zircon

Be that as it may, it's still disappointing to all of the people who developed friendships with him and talked regularly, outside OCR, about non-OCR subjects. It's one thing to stop posting or visiting a site, it's quite another to sever ALL your connections.

If you're still on the fence about picking up this album, here are some reviews I've gotten over the last few weeks: "Some serious good shit! I like this alot!" "Very awesome album. I especially enjoyed The Emerald Lounge. Scrap that, the entire album is good! And as always, more phat bass!" "I would say this was Film Score work based on D&B, great work, you think like me :)" "Great work! Really like 'The Emerald Lounge', 'Timeless' and 'One True Love' especially." "Congratulations on your release I really like your work I can hear this in some big action movie great work mate." For $7, what have you got to lose? I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

He did leave a post like that on the judges forum. Basically, he said exactly that - he was moving to Nevada (Nebraska?) to do TV work and that he wouldn't be back.

Yes, but currently only two sequencers on earth (Cubase & Sonar) can handle 32 and 64bit plugins side by side, and they don't exactly do a bang-up job of that.

Happy birthday Jill & Brandon!!! I love ya. Jill, I mean. Hint: You can help celebrate Jill's bday by giving her the gift of buying her albums

Hey, welcome to the forums - moved this thread to our higher visibility Community board for ya. Good luck with your search; I'm sure there are plenty willing to take on a job like this!

Haha, yeah, that video is amazing. Christmas might be another 9 months away, but that's no reason to not pick up this album, especially since it's Jill's birthday!

This guy doesn't play around. He's REALLY talented - his entry to my contest was very good.

I still gotta pick up the final release, but my top track was definitely Omen. Warrior's Dance was really awesome on YouTube but I didn't like the album version that I heard... just seemed very weak to me overall, not powerful. Thunder was good too, and the titular track has really grown on me. Take Me to the Hospital is probably the track most like Jilted/Experience which is a nice throwback.

REAPER continues to surprise me. It's really, really customizable and has extremely efficient operation (low memory, low CPU, great multithreading, fairly stable). Those are the primary benefits. Plus, it is very regularly updated and a 64bit version is in beta testing now. However, I would base a recommendation on whether you want to switch on what you want to get out of your sequencer. The main issue I have with REAPER is the piano roll. I just don't like it. I don't particularly like any other piano roll besides FL's either, but REAPER's just seems weak compared to most. The devs acknowledge this and I'm hoping by REAPER 3 they will really boost the MIDI capabilities. However, it's still workable. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" on Jill's album was done entirely in REAPER... it's still easy enough to record, quantize, and so on. I'd say if you're mainly working with recordings, switch to REAPER immediately. It's amazing for audio editing. If you're mainly a MIDI guy, spend some time with it first and see if it fits your workflow.

Yeah, Seth is ridiculously hard and cheap. What difficulty are you on though? I have no problems on the lowest two, just on "Easy" and higher.

Revenge system = ultra combos. You get hit, ultra gauge fills up, when it's full to level 1 you can use your ultra combo. When it fills to level 2 the move is even stronger. Really simple.

Yeah... I saw that. Really stupid.

Vinyl noises (probably sampled from somewhere, not generated) + cutting out lots of low end and some high end, putting some stuff in mono... sounds easy to me.

Previous argument aside (anso you misunderstood me yet again, "harder" means "harder than without these features", not "harder than another game) I'm still mad at SF4 for making Fei into an even CRAPPIER character. The only thing he has going for him is a set of decent pokes. He has no way to get through fireballs except EX moves - but then again, most characters have that - his Chicken Wing is harder to do, has less priority, and doesn't hit overhead, his Rekkas aren't safe on block (except *maybe* jab rekkas, and even that, not really), you can't link into his ultra from anything, and his Tenshin command grab sucks. When I went back to HDR it was amazing how powerful he was in that, and even in THAT game he's considered lower-tier.

Nah, you just strengthed my WoW analogy more. I played that game for thousands of hours at the highest level, best PVP/PVE guilds, etc., so I knew it backwards and forwards. The game is popular because it's easy to get to a high level and access lots of content. Doesn't mean you'll be GOOD at all the content, but you can try to run the same raids as other guilds, play vs. the same people, and so on. As compared with EverQuest, where to do raids of the Planes you had to play for thousands of hours. That's the difference. OK, so by your logic, with regards to comparing games, no one can make any critiques of any games ever. No game can be better or worse than another one, just "different". If that's your opinion, fine, but then I guess we're not allowed to say any aspect of any game is better or worse than any aspect of any other game. I disagree. SFIV is harder to play than HD Remix, IMO. HDRemix was the first fighter I put any real time into (very very casually played some SF games years ago) and I found myself doing well in ranked matches without that much practice. In SF4, the design changes make it simply harder to get good at.

It apparently can happen any time the 360 is moved with a disc in it, regardless of whether the 360 is on or the disc is spinning. There have been tens of thousands of reported cases, so it's just bad design. If you don't touch the system though it becomes much more rare.

No, Chrome takes into account frequency. "Every time you open a new tab, you'll see a visual sampling of your most visited sites, most used search engines, and recently bookmarked pages and closed tabs." So, nothing new on that level, though it's interesting Opera had this even before Chrome did.

Yeah, I'm doing a return with Amazon now... looks like I should be OK. New copy is coming in on Thurs.

Here's the first part of the argument, laid out simply. (1) Stuff like kara throws and difficult roman cancels make the game's execution more difficult (pure dexterity & 1p training). (2) The game has been designed, marketed, and presented with the casual gamer in mind (flashy graphics, Ultras & ultra animations, unlockables). (3) The design "features" in point 1 contradict the apparent philosophy in point 2. This much is pure deductive reasoning that can't really be argued with. The additional argument Sirlin makes (and I do too) is; (1) Certain execution barriers make it significantly harder for many people to get to a competitive level of play. (2) It is preferable for more people to be at the same level of play. (3) Therefore, it is preferable to reduce certain execution barriers. Very straightforward.

How about a fighting game with stages that take 5 minutes to run across? Or ones where you have to hit 8 buttons at a time to play? Those would just be "another way to play" also, but that doesn't mean we can't say they are better or worse. When did he say it was game-breaking at all? He just said it makes knockdowns less important, which is true. Also, if the majority of people want to get up quickly from a knockdown, then it makes sense to make the "down" command keep you down longer, not fast-recover. That is what he is trying to say about optimizing for the majority of cases. You're not reading what he's saying. He's not saying kara throws are unbalanced. Kara throws enable some characters to enlarge their throw range. However, they're tricky to pull off. This is a bug, but Capcom seemingly intended to leave it in. His point is that RATHER than force people to use an arcane technique like a Kara throw to extend their throw range, just extend the character's throw range and remove Kara throws, which aren't even supposed to be a feature to begin with. Anso, you are really not understanding his argument at all. For the last time, he's not saying complexity is bad or that it removes strategy. He is an experienced Guilty Gear player and you don't see him badmouthing it. However, his point is that the game is MARKETED and DESIGNED in many ways as a CASUAL FRIENDLY game. When you put in things like two-button throws, Kara throws, complicated roman cancels, and extremely difficult link combos, you are making it harder for CASUAL PLAYERS to become better at the game and compete at a higher level, where everyone already will know how to do all of that stuff. You are forcing people to spend time in 1p training to become better at a 2p game, which is basically like "grinding" Let's go back to the WoW analogy. WoW is so successful because it (mostly) cut the crap out of MMOs. EverQuest could take you 2,000 hours to get up to the maximum level, where the real fun begins. World of Warcraft cuts that time to 1/5, 1/6 or even lower. Blizzard realized that the meat of the game is in the endgame, where everyone is roughly the same power, and that it would be more fun overall to have everyone be able to get to that level faster. Some hardcore players have complained about WoW's experience curve, but it's still the most successful MMO ever, even among hardcore gamers. Guild Wars took this a step further, removing the grind almost entirely, and it has been very successful. You might not personally feel this way, but I would imagine that MOST people don't find it terribly exciting to spend hours and hours beating up a dummy just to get the tools to play the game normally, just like most people don't enjoy grinding for thousands of hours in an MMO (where the rewards are still even more tangible than a fighting game). I certainly don't. Crap like making Fei Long's chicken wing command needlessly complex doesn't do anything except force mindless practice. It's not fun and there's no strategy or thinking involved.

I think Giga died because it just didn't keep up. Who wants to use a finicky piece of crap that can blue screen your computer? It took them YEARS after Kontakt hit the scene to develop a VST version of Gigastudio, which should have been around BEFORE Kontakt hit the market. They died, and it's all their own fault. If they made stable, readily-usable software that worked cross-platform and in Pro Tools, they would probably still be around! Still, the growth of proprietary samplers is annoying. I'd prefer if everyone used Kontakt.

I don't think ad hominems are a good basis for discussion. The reason I've referenced the article several times is because I completely agree with it. As you can see several other SF4 players here agree as well, ie. djp, Bardicknowledge, Liontamer... I think Capcom could fix some of these issues pretty easily, for example the lack of double blinds in online games, the weak netcode, tweaking some of the characters (no Fei Long overhead, no safe rekkas), maybe providing a shortcut to focus cancels, and so forth. Nah, the worst part is getting 10 "unable to play. search again?" messages before getting an actual game. Seriously, I'd say connecting works maybe 10% of the time?

Nice ad hominem! Really compelling Yet another person misses the point. He's not saying GG is the paragon of fighting game design. He was pointing out that even though it's extremely complex and oriented towards the extremely hardcore, it manages to do roman cancels more elegantly than SF4. He's not saying GG is simply better than SF4, but that even in a VERY complex game (MORE complex than SF4) you can do roman cancels elegantly. Yes, and he's not saying GG is a better game than SF4 as a result, nor is he criticizing complexity in general. Obviously as an experienced gamer he can handle complexity. He's questioning design decisions that make SF4 a more hardcore-oriented game despite the fact that people routinely call it casual-friendly. This all may be true, but again it's beside the points that he is making. I think most of what he has said is objective criticism, not really taste, and he does a very good job defending everything he has said. Remember, he's not saying Street Fighter IV is a bad game. He's not saying other games are BETTER than SFIV. He's talking about very specific features or issues in SFIV and drawing comparisons to other games to support his argument.

Actually, Sirlin is pretty much a game master. He's a tournament level player not only at the Street Fighter series as a whole, but also Smash Brothers, Guilty Gear, Virtua Fighter, StarCraft, whatever. So, when he criticizes something for being off, it's not because he's comparing it to one game.