MindWanderer

Those are really long lists, however. The most popular by far are Castlevania I-III for the NES and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Maybe Rondo of Blood and Portrait of Ruin as runners-up. Lots of the others have some great stuff, but I'm sure you'll be able to come up with a list of 5 without going beyond those 6 games.

I've created a Chrome extension that automatically searches every website you visit looking for hexadecimal codes that match the Super Mario Maker format and turns them into links to their respective bookmark page. Feel free to use it if you think it'd be helpful to you. Edit: Just noticed that there's a stealth update: you can sort courses by "Star Rate," i.e. the percentage of players who have starred that level! Great way to get around the YouTubers and other celebrities with tons of "hits" but low-quality levels.

Technically we only have two signups so far. Everyone get your picks in! Still a couple weeks before signups close. Hopefully some folks are just procrastinating.

Addendum: I thought I put in a correction. Apparently it failed because I omitted a "required" field. This is a problem in two ways. You can't tell that it failed right away--you have to scroll down the page looking for the red text that wasn't there before. "Calendar" is a required field. However, when editing an existing event, it defaults to "Select" (i.e. no calendar chosen) and is also disabled. This makes edits impossible.

In other words, "we realize we're out of touch with what our core fanbase wants at this point, so we'll release a piece at a time so we can make corrections mid-stream." Not a bad idea, considering all the flak they've taken lately about that very issue. That's the most reasonable idea I've seen so far. Of course, they can't really correct core mechanics and style this way--if they start off with an action-RPG, they can't realistically switch to a JRPG after one episode. Of course, selling $90 or $100 worth of games when they'd ordinarily only be selling one $60 game is probably also a consideration--although I suppose they could still pull a Telltale and just sell it upfront while releasing it in parts.

I'm not sure if I'm repeatedly being an idiot, but every time I schedule a calendar event to begin or end at noon, it ends up getting changed to midnight the following morning. The first couple of times I figured I'd made a mistake, but now I'm trying to be very careful about it and it keeps happening. For instance, CCoI signups are supposed to end January 6 at 12:00 PM, but the event now shows January 7 at 12:00 AM. I put in a correction (and yay, edits no longer delete the whole event), but it didn't change, although I suppose the change might not have been approved yet (though I put it in yesterday, and usually someone approves it within a few hours).

For some reason, I parsed it correctly in the full-size version next to the post, but the shrunken version when his was the most recent post in a forum/thread came across as decidedly NSFW to me, too.

Oh, I see. You can only indent one level at a time, and you have to have some text on each line before you can indent the next. And you can't nest a numbered list inside a bulleted list or vice-versa (you can in BBCode). Doesn't look like ordering by letter or Roman numeral are options, either, but I'll live. And I see the quote thing was due to some strange "helpful" thing it was trying to do to keep what I had typed in an incomplete post earlier. Not sure how I got an empty quote by djp in there, but it's gone now. Had to delete by clicking on the "move" icon in the top-left and then holding it down while pressing the delete key. Bizarre.

OK, that was interesting. I tried to reply to this topic, but every time I click "quote" or "Reply to this topic" I get the empty quote box above. And it took me quite a while to figure out how to get my cursor out of it ("Enter" key twice), neither the mouse nor the cursor keys would do it. I was in fact trying to quote Timaeus. Anyway, when I'm in a bulleted list and hit the tab key (or Shift+tab), my cursor just leaves the editor box and moves to another field on the page (Submit Reply or the address bar, respectively).

I don't know what DAW you use, but Reaper has a Key Finder tool. Highlight a bunch of MIDI notes and use the tool, and it will give you a list of compatible keys. You may have to manually exclude accidentals. Then transposing is easy.

Yep, I was about to report the same thing. It covers part of the search box as well (although that's less of an issue.) Really missing the ability to enter raw BBCode; I've been using BBCode since before WYSIWIG editors existed, so it's just faster for me, not to mention more versatile. Is there a way to make nested lists using the WYSIWIG editor? And it looks like the "special tags" option is gone, too (I personally used the "topic" tag frequently). Fonts and custom colors are also missing.

Huh. I've been only using free stuff up until now because samples and plugins are usually so pricey, but a buck to make sure I'll have adequate drum samples for most of what I'm ever likely to want is worth a chance.

It's not first-come first-served, you should probably at least rank it if you want it. Also please include YouTube links--I'm pretty sure all these are unambiguous, but not all source selections will be and I want to set the correct precedent.

Go right ahead! Any time between now and Jan. 6.

I'd actually really love to see that. I'm probably nearly alone, though. Other than the small number of courses, I actually prefer Chocobo Racing to any Mario Kart game. I don't think speedruns are a good guideline, but yeah... deciding that buyers don't want 60 hour games and then selling them 3 20 hour games at half the price of one game seems... well, evil but probable. On the other hand, the truth is that this is pretty ambitious, and a single $60 game with no DLC probably wouldn't be profitable at all. I just hope they don't "add content" by adding fetch or farming quests. I wouldn't be surprised to see boss hunt quests, since FFX, XII, and XIII contained them.

I personally prefer the gauntlet format myself, but that's one reason for the loser's bracket, and getting a free pass because your opponent dropped out isn't the worst thing. I actually thought of that, and this is one specific reason I stated "'Castlevania' in the title" as the rule. Not because I have anything against Kid Dracula per se, but the aesthetic is so different I felt it would be a departure from the point. Edit: Oh, as an aside, I'll also take suggestions for music to use for special rounds and the losers' bracket. I have several choices of my own, but the Castlevania series is huge and I've only played maybe half of them myself.

Castlevania: Cacophony of Incarnation (CCoI) A Remix Competition Presented by the OverClocked ReMix Forums Introduction The Cult of Dracula strikes again! With their arcane power, they've reached backwards and forwards through time, even into alternate realities, to piece the Castle of Chaos and its surroundings back together, and with it, their fallen master. But the castle has come back jumbled together! Lakes float above towers, forests grow deep underground, and libraries burn perpetually in caverns of fire. Of course, with the pieces of the castle have come the heroes of ages! These heroes must fight through the Transylvanian chaos, sending each area in turn back to the abyss, until only one remains, trapping Dracula's essence and allowing him to be defeated once more. Download Current News Voting for the Final Battle has concluded! While Simon Belmont, represented by OA, has succeeded in his quest, Dracula, represented by Jorito, has had the last laugh. He'll return soon, more powerful than ever! Congratulations to both Jorito and OA! Brackets Alucard Bracket Concluded! Soma Bracket Concluded! Simon Bracket OA: Entrance, 1797 Dracula Bracket Jorito: Crumbling Tower, 1691 The Fallen PlanarianHugger: Plant Castle, 1591 Yami: Underground Caverns, 1797 theshaggyfreak: Munitions Factory, 1917 Esperado: Forbidden Area, 2035 Chernabogue: Underground Caverns, 1691 Chalis: Dance Hall, 2035 Trism: Wilderness, 1698 YoshiBlade: Castle Center, 1852 HoboKa: Burning Town, 1792 Supercoolmike: Inner Halls, 1476 Sir_NutS: Entrance, 1691 Aleix Ramon: Master's Keep, 1944 Magnetic Ether: Inner Quarters, 2035 War Machine: Dungeon, 1691 Gario: Warakiya Village, 1476 wildfire: Abandoned Castle, 1479 Format Castlevania: Cacophony of Incarnation (CCoI) is mostly a traditional elimination tournament. Each participant will choose the music from one location, stage, or area from any Castlevania game. They will then be paired off against each other, with the winner continuing to the next round. Remixers will have two weeks to write a "vs. remix;" that is to say, a remix featuring the themes of their own area and their opponent's area, and there will be a one-week voting period following each round. Two elements make this compo different from traditional brackets. First, instead of requiring a specific number of participants, any number will be accepted. One or more special rounds will be added to even out the number of participants. These special rounds will require remixes to use both their stage music and a special theme for the round. There also may be three main brackets instead of the usual two if that makes things work out more evenly. Second, there will be an optional loser's bracket. This will be point-based, and based on the number of participants who opt in for each round: the more entries, the more points will be up for grabs in each round. Those who lose in the main bracket will enter the loser's bracket slightly above the median score of all existing participants, to put them on even footing (with a reward for lasting longer in the main bracket). The winner of the loser's bracket will compete with the winner of the winner's bracket at the end: The winner of the winner's bracket can claim ultimate victory whether they win or lose, but they need to share that victory with the winner of the loser's bracket if they lose to them. All participating competitors and voters will adhere to the Competitions Code of Conduct. So do I just pick a theme? Is it first-come-first-served? I'll be doing a draft for source selection. If you're planning on participating, please post a list of at least three sources you're interested in claiming, in your order of preference. If you're choosing themes you expect to be popular, you should post 4 or 5 choices so you have backup. Since Castlevania doesn't always use consistent names for locations, and the names of the themes themselves aren't always easy to find, please include a YouTube link to each source. Also, if you have any schedule restrictions (planned vacations, exams, etc), please mention them in your signup post. I'll do my best to accommodate. Eligible sources are those which are the music for a stage, area, or location from any game with "Castlevania" in the title. Boss music, character themes, etc. are not eligible. If a source is used for two or three locations in the same game, that's fine, just specify one. If it's used in different games, try to list the game it originally came from (e.g. Castlevania for Vampire Killer). Different participants will not be allowed to choose different versions of the same melody. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is a special case: Silence of Daylight, Bloody Tears, Monster Dance, Dwelling of Doom, and Within These Castle Walls are the eligible sources. Once everyone posts their lists, I'll assign choices based on a weighted point system designed to give the highest possible choices to the greatest number of people. (Some mathematical oddities in the sequential conflict resolution system actually make lower-ranked choices more likely in some cases, so I won't be using that.) Submissions All entries must be sent to me (MindWanderer) via PM on the forums. Please include the name of your bracket and the round number in the subject line of your PM. Please send me your submissions in MP3 format. I'll trust the submitters' ears to choose the best encodings for their music. Please do not use MediaFire, RapidShare, or any other ad-ridden public sharing site as a host for your entry. Tindeck is also bad because it changes your filenames. There are many better options you can and should be using to host your music. I recommend Dropbox or SoundCloud. Make sure your files are downloadable. File names must be in the following format: 1-on-1 round: Remixer - Title (Remixer's Stage and Opponent's Stage).mp3 3-way round: Remixer - Title (Remixer's Stage; First Opponent's Stage; and Second Opponent's Stage).mp3 Dracula Bracket round: Remixer - Title (Remixer's Stage and Round Theme).mp3 Examples: DarkeSword - Blood in the Water (Sunken City of Poltergeists, 1476 and Wilderness, 1698).mp3 MindWanderer - Wallachia Just Keeps On Burning (Warakiya Village, 1476; Burning Town, 1792; and Master's Keep, 1944).mp3 djpretzel - Praying for Time (Clock Tower, 1691 and Prayer, 1476).mp3 Please pay attention to the spaces and punctuation. Your artist name and mix title can be whatever capitalization you want but the stage names must be full and capitalized properly (as listed in the brackets). Properly formatted file names make it much easier for me to tag everything properly, which ensures good, consistent metadata on all the files that will be distributed to voters. You must adhere to this file name standard. If you don't, I will seriously consider disqualifying you, and I don't think anyone wants to be disqualified just because they couldn't name their file properly. Voting Rules and Guidelines Voting is conducted publicly in the Public Voting forum. Every week, a thread will be created for the most recently completed round of remixing. Specific rules will vary from round to round, so be sure to check the main post of each thread for instructions. Things to keep in mind when voting: The most important thing to consider when voting is how well the remix incorporates and arranges both themes. Production and enjoyability should also be considered, but this is primarily an arrangement competition. If you can't hear both themes in the remix, don't vote for it. Everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to vote, including both competitors and non-competitors. Due to the forum's poll mechanic, you are required to choose a remix to vote for in each pairing in the main brackets. If you participated in the round, feel free to vote for yourself. In the Dracula bracket, you will need to choose a first, second, and third-place choice. Do not vote for yourself. Voters will earn points equal to a first-place vote just for voting. Do not post reviews in the voting thread. Compile your reviews for each round into a single post in this thread. Post only once in each voting thread. Everyone must adhere to the Competitions Code of Conduct. Violations may result in your votes or entries being disqualified. Schedule Signups close: January 7 Remixing begins: Alucard Bracket Round 1: January 13 Soma Bracket Round 1: January 20 Simon Bracket Round 1: January 27 Alucard Bracket Round 2: February 3 Soma Bracket Round 2: February 10 Simon Bracket Round 3: February 17 Dracula (losers') Bracket Round 1: February 17 Hero Finals: March 9 Dracula Bracket Round 2: March 9 Final Battle: March 30 (3-week mixing period) Epilogue: March 30 (3-week mixing period) Conclusion Castlevania was originally released on September 26, 1986, making this coming year its 30th anniversary. I'd like to release a compliation OCR-I on that date if at all possible. So if you make something you like, or that you could like with some extra time to polish it, hang onto it, and I'll ask for submissions following the end of the compo. Art Art supplied by Chernabogue! Get your signature banners here. Aren't you stealing DarkeSword's format just so we can make more Castlevania music for you to listen to? Yep, pretty much.

Still looks ambiguous to me. Are those movements on autopilot after having selected an option from a menu, or are they controlled directly via attack buttons and joystick movement? I thought X-Com: Enemy Unknown was an action game at first because it had combat like this in the trailer.

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.