. None of the other e-readers I've seen either function when turned off or display graphics accurately.

OK, I understand that perspective. I think perhaps "bleeding-heart commie" would have been a better example of a political slur and opposite of "fascist", which yes, I do think people who use those terms have turned their brains off. And yes, I personally feel like slurs against perceived behavior are just as powerful as slurs against what you call "identity." First, because once you put a label on someone's position, you stop listening to them. You may have even put them in a box that doesn't really describe them accurately (e.g. "fascist" or "commie" are unlikely to be strictly true). In addition to being denigrating and dismissive to the person themselves, it dismisses their very thoughts and not just their biology. I think that's at least as powerful. Second, political identity is extremely important these days. People identify very strongly with their political orientation. For instance, here is an article about discrimination against identified conservatives. I've seen many similar articles lately, but this is the one I recall specifically offhand. I think it's fair to say that many people consider being liberal or conservative just as important to their own identity as their race or sex, and it seems that many people think other people's political leanings to be one of the most important things in defining their potential relationship. I thought that was basically what you were talking about, Norway being a classic example of a sexually liberal country. I seem to have missed your point then. Note that I said "compelling reason to focus on objectification and not mere presence." I think we're in complete agreement here: Porn (and sexualized representations of women in general) in and of itself is probably not harmful. Where we disagree is whether certain types of porn, heavy on the objectification, is harmful. I believe it is, but that's an opinion and not a demonstrated fact, which could stand to be researched further. This study was specifically among ADHD participants, and without the full text, I'm not sure what they mean bu a "very slight cathartic effect." At the time I was in college, catharsis being an incorrect theory was almost universally supported (lots and lots of studies; there are a few in the Wikipedia article), but it does seem like there are a few more current articles in its favor. Very true, and yeah, that's a good article. Context and culture are vitally important and hard to understand. It's not as simple as "X causes Y." Anyone claiming it is is seriously out of touch with reality. There's circular reinforcement, there are tons of mediating and moderating relationships, there's our horrible polarizing two-party system, and that's just the beginning. An isolated decree such as censorship won't solve a darn thing (hello, Prohibition).

Yeah, I do. I tend to be more for than against the feminist standpoint, and I'm equally offended at being called an SJW as a kike (I'm Jewish). Both slurs are shorthand for saying, "You're a member of a group who I feel is inferior to my group, and not deserving of equal treatment or respect." Using both terms means, to me, that the speaker has turned their brain off, and the box they've stuck the other person into is the only thing about them that matters. "Tranny" doesn't have an especially long history of blood and death, do you think that makes the term less offensive? Or "dyke" for that matter? This is actually a really interesting and important point: pornography in different countries is different! I'm only finding one study at the moment (you may have more, I couldn't find a citation for what you're saying, although I've heard the same), but countries in more sexually liberal countries, with better women's rights and outcomes, have pornography less objectifying and demeaning to women. Porn models are more often shown in an equal or dominant position, there's less focus on "perfect" body types, and poses tend to be more naturalistic. To me, this is a really compelling reason to focus on objectification and not mere presence. (Sidenote: the same thing is true for alcohol, which, since it's easier to study, has been studied more. Countries like the U.S, which simultaneously romanticize and demonize alcohol, have bigger problems with alcoholism, drunk driving, and alcohol-prompted misbehavior than those that treat it as no big deal. One wonders what we'd see if there were any countries that had zero gun control.) I don't understand this paragraph. It sounds like you're trying to determine the effect of an effect, with no cause in there. Unless you're talking about catharsis, which is widely debunked. And negative reinforcement (removal of an aversive stimulus as a reward mechanism) hasn't been in the conversation at all, nor any type of operant conditioning. This took me a few reads to understand what you were getting at, even though I agree with you. I believe you're trying to describe a distinction between perfect and partial correlation. Which is worth a mention anyway. Even in "causal" studies, the actual statistics are correlations. Give people a drug and correlate the dose with their improvement. The correlation won't be 1.0--some people will get better on their own, some people won't get better even with a great drug. The same is true for behaviorally causal effects. To choose an example I hope no one will disagree with: if a kid's school is terrible, with unmotivated teachers, outdated books, lots of violence, etc., they're less likely to go on to college and become financially successful. If they go to a great school, with computers and proactive college counselors, the opposite is true. Are there exceptions? Yes, absolutely--the kid's individual traits, their family, friends, other life events, etc. are probably even more powerfully predictive. But is there a causal relationship? Yes. In other words, just because a thing exists which can influence behavior, maybe there's only a predictive correlation of 0.1 or less. Maybe everything else going on in a person's life (including "free will") is much more important in determining their behavior. But there could still be a causal relationship, and if what it's causing is undesirable, then maybe it's worth looking at.

Social sciences are sciences--they need to be based on physically objective phenomena. Unfortunately, when you can't measure something directly (e.g. attitudes), you need to measure them indirectly (via behavior or self-report). And I think I mentioned this a few dozen pages ago, but the real problem with requiring hard, objective evidence that media portrayals have an effect on attitudes and behavior is that it's really, really hard to do meaningful, controlled studies on this sort of thing. The ideal experiment would involve putting people in a completely media-controlled environment for years. Obviously, that's impossible. So psychologists use smaller-scale analogues which they think might demonstrate the same effects in miniature. Studies no more that a few weeks long, which involve exposure to a few chosen examples, and can't control other influences. And these studies do often show causal effects--but they're so far removed from real-world circumstances that critics discount them. And it's not like the media hasn't been on board with the whole "reducing sexist" thing for years now. The creators of movies and TV shows make conscious decisions to include more professional women, for instance, and fewer stereotypical housewives and "maidens in distress." This is in an effort to empower women with strong role models, and get men used to the idea of having women as peers. I don't see much disagreement with this effort. The only debates I'm seeing are 1) between "more good things" vs. "fewer bad things" and 2) what exactly defines "good" and "bad" portrayals. In other news, I found this fascinating: http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2015/11/24/dead-alive-xtreme-3-isnt-planned-western-release-treatment-women-video-games-cited-reason/#/slide/1 Koei Tecmo had this to say: Which I read as, "We have nothing to say about sexism/feminism or what they have to do with our game, but we know that the Western media will flambée us over this game, and we don't want to have to deal with that." These aren't the words of a media producer who's been convinced by arguments. These are the words of fear. Words that really ought to reinforce that the feminism in games coalition is taking the wrong approach, regardless of the virtues of their arguments. Oh, and can we stay away from the term "SJW" please? It's a slur, and I personally don't consider it any less offensive than racial epithets.

I was with you up until right here: I don't think the goal of advocates is necessarily to "use" a particular game (or movie, or whatever) to advance their cause. Sometimes, sure; calling out a game like Hatred for its violent content is missing the point. And news commentators that keep harping on how school shooters play video games are being disingenuous and/or willfully ignorant. But when your commentary is on the AAA game of the week, which is already in the public eye, and your beefs with it are apropos, then I don't see this as being opportunistic. If you believe that the game contains what you believe are flaws, and you believe that those flaws are endemic of a culture that holds values you disagree with, then I don't think there's anything going on as malicious as what you imply. I disagree with this as well. I don't think that the feminist advocates are diminishing the need and appropriateness of criticism of games as art. They're not critics, and they usually don't claim to be critics. Their commentary overlaps very little with traditional criticism or reviews. Now, when a game review magazine docks points from Bayonetta 2 because of perceived sexism, I think they're getting their wires crossed unless they have an explicitly feminist audience or agenda. In fact, I think that this type of criticism is strongly in favor of games as art, because they assume that exposure to games is just as impactful on peoples' attitudes and assumptions as other forms of art. It's not really the point they're trying to make, though. These are usually the same people who complain about what they view as sexism in movies, TV, and music as well, even print ads and fashion, and if there were any other forms of art that had mainstream impact these days, they'd complain about those, too.

Citation please? It's all but impossible to perform scientific experiments on long-term effects of cultural factors, because you can't remove people from a culture in any kind of methodical way. There have been studies that do suggest that exposure to certain types of media can influence behavior, at least in the short and medium term (i.e. for a few weeks). For instance, exposure to violent games or movies increases violent behavior in the medium term, and media laden with violence specifically against blacks increases racist attitudes against blacks in the medium term. Unfortunately, all the long-term studies I'm aware of are correlational, not causational, which is just about worthless given self-selection (and parental involvement, for kids). But causal effects that persist over several weeks are likely to be persistent if exposure continues. That's basically the way attitude formation works. I'm not personally aware of any studies that look at sexist portrayals of women and how that affects attitudes or behavior later on, but I'd hate to be the psychologist trying to run that experiment, because sexist portrayals of women are prevalent everywhere you look. You wouldn't be able to have a control group without a controllable context. Maybe if you ran it at a summer camp or something. But it would be bizarre to imagine that repeated exposure to objectified portrayals of women wouldn't result in objectivist attitudes.

You know, not too many musicians achieve "lucrative success stories" at all. Limit the field to just VGM artists, and of course it will be hard to find many. I don't have any numbers, but I would be willing to bet that the Black Mages have been pretty profitable, and I'd also estimate that Taylor Davis makes enough off of YouTube revenue to make it well worth her time. Heck, given that Lindsay Sterling is in the top 10 YouTube personalities by revenue, I bet her Zelda and Skyrim covers have made a ton of money. Granted, that's a halo effect from her original music, but still.

Usually, building a computer yourself is more expensive. Windows 10 is the way to go for the best compatibility with the most DAWs, and is much cheaper than a Mac, so I'll disagree with Metal Man on that front. Getting Windows 10 out of the box is better than an "eligible for a FREE upgrade to Windows 10" Windows 8.1 installation, as performing that upgrade doesn't always work as planned. Also, that Dell listing is missing a lot of important specs (RAM and HDD speed). The Lenovo also has 802.11ac WiFi, a cheap but relevant feature, so it looks like the clear winner to me. A question for the peanut gallery: Is 8GB RAM enough if you want to load lots of tracks with high-quality samples? I use only free samples, mostly small ones, and have 16GB RAM, so I have no relevant point of comparison.

With Final Fantasy Explorers (announced in the same Direct, though not the first time we've heard of it), Cloud will indeed be on a Nintendo system. And he's probably the most visually iconic Final Fantasy character. Snake was an equally strange choice; even though he'd been in Metal Gear and its sequels on the NES, and in the Twin Snakes remake on GCN, most people know him from the PS1/2 games.

Amazingly unique take on Millennial Fair, great guitar work. The use of Schala's theme deserves a special callout--it's an overused theme in remixes, but the energetic guitar variation and chugging bass make this one extra special.

This is a bit of a sidetrack, but it really stood out to me that you equated "religion" and "spirituality." All too often, and especially in this case, they're very different things. "Spirituality" has been studied extensively, on a psychological and neurological level. There is a "part of the brain" associated with it, related to prayer and meditation. You can light it up regardless of your particular beliefs or lack thereof. "Religion" is primarily a social construct. And this is where I certainly agree with you. The two extremist sides of GamerGate show strong parallels with historical case of people killing each other over religion. It has a lot more to do with group membership and social identity than it does with faith or spirit.

Some of the shading looks off to me, too. Some parts look like the light is emanating from the TV, others like it's a full floodlight in front. Mario in particular looks like a paper cutout except for his eyes and hand. The shadow cast on Balloon Fighter from Kirby actually makes it look light the light source is off to the left somewhere, and the shape of that shadow is a bit odd. Ness's hand is apparently immune to the shadow cast by his own foot. This is all pretty nitpicky, of course. It's just what stood out to me.

Yeah, that was the plan, but there weren't any bites. It's a hard compo to run since it requires a commitment from at least 4 people, half of whom don't really benefit and are simply being generous with their time. It seems like it needs to go on and off periodically to reduce fatigue. I will start it up again, but not right away.

This was the top US level by star count this past weekend, nice job! And I believe it was #2 after a Japanese level. I especially enjoyed the boss segment with accompanying music. Apparently someone discovered my "Still Alive," too. It sat there for a week and a half, slowly getting a star every couple of days, then on Friday it exploded, getting plays and stars in a steady stream while I was building other levels. Over 100 stars at last count. Not sure how that happened, I can't find anywhere online that mentioned it. Did it show up as "Featured" to anyone else? Which is kind of frustrating. Making these things isn't tremendously hard (Peach's being an exception, since they're actually playable levels as well) if you have any music experience, and especially if there's sheet music. But last time I checked, something like 80% of the top starred levels were music, and the rest were automatic. Making a good, fun, actual level is much harder, but they don't get any recognition unless they get featured by a popular site or streamer (and they mostly stick to things featured elsewhere, or made by other popular media personalities). I feel like several of my other levels are much more deserving of recognition. The only way to use the game to find non-automatic levels is to set the difficulty filter to "Expert" (even "Normal" shows mostly auto/music levels, it seems). Speaking of which, I reiterate that the game needs another difficulty tier. I saw levels in Expert with clear rates of about 12%. That's not tremendously hard; I usually beat levels like that on the first or second try. These should really be separate from the levels with <4% completion rate (that seems to be about my threshold for where levels move from "challenging" to "frustrating"). And of course the ones with <0.1% completion are another beast entirely.

That's one angry-looking Balloon Fighter. Not bad, just not what I would have imagined. Pikachu, however, looks like he needs a few good meals.

There are some free options out there. Reaper has an unlimited, uncrippled free trial. There's also Ardour, which is pretty new, and you'd have to compile it yourself to get it to run on Windows, but it's open source and completely free.

Just one comment here: There's a lot of technical discussion here, but that's not all music is about. Maybe offering detailed advice on compression or decluttering a particular range of frequencies would be a technical suggestion out of your reach, but saying "this aspect doesn't seem to gel with this other aspect" or "this transition felt abrupt to me" are things that don't require a trained ear or a technical vocabulary. Also, music is art. Different things appeal to different people. If there's something you really like or dislike, and no one here seems to agree with you, that's fine. In fact, that's good! A hive mind when it comes to art is a terrible thing, and puts expression and appreciation in boxes. That's especially true here at OCR, where, even though there's a panel of judges that disagrees on occasion, they're mostly looking for the same sorts of things, and are explicitly selected based on their agreement with other judges' decisions (that's part of the "test" to become a judge). Your opinions are no less valid when it comes to enjoyment and appreciation, as long as you're not hostile about it.

Yeah, I felt the same way. Really cool bass-driven ambience drives the dark guitar chugs, but then the synth leads are oddly upbeat. The melody starting at 2:12, for instance, was otherwise really enjoyable, it just felt like it was lifted from a different remix. It's also pretty repetitive. Really hoping to see more from shredd that improves on these issues, since the parts of this I like, I like a lot.

I just got capped at 15 Easy as well. Still working through Normal, I spend more time making than playing. I was about to post a couple new levels of my own, but I'm probably going to remake them and a few of my others now that checkpoints are being added to the game (next Wednesday). Unfortunately, KP9000's repository doesn't have any functionality to update or delete entries. I'll just use Nintendo Life and MarioMade. I will share this one, though: B155-0000-00B1-31F5. I made a crappy version of "Still Alive" for Weighted Companion Shell, so I made a better version as a standalone level.

I don't personally think it was irrelevant. The discussion was about loops and efficiency, and the guessing game is a classic example of such, using something similar to a binary search algorithm. The connection could have been made more explicit, though. I also wouldn't say you'd "never" have a situation like this. First, again, it's very similar to a basic search algorithm; the logic is near-identical when you have a nonlinear but sorted data structure of some sort. Second, with encapsulation, sometimes one part of a program literally does not have access to data stored in another part, and has to go about learning it in an indirect method. I run into this sort of thing using APIs pretty frequently. Most examples in beginners' textbooks are indeed pretty useless in and of themselves. But they can teach concepts that can be used for other things.

All the music is done. All that remains is to tally the votes.

Yeah, I saw that, and it certainly explains some of my other courses. But this one in particular has very little that can kill you, except for whacking yourself with the shell. There are no traps, no surprises, no alternate routes. I'm increasingly thinking there needs to be a new difficulty level in the 100-Mario challenge. An "expert" level can be anywhere from "tough but fair" that probably needs a few deaths just to figure out the course, to deathtrap guessing-game BS, to Kaizo-level insanity. I always finish Normal difficulty with 95+ lives left over, and I haven't finished Expert yet at all. The worst are the ones that start off moderately challenging, so you spend a few lives figuring them out, but have a finale that's just absurd, or worse, features surprise deaths. I end up wasting lives on those and then skipping them anyway.

New stage: "Weighted Companion Shell" (DF06-0000-009D-31A5). If Cave Johnson lived in the Mushroom Kingdom and worked with Koopa shells instead of portal devices, you might end up with something a little like this. ... I may have to play the stage myself and leave hint comments. It's lightly puzzle-ish--everything you're supposed to do seems really obvious to me--but the 0% completion rate speaks to greater difficulty than I'd intended. Then again, I'm not sure if people are really trying; one player walked right up to the Koopa Troopa at the start, got killed by it, and quit. I finally passed the game, and learned that, despite the fact that this is the advice I see everywhere, it's actually wrong. I can now pass level 3 100% of the time (and have played it several times to make sure), with several seconds to spare. The trick is this: ignore the bombs when the boss is on screen. Priority becomes boss, bombs, gnats. The reason is that the boss flies away once you've destroyed a certain number of bombs, and you want it to stay on screen for as long as possible. Sure, it costs you a second when each bomb goes off, but it's totally worth it for the extra boss-whacking time.