zircon

You're entitled to your opinion, but you are in the minority here. Smartphones are hammering the market for dedicated handhelds, dedicated cameras, etc. How about PDAs and MP3 players? Pretty much dead at this point. GPSes are most likely getting shredded as well. Most people seem to really prefer just having that one device that does everything as opposed to a camera, GPS, PDA, MP3 player, and a Nintendo 3DS all being carried with them along with a dumbphone. The market is only going to keep moving more in this direction, not away from it. The PS3 has sold something like 70+ million units, I would guess it's the most popular Blu-ray player by far. I highly doubt that the sales of all Netflix-enabled TVs combined don't even approach 10% of that. (Also, most TVs don't have that kind of functionality built in, only a pretty small subset do). EDIT: Worth noting, Microsoft has NOT confirmed used-game fees OR online requirements. The only thing they HAVE confirmed is that you can trade in and sell games. http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/21/4353538/xbox-one-perform-recurring-online-checks-even-for-offline-play So it looks like they are merely considering the online check-in thing. It's not confirmed.

Yes, of course the games had to have widely appealing design to be successful. But the point is that pre-smartphone era, if you wanted handheld gaming, you had to buy a dedicated handheld console. Now, you don't. There is a massive game library for iPhone and Android, with many free and 99 cent titles. Hence why it is cutting into the market share for Sony/Nintendo so much. Why spend $100+ on a dedicated gaming handheld, and then $15-30+ per game, when I could just as easily play Jetpack Joyride, Punch Quest, Dungeon Story, Scramble With Friends, etc., for a couple bucks? People have limited time and money. Now that smartphones are a viable gaming platform for many, MANY people, a good chunk of them are choosing to use their time & money on those, and not dedicated handhelds. EDIT: Apple TV is the perfect point in favor of my argument. It's a big failure. All three generations of AppleTV have sold, in total, <6m (as far as I can tell). Why is it a big failure? Among other reasons, because it doesn't do enough. I own a PS3 and I see absolutely no benefit to getting an AppleTV, since my PS3 does basically all of that stuff, AND it plays games and Blurays. If I were a new customer, I would look at both, and then choose the PS3 for the same reason. The PS3 does more.

This makes so little sense. Show me what companies are making similar multimedia devices - devices that sit in your living room and play games, connect to the internet, show live TV, Skype, Netflix, etc. Does anything like that exist? Your argument seems to be that it doesn't, but that it WILL exist... huh? What leads you to believe that Apple has any interest in doing this? Microsoft and Sony have been growing and competing in this space for 6 years. Look at the status of the PS3 at launch, and look at the range of online apps + services it has now. Game consoles ARE the all-in-one media devices you're talking about. Wow, so in 2004 Nintendo predicted the iPhone that would be released 3 years later, really? Again this makes no sense, like literally there is no logical connect going on here. The DS was successful because the iPhone didn't exist yet. Now that smartphones are ubiquitous, they have cut heavily into the market share of handhelds. That kind of goes against your argument 100%, because it shows that multi-use devices have a huge market impact over dedicated devices. Again this is like the bizzaro-world interpretation of reality. In this economic climate, where people DON'T have much extra money, people DON'T want to spend money on devices and products that do only one thing. Why buy a Nintendo 3DS when your phone can play handheld games? Why buy a Blu-Ray player and a Netflix box and ____ when you could buy a single console that does everything? People want to buy LESS, not MORE, in bad economic times.

Again assuming the "check in" is just a quick authorization / validation thing, then even a 1Mbps connection would seem to be sufficient, right? I can't imagine that they are going to require you to download 500mb files every day, that wouldn't make any sense on any level. I agree with you that ease of use is an important factor. That being said, we've also seen in the last 3 years most major updates + new services requiring online connectivity, so I would bet those numbers are even higher now. I think Microsoft is doubling down on their core demographic here. There are also cases like mine, where I WOULD have my 360 online but it doesn't have wifi by default, so I can't (not buying a $100 adapter). If it did, I would!

I like to think we've been transparent from day one about how the project is going. At the moment, 99.9% of the music is done and we are waiting on a single track from Mr. Pretzel himself (the other last two tracks finished within the last ~3 days). I've spent a great deal of time in the last few weeks assembling full information on credits, source names, artist/track names, commentary, and lyrics, a task that is much more complicated than it sounds when you are dealing with 60+ tracks and artists. Website and graphic design are both almost done and have largely been waiting on information on credits/names to be totally complete. Here's what needs to be in place for this album to be released: * All music complete and encoded in MP3/FLAC and tagged with full artist credits, track names, comments, lyrics, URL, etc. triple-checked and cross-referenced with our master list spreadsheet. * A selection of tracks tagged for release on OCR front page, complete with writeups from djpretzel, myself and McVaffe. * All tracks uploaded to multiple mirrors. * Torrent prepared and pre-seeded on the tracker. * All artwork complete for digital & physical releases including full liner notes, Kickstarter backer list, directory commentary, credits, legalese. * Website complete with all tracks, download links, credits, lyrics, commentary, artwork. * Digital and physical artwork, the latter including art for all 5 discs, Digipak 4/8-panel insert, panels. * All interview / behind-the-scenes videos edited, encoded and combined cohesively for the DVD. * All stems and bonus files organized and named properly for the DVD. * OCR frontpage prepared for the release. and that's just off the top of my head. Most of this has to be double, triple, and quadruple-checked by as many staff as possible. The physical release has way, way more stuff involved ranging from templating the art properly, to going over proofs, routing shipments to Amazon and filling out bulk shipment forms, updating backer addresses one by one, etc... But at the end of the day, Spring is still the goal and believe me when I say this will be well-worth the wait.

Yeah, I get that, but I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of people DO have internet connections, broadband ones at that. Again I feel like there is a big difference between always-on and "check in daily". I would wager that the majority of people who would buy an Xbox One are the kind of people who would be using it online frequently (after all, Xbox Live was/is one of the strongest selling points of the 360 for most). Do I PREFER that as a consumer? No, obviously, it's not a decision made for my benefit but for the benefit of the hardware manufacturer, developers, publishers, etc. which have their own needs and requirements. Just saying that it's not a death knell or anything of the sort. This is the kind of old-and-busted mindset I was talking about. The era of a game console being a dedicated box that plays games and does nothing else is over. The market as a whole does not universally want that. Microsoft, Sony and to a lesser extent Nintendo would not spend time and money incorporating applications like Netflix, video stores, browsers, etc. if people did not use them. The selling point of consoles is to have an all-in-one living room device that lets you play games AND listen to music AND watch movies AND _____ as opposed to having a game console, and a blu-ray player, and a CD player, and a Netflix box, etc.

As far as I can tell offline mode is intended to be used only for short periods of time. If you Google this you'll find tons of people having problems with it over longer periods. In short - the intended functionality seems to be that it needs to "check in" every so often. Again, Xbox One's requirement of checking in once per day online is no more onerous. It's extremely unlikely that you will be in a situation where your HOME CONSOLE cannot get an internet connection at all. Talking about PCs and always-online functionality is very different because you can install games on a laptop, and laptops travel frequently. There are a million situations where you would have a laptop in a place with no internet. Trains, buses, cars, planes, etc. So it's much worse to have that kind of requirement on a PC, whereas with a stationary console that never leaves your house, 94% of Americans could hook it up to broadband easily. BTW again I have very little interest in this based on the whole Xbox Live subscription thing so I'm just talking about this from an objective standpoint, not as some kinda diehard fan that can't wait to get one.

I'm telling you exactly what happened. I moved my computer, plugged it in, no internet. Steam refused to do anything, including Offline Mode, because there was no connection. I'm not making this up. I literally could not play ANY games on Steam including ones like FTL, nor could I access Offline mode. Just google "Offline mode doesn't work unless online" or similar, plenty of people have had the same issue. http://kotaku.com/you-will-be-able-to-trade-xbox-one-games-online-micros-509140825 Again how is this any different than Steam, which we are all quite used to...?

Where are you getting this from? Microsoft said the game can't be installed on two accounts, not that you can't re-sell it. In fact someone from the Official Xbox Magazine explicitly said that reselling is fine, they would just de-auth the original account. Almost all music software works like this and there is a healthy secondhand market for it. Again is this really news? Steam does the same thing. I moved my gaming computer upstairs temporarily (no wifi on it) and I couldn't play any of my single player games. Wow, what an outrage.

Keep in mind we're a very unusual subset of the overall populace here How many people on OCR are huge sports games fans? Probably not many, but if you looked at the whole population the percentage would be very different. Re: the internet connection thing, I honestly think it is not very onerous to connect once per 24 hours for some kinda validation or whatever. I doubt they are going to make you download massive files every 24 hours but just authenticate or something. Steam does the same thing. The vast majority of American households have broadband, something like 94%. And even those 6% who don't have it probably do have access to an internet connection at least good enough to authenticate once per 24 hours. Frankly I'm more concerned that they will continue the stupid BS with Xbox Gold, for example not allowing Netflix streaming without paying an Xbox monthly fee. If they do that, I have 0 interest in the One, and will probably just get a PS4.

The Wii U just hooks up to your existing cable/satellite box, right? So it's not really its own device. It sounds like Xbox One is going to actually have its own original live programming.

Where to begin? The Wii and DS came out in 2006 and 2004 respectively. It's 2013, with a different landscape. When the Wii first came out, the market of "non-gamers" was as of yet untapped. Thanks to the Wii, Kinect and PSMove (among other things) that market has been thoroughly saturated. Smartphones weren't popularized until years after the DS came out. This is an older graph but the trend is obviously still moving in this direction: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20054217-17.html More people are playing games on their smartphones, thus cutting into the market for dedicated handheld gaming devices. Common sense. http://cdn.gizmocrazed.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Chart_USportableGameRevenue_MarketShare_2009-2011-resized-600.png The PS2 is absolutely incomparable to the PS4 / Xbox One in every possible way. Completely different landscape. At the time the PS2 came out, you were not seeing the biggest, most popular games released for all platforms - including PC - and PC games were on par or worse in graphics than top-tier consoles. Steam didn't exist. Internet play was basically non-existent on consoles and not nearly as popular as it is today on PC. Downloadable games were a tiny tiny market. Hell, the internet itself was still (relatively speaking) in its infancy. The PS2 was 13 years ago, dude. What I'm saying is that TODAY, millions and millions of people are playing games on their phone, on their tablet, and on their PC. You can easily get a great, modern game on Steam for a couple bucks. Facebook and browser games are a multi-billion dollar market. These things were unheard of 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago. For consoles and handhelds to compete they need to do more than just play games. Well sure, if the Xbox One is $1000 then it's a pretty crappy alternative. But I suspect that these consoles will be much cheaper and have a better form factor than any comparable PC device. In other words, this IS the cheaper alternative.

IMO it's a very smart move for MS + Sony to focus on consoles as more than just gaming devices. In this day and age, people are less interested in single-use devices... hence why smartphones are so successful and ubiquitous. Instead of carrying around a phone, and a watch, and a handheld gaming system, and a calculator (etc) you just have your smartphone that does everything. People like having a device that can do multiple things. The concept of a box that does nothing but play games is increasingly outdated. This is the best direction for game consoles. They SHOULD be living room media centers, basically purpose-built mini-computers with customized OSes.

I have no skin in the game either way, but I found this to be an interesting article, as someone who runs a brand... http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2013/05/18/wii-u-two-years-of-negative-brand-momentum/ It makes a strong point. The WiiU has been surrounded with negativity since years before their release, partially because of the negativity surrounding the original Wii over the last few years. Regardless of the merits of the system, its games, etc., it's hard to argue that the WiiU is in a very bad place when it comes to branding, both in and out of the industry. Nintendo needs to seriously rethink the way they are marketing and pitching the system.

You can just use the WAVs directly in the drum sampler of your choice - directly in your DAW too. Go for it!

Thank you so much to everyone that backed the project! With all the stretch goals met, this is going to be AWESOME.

Inspired by artists like Madeon and BT... progressive atmospheric dubstep trance electronica. Or something. It's my vision of the sound of the future Enjoy! https://soundcloud.com/zircon-1/augment/

Deadline EXTENDED to May 28th, by popular demand!

Short deadline but I know you guys can do it

Again I actually did enjoy the way they hyped the album, with the collaborator videos and all, but I think they far overstated the uniqueness of the album. To me it seems primarily like old school Daft Punk (90s) with less electronics, more live instruments, more 70s influence. That's fine, and again I really like that they used live instruments. I just think that it is merely a solid album and not a true tour-de-force masterpiece...

To me, it's not at an issue of production values but just kinda.. lazy composition and arrangement for songs like Get Lucky. They picked the wrong 70s bands/artists to emulate, in my opinion. They should have taken a page out of Stevie Wonder's book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhw_zbvxvb4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0eVf3ynZbw These have similar levels of old-school production and fantastic groove, but they are simply WAY more interesting in terms of melody, harmony, and arrangement... it's just not even a contest. And you can't tell me these grooves aren't amazing. If only Daft Punk did something more like this. I agree that this was way overhyped (even though I enjoy the hype), though I respect the band immensely for their goal of using more organic elements. I did the same thing with Identity Sequence, after all.

http://impactsoundworks.com/juggernaut-contest/ The results are in! To celebrate the upcoming release of our new flagship scoring library JUGGERNAUT: Cinematic Electronic Scoring Tools, we asked composers to write a piece in <2 weeks incorporating our free Cinematic Synthetic Drums library (the precursor to Juggernaut). It was VERY difficult to narrow these down to just a handful of our favorites, so we added both Runners-up and Honorable Mentions to represent some of the other wonderful compositions we enjoyed. Despite this, there were still tons of other amazing compositions, making it quite the challenge to figure out the winners. You ALL have raised the bar. A huge THANK YOU to everyone that wrote and submitted something: we hope you are all proud of your work on a short deadline, and that you will enjoy both the free CSD and the FULL version of Juggernaut for years to come! https://soundcloud.com/isworks/sets/juggernaut-composer-challenge Judging: We considered composition, production, and overall creativity, which can shine through in many ways: how the free samples were used, unique arrangements, musical styles, or tonalities, etc. For example, the 1st place entry “TIKIPUNK” uses 100% CSD samples and some very imaginative re-processing, sampling and resynthesis to create a huge palette of tones. Quite inspiring! 1st Place receives JUGGERNAUT: Cinematic Electronic Scoring Tools, an ISW library of their choice, and a Google Nexus 7. 2nd and 3rd Places receive JUGGERNAUT: Cinematic Electronic Scoring Tools and an ISW library of their choice. Runners-up receive JUGGERNAUT: Cinematic Electronic Scoring Tools. Honorable Mentions receive a 30% discount for JUGGERNAUT!

Stand Alone Complex is just.. amazing. I hated the dub but man, probably my favorite anime of all time. Inspired a whole album no less!

Some fun statistics... * 34 tracks utilize LIVE instruments or vocals. Instruments include acoustic & electric guitar, mandolin, harmonica, whistling, sax, trumpet, cello, violin, viola, acoustic piano, clarinet, and more. * Balance & Ruin will clock in at just over 6 hours of music (confirmed). * There will be a total of 72 tracks - possibly 73. * Every source has been remixed except "The Unforgiven" and "What?!" * Counting guest musicians - and I probably missed a few - there are 64 artists involved with the project. * XPRTNovice is MVP of the project, having arranged or performed on 6 (!) tracks total. I came in second with 5 tracks arranged & produced, tying with the illustrious Jeff Ball who arranged or performed on another 5. * Only 23 tracks on the project have predominantly electronic elements, and this includes a number of remixes that are definitely more of a hybrid style (ambient, new age, jazzy, etc.) Excluding the hybrids, it's more like 17 tracks. Nobody can accuse us of having too much techno THIS time! * On the other hand, only about a dozen tracks are electric guitar-driven, and this again uses a pretty broad definition including rock/electronic hybrids, classic rock, rock opera, etc.

Yes, Jake's opera is truly mindblowing. In my opinion it is one of the very best remixes ever created, by anyone, of anything, and I don't say that lightly. That being said, there are other remixes of pieces from the opera sequence as well that are fantastic, and they all fit in sequence. * OA featuring Moonlapse and Bardic Knowledge will kick off the Overture with a very Nightwish-style piece with metal & orchestral stylings and tons of driving, aggressive rhythm. * Jake's piece will likely come right after that, covering a variety of themes seamlessly, including the intermediate stuff like the waltz and duel. * The energy and drama built from the previous two pieces (which feature all male vocalists) will dissolve into a sea of atmospheric beauty with the pure Aria theme arranged in a softer, emotional style featuring Jill as Celes, AeroZ playing a gorgeous cello counterpoint line, and my own dreamy electronic production with synthetic and acoustic elements. Basically.. lots of synergy and vocal power!