MindWanderer

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.

Yeah, I loved the art, the title, and the concept, too, but the t-shirt and tattoo were kind of jarring. Maybe a Kirby or a Master Sword tie? If you love the triforce tat, I think it should be on the back of the hand anyway (per the games), where it would both be more subtle and not be covered by the suit.

That one is amazing. I've put some music into a couple of my levels, and it's trickier than it looks--the item limit hits pretty fast, and placing notes so they don't overlap or conflict, with only about 2 octaves to work with, is really tough. Peach managed to put in melody, bass, and percussion and really nailed it. Perfect length, too. I know what you mean. I made Topsy-yvruT so that the sub-level is almost exactly identical to the main level (but upside down), down to coin placement. And when people see coins, even when they're plainly right at the bottom of the screen and meant to be collected on the flip side, down they go. Turns out I got truly unlucky with my first go at Expert. My first three levels took about 40 lives, but I haven't had a net loss of more than a couple of lives each for the next 4 or 5. I haven't had the frustration tolerance to finish yet, though.

MindWanderer Splash Supafly (Splash Warfly in Sigma Stage 2 [X3]) Hilf Dir (Tunnel Rhino in Sigma Stage 2 [X3]) Laulu (Frost Walrus in Sigma Stage 2 [X3])

Only got one signup, via PM, so consider RWS closed until further notice. I'll relaunch it when enough people start nagging me to do so.

You can also give free trials of many DAWs a shot. Reaper in particular has an unlimited, full-featured free trial--you pay only if you want to. Also it will stay with you if you decide to migrate back to Windows at some point. You can also consider Garage Band as a sort of free trial of Logic (similar interface, much fewer features), so you can compare the two (Cubase too, if you want) before plopping down money.

Two new stages from me: "It's Co-Optitude Time!": [92A2-0000-008A-A02F] This has a theme based on Co-Optitude, the (mostly) retro Let's Play on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel, with Felicia Day and her brother Ryon. I'm especially looking for feedback on this one because I'd like to bring it to the attention of the channel and hosts. "Topsy-yvruT": [b0AC-0000-008E-1634] Getting through this level will require an occasional change in perspective.