SystemsReady

There's a place called Floating Point, Bracket Towers, putting Help() in a passive slot allows you a chance to become a Super User...there's more, but I don't know how far you are

Played it, beat it, playing it again. I really love it. I also really, really love all the programming references.

I played Transistor the other day. The credit roll had like...twenty people in it. Bastion was their first game. How much money do you think they had to develop the game, and what portion of that money went to paying Korb to make the music? Someone as specific as a harpist would be damn expensive. I don't even know anyone in RL, even on our music departments on campus, who plays harp. "Find someone online then!" Ok, I happen to follow a small producer named Foxsky, who had to wait months and months for vocal tracks to get back to him so he could finish his songs. He's lucky, he's not writing music for a game, which likely has a strict timetable. Are you seriously expecting someone to put large swaths of their work on hold while they wait for an instrumental part from someone, in an environment like game production? Loops exist for reason. That reason being, unless you're a music god who can play a ton of instruments or have a ton of connections to people who do, putting together songs with "real" instrument tracks is expensive and insanely impractical. Even more so when you're on a time crunch for a small game made by a small team. You can record your own drums? Wonderful for you. Me, I can't afford drums or move them into dorms if I even had them. I don't know any harp players. I can just play the clarinet, but I can't even record it because I don't have all the equipment needed, assuming I even had a proper venue to record it in. But I have so many ideas. I guess I can't be a "real" producer, then, if I use some soundfonts and loops I literally got from a topic in this forum? Acting like loops instantly make something illegitimate is, IMO, elitist, short-sighted, and completely ignoring any other aspects of music production, writing, and creation. It's also kind of ironic, given the purpose of this site, existing to show permutations of other people's work.

Best wishes to him. I'm a massive fan of his channel...

Well, for Sonic Adventures 1 & 2, one of the things that stuck in my mind about EGM's review for Sonic Heroes was that they were praising the music as "finally being good". And at the time I honestly didn't appreciate the OSTs that much until I was older and was more into electronic and jazz and rock, and could appreciate things like instrumentation (which are damn fantastic in those OSTs). I remember loving the hell out of some songs in Sonic Shuffle (the battle theme really stuck with me), but I just didn't play it enough to really appreciate it (couldn't get past the first board on my own). IIRC, Shadow of a Hedgehog doesn't have its soundtrack either.

People gave the Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 OSTs crap, but honestly nearly all the music save for most of the character themes are pretty good, IMO.

Yeah, you can do that, but unfortunately apparently 3DS games still internally render two images for the 3D, regardless of whether the slider is on or not. Some games allow you to just switch it off entirely, which I imagine would conserve some battery life by halving the rendering needed. I think an easy way would be to change the Pokemon distribution. IIRC, the surfing was literally only Wingull and Tentacool (and their evos). If they decided to say "screw it" with keeping the old distribution, they could add in a whole lot more to make it a bit less tedious.

Yeah, what they said. Though this time I wish they'd just implement being able to turn the 3D off entirely. The 3DS's battery life is pathetic enough as it is.

I'm honestly really stoked for it. Given how Game Freak's been dead-set on theming their regions from 5th gen onward, I want to see if they'll do it with Hoenn, too. Plus it has all those unique, interesting places and routes! I want to see what they'll do with that!

I got the impression in the Avengers that since Mjolnir's magic-powered, it pretty much managed to deflect most of the energy from that (the lightning going everywhere, leaving only the normal force of the hit). Also, it was a straight-down blow instead of a horizontal one, which naturally resulted in him being pushed against the ground instead of being blown back (Thor, being in the air, on the other hand...). Which had to have been hell on his knees.

Saw it yesterday. Loved the hell out of it. I guess I can use the cliched phrase "was on the edge of my seat"... This movie kicked the absolute ass of DC's last two efforts to make "realistic" and "timely" superhero movies. Easily. It has an actual coherent plot that successfully ties in the relevant stuff/philosophy without it being the sole end-all be-all of the story (unlike Dark Knight Rises), and kept the characters as their characters in a realistic world and plot (unlike Man of Steel, which was also pretty much nothing plot-wise). It was funny, after Avengers I was saying "man, a spy movie in this universe would be amazing!" and...I got it!

Interesting viewpoint. I think it nails down what, IMO, makes the later Persona games (3 & 4) so fun...they're insanely long games, but since those games' systems are on a day-to-day basis, the game not only spoonfeeds you story and gameplay in small segments, but you have a choice as to whether you want to advance sidestory or grind in dungeons, one in-game day at a time. So it stays interesting and fresh. As for the OP...I have a viewpoint that doesn't seem to be held by many, namely that I see each game I play as a story or experience, like a book I put on a bookshelf after finishing and will eventually come back to. So length doesn't bother me that much (unless of course you have pacing problems like the aforementioned Zelda game). That said...a game that seems like a glorified demo for an upcoming game should be like $15, like lot of expansions/DLC.

And...? My computer runs Skyrim on Ultra High at 60 FPS and yet Minecraft grinds it to a halt. The PS3 also has completely different architecture than the PS2, which pretty much means that it'll be very, very hard to run a PS2 game with the same performance without completely gutting it. Which they wouldn't for a remaster. Also, Naughty Dog is not only a first-party company with inside info, but also have programming gods. Seriously, read about Crash Bandicoot's development, it's amazing.

IIRC, most games on consoles never even hit 60 FPS to begin with, so I think that's a rather high bar to set for graphics (cue "PC Master Race"). IMO, the biggest reason why this remaster exists (aside from "SE is hurting for money") is that the PS3 doesn't have backwards-compatibility. And even my own PS2 has died after years of repeated, loving use. A remaster is just that...a coat of polish over a game that you can now play on a console you likely still own. Different than a remake.

IMO, the world map isn't even that big of a loss. From all the other FF games I've played, the world map only seemed to exist to foist random encounters on you while you try to find the next location you should go to (a la D&D). Hardly a useful feature, and it doesn't work very well with story urgency if you're just running around a peninsula grinding. I have to wonder who is really up-in-arms about it, too. The only people I can imagine being mad about it are diehard FF purists; smaller series like Persona are linear-as-hell, most mainstream modern games are linear-as-hell, and JRPGs are a completely different genre than WRPGs.

Wonderful weather up here eh?

Ok. SystemsReady and Grand Forks, ND as general location.

Hm, it complains about me not having any privileges, so...

A good DnB track is Zircon's The Search For Ambrosia from the Deus Ex: Sonic Augmentation album. Closer to liquid DnB than outright DnB, but whatever :3 On The Run (The Returners) from the latest Final Fantasy album is a good indie dance/nu disco track, seems like it's good for a set closer...

I should probably clarify...my syntax is a little misleading, and written at 7 in the morning. After listening to songs on here and reading judges' critiques, you need to change enough of an existing song for it to stand out on its own. Additions to the melody, new instrumentation, introducing new countermelodies etc etc. This is easy to do for an old VGM song, because most songs are a single looping melodic line, a harmony, and maybe a countermelody. The quality of it is generally pretty low too, so you can add a lot simply by going "let's make [x part] [y instrument]". You can improvise more, and have more room to do things with it. But when you look at new stuff, something like, say, ...what is there for you to change or add to make a decent remix out of? The melody is much longer than anything that shows up in a Sega Genesis title, there are a ton of instrument parts, there's so much more texture, the instrumentation is fantastic. It's so much more complex. It's so finished and everything works. Again, like trying to make your own version of a Van Gogh painting or something. I can't listen to this song and imagine how I would change it in any way, shape, or form, even as I can pick out each and every part of it. There's absolutely nothing I can add to it if I ever proposed writing a remix for it.Earlier posts in the topic tried to make it an issue of catchiness, and I disagree. A ton of modern music is just as catchy, the issue is that it's really hard if not impossible to adequately add or re-interpret music that already has the parts, bells, and whistles to be a fully-fledged, imagined piece.

I was thinking about all this this morning, and I really think a lot of it does come down to complexity and the fact that it's really hard to fix something that isn't broken. I read a lot of posts talking about how modern game music isn't as catchy, etc, but I can literally sing to you most of the themes from Okami, Odin Sphere, and most of Skyrim, and those are all orchestral soundtracks. I had Odin Sphere's miniboss theme stuck in my head while showering today. But I can't write remixes to them. Granted, there's always the sure-fire method of just going "well what if [x] song was in [y] genre" (I've come across an electronic remix of Skyrim's "Dragonborn", which was...amusing), but that's not really an improvement, or that much of an actual change. I can't look at a sublime song like and name a single thing I'd like to change about it, let alone enough to warrant a remix. And I think that's the biggest problem. It's way, way harder to remix something that is absolutely, completely fantastic, from songwriting to arrangement to instrumentation. It's like trying to improve a Van Gogh painting.

I actually don't mind the new designs, especially Amy's...it's nice to not have like a 9-year-old girl wearing a ridiculously short hoop skirt, geez. Let's hope they retooled her personality, too. I was so disappointed that they threw out her character development in Sonic Adventure... The team may be good, but I'm pretty sure the Sonic franchise is cursed or something, so I'm holding my breath. Hell, even the good games are buggy. There's an entire...what, 20-video series on YouTube dedicated to showing all of the ones you can get in-game in Sonic 3 & Knuckles without hacking?

From my experience writing remixes, it's harder for me to remix something with great instrumentation and such...which modern VGM tends to have. You have a bit more creative freedom with old chiptune or low-fi stuff, IMO.

The "As if Tripping on Alligators" tempo marking made me spit out my coffee, hahahahaha

IIRC, Sony wasn't just doing badly PS3-wise, but also in their TV and music player divisions, too. I was hearing about some massive layoffs a while back... Meanwhile, no matter what happens to the rest of Nintendo, they're still making millions off Pokemon, which sells just as fast as it always did.