zircon

Most of the important stuff you need to read is numerical, but you will need to familiarize yourself with the status screen so you can discern, for example, your Fire Resistance vs. Plague Resistance, Item Burden vs. Equip Burden, etc. Very little story though.

I think IBBIAZ was talking about getting into Berklee itself, not the online courses. Anyone can take the online courses, you just have to shell out the dough.

Hmm.. I don't have protection or warding. Just Water Veil. Oh well, gonna try it and see how it goes. I did pick up the Hand of God which I'll use for some magic damage. I also was a dumbass and upgraded my +6 Winged Spear to +7, not knowing that I needed exactly +6 to get the "Moon" upgrades. Ugh, now I have to start again with it.

Just come to #ocrhon and ask away, or watch some of the YouTube tutorial videos. It seems complicated but really if you just keep playing and internalizing what the different heroes and items do, you'll get to a high level pretty quick since there isn't a huge amount of dexterity or hand-eye coordination involved. Basically, the point of the game is to destroy the 'heart' of the other team's base. To get to it, you have to destroy towers along the way. To help with this, both sides get AI-controlled 'creeps' which will fight each other mindlessly unless the players intervene. Killing enemey creeps makes your hero more powerful. Killing your OWN creeps denies the enemy heroes experience and gold they would have gotten from killing them. Killing enemy heroes gives you lots of gold and experience, while the enemy loses gold. It's basically the PVP of an MMORPG, distilled into 30-45 minute games.

A couple things... 1. I had an epic PVP encounter today (my realm was invaded and I won.) I then had an incredibly annoying encounter with someone using the Shattering Spear. It's such a stupid weapon because I outplayed the guy (hit him more, dodged better, etc.) but he beat me simply due to attrition and I ended up having to spend about 8000 souls (a huge amount for me) just to repair my stuff. Really annoying. 2. I'm venturing around in 2-2 and finding it really annoying. Everything takes like 100 hits. Seriously, the big bug things in the tunnel must take at least 40 hits to kill. Am I missing something? There are NO shortcuts in the entire stage so if I were to die I'd have to spend literally 20 minutes getting back to the boss. Speaking of, it's a good thing I looked up a bit of info on the boss, because apparently he's next to impossible for melee characters without using gimmicks. What should I do about this?!

I chose a Temple Knight so I'm basically a melee guy. I leveled up my Magic enough to get Water Veil which has saved me a few times in the numerous fire-based encounters early, and I also leveled up Faith enough to learn another Miracle (I figure this will be useful latear.) Unfortunately my MP is still awful so most of the time I'm walking around in half-heavy armor with sword/winged spear. My strategy for most enemies has been to bait their attacks and then get up close and personal. I have enough stamina and a good enough shield that I can repel most frontal attacks and then counter with my own. Still not good at riposting yet... the risk/reward doesn't seem worth it.

I'm still pretty early on but just denote spoilers and it's fine. I'm definitely looking forward to doing some PVP later on; I'm only just getting the hang of the combat right now (beat 1-2 and 2-1.)

Uh.. less than half a year is a "good while"? We still talk about HoN and TF2 which have been out far longer. There's no OCR discussion thread about it at all, so what's with the high-horse attitude? It's a cool game. I want to talk about it with people. It's not really like Diablo at all in the play style, just the general idea, so if you don't like Diablo you might still like this. I also didn't enjoy Monster Hunter at all but as you can tell I love this.

Anybody else own this game? I had never even heard of it until recently, when I saw some very positive praise for it on multiple websites. I picked it up and was NOT disappointed. This is probably my favorite PS3 game and one of the best RPGs I've played... ever. Demon's Souls is a generally single-player action RPG closest in concept to games like Nethack or Diablo. You're a single character who never has any sort of 'party', the game has a single town/safe zone which leads to all the levels, and you're fighting demons. It sounds generic but believe me, it's not. The combat is VERY engaging and the customization system is extremely unique. The atmosphere of the game is also wonderful and even though the individual plot elements have been done before, it feels new, and takes itself quite seriously (in a good way.) There are two things particularly notable about DS. One is its difficulty. The game is unbelievably hard. As a veteran RPG player, I've probably died at least 40 times, and I haven't even beaten the second 'stage' yet (out of about 20.) The difficulty feels legitimate, too. From time to time you'll die to something completely unexpected, but generally, you don't die because of the game's controls, or because of a 'cheap' attack, you die because you're not skilled enough. In that sense, it almost shares more in common with true action games rather than RPGs. 8 hours into the game, I'm finding that 'farming' is not particularly useful, and it's more about making the right equipment/spell choices and simply playing better rather than accumulating tons of experience and plowing through. The other unique aspect is the multiplayer. It's unlike anything I've seen. When you first start playing you'll notice ghosts fade in and out from time to time. These are actually other players, and you can vaguely see what they're doing, but not what is around them. So, if you see another player fighting around you, it would be wise to prepare for a surprise attack. You cannot talk to other players, except for leaving messages from a preset list, such as "Watch out for a trap ahead." Bogus messages fade away fast and you can recommend ones that helped you. Also, if a player has died nearby, you can touch their bloodstain and see the last ~5 seconds of their life (but not what was around them - just their position and actions.) This makes for a really immersive experience and the idea is to learn from the mistakes of others. There is also a co-op and PVP system, but again, it's all very much immersed in the game lore. With particular items you can summon another player (random - you can't choose who) to your realm to help you with something, and you yourself can be summoned too. But with another item, you can actually *invade* the realm of other players, appearing to them as a black/red phantom. These actions have repercussions on the game itself as well as your character and theirs, and the fact that you can't communicate with anyone or even see their name/handle makes it all the more interesting. Anyway, I'd love to talk tactics, character builds and so on, so... DS fans unite!

There have been double blind tests to see if either self-proclaimed audiophiles, pro engineers or laypeople could really tell the difference between 44.1khz and 96khz playback. The results were that they couldn't. They COULD tell the difference between a piece of music *recorded* at 96khz and one recorded at 44.1khz, but this doesn't conclusively mean 96khz sounds better - the authors of the study said that the discrepancy could be due to the fact that engineers who record at 96khz may pay closer attention to the mix and generally put more time into it. Anyway, keep your playback at 96. No harm in recording there except your HD space as IBBIAZ said.

If you don't mind, hijacking this thread and making it the official release thread Also moving to Workshop.

Well anyway, thanks for the comments nonetheless.

I do mixing and mastering professionally, including for a number of people on OCR. Mixing would be actually taking your individual instrumental/vocal tracks and using EQ, compression, and effects then blending them together properly. Mastering is only working on a single WAV, which is the mix *you* make of all the tracks. My rate depends on how many tracks we're talking about, as well as whether it's mixing, mastering or both. But think in the ballpark of $25-35 a track, which is definitely pretty low.

Thanks for the comments so far, all! To respond to the left/right channel issue, those are separate recordings AND separate timings. So, if you're hearing something, it is probably your imagination (though the amp sims are indeed different.) As for the lead synth, dunno why so many of you dislike it. SnappleMan, norg, Sixto and danimal cannon all use very similar leads (and in fact I've designed a number of Sixto's leads, so I would know.) I was just emulating their style because I love 'em. Especially SnappleMan.

Don't forget Cable. Believe me, I LIKE the idea of a large cast, but seriously, the cast is already 24 (I think) characters, and now they're adding at least 8 more. Alpha3 was not balanced. MvC2 was not balanced. I doubt Capcom's ability to make the majority of these characters competitive in any way. Look at the console characters in SF4... in general, they can't hang with the rest of the cast at all, EVEN against Japanese players who don't even have practice against them. Sure, it'll be fun to play as Guy or Adon but I have the sinking feeling that it's gonna be like playing Fei.

Considering that video was leaked - read: unofficial - and not even close to release, why would you assume that's the final state of the game's physics? The advantage of working with 3D is that 3D engines have very moldable physics parameters. I'd be surprised if they messed it up considering they've done successful Sonic games in the past.

That's definitely not the whole list; they've added several new original characters too. I'm actually NOT looking forward to this because I don't see how they could balance a cast this huge. SF4 already was not that balanced, so it's just seeming like it's going to be MvC2.

Not exactly. Your latency has nothing to do with how many plugins you're running or what audio processing you're using. It's a value you set your ASIO/WDM/whatever drivers to (alternatively, done within your host.) While it's true that having a huge CPU load at low latencies will produce more audible artifacts (pops, clicks, distortion, slowdown), having a huge CPU load won't affect your latency whatsoever. Outboard hardware always adds latency because the audio from your computer has to go out and be processed through the outboard and then come back in, all synced to a clock. I believe UAD has a "no latency" mode for processing but it is much more intensive on UAD's own processors and possibly on your CPU's processors too.

That's actually part of the song.. a low synth. 8-bit is inherently noisy and gritty. Why would you want to remove parts of the song?

Hmm, not quite what he's looking for Blue Magic, though it's a reasonably accurate general definition. When people refer to DSP cards or DSP hardware, in terms of music production, they mean gear that can process, effect and/or generate audio without requiring any resources from your DAW. Stuff that runs on your DAW, be it a PC or a Mac, is called "native". Hence, "native plugins" vs. Pro Tools plugins (RTAS/TDM), which run off the physical Pro Tools hardware. The PT hardware is thus DSP. The obvious reason why DSP is nice is because it saves RAM and processing cycles, but this is much less of an issue now than it used to be, since we now have abundant quad and octo cores. Still, it's a nice benefit to be able to run say 15 EQs without using ANY CPU whatsoever. The next reason is actually far MORE important to some people. The quality of the plugins and audio processors in DSP hardware is, in the opinion of many, superior to native plugins. Manufacturers of PCI DSP cards, such as Universal Audio and SonicCore (formerly Creamware), typically have amazing emulations right out of the box, with the ability to get some extremely high end stuff that simply is not available anywhere else. For example, the SonicCore platform is the only way you can run a plugin version of the famed Virus hardware synth. Some soundcards and audio interfaces claim to have DSP capabilities. This might be misleading. For example I had an EMU card (0404) that could run EQs, verbs and compressors, but they were fairly low quality, and could only be used in the EMU interface - they weren't VSTs or anything like that. The advantage of UAD cards, on the other hand, is that they actually integrate directly with your host and are designed to be used for music production, not just messing around on Skype or whatever. Should you pay a lot? Only bother with DSP hardware (UAD, SonicCore, Muse Receptor, etc.) if you either (a) REALLY need offloaded processing and/or ( want the sound of plugins only available for hardware DSP platforms. Keep in mind integrating any hardware into your setup will add latency and force you to manually record (no offline rendering) though there may have been advances that have fixed these issues lately. Some people really do swear by DSP stuff, particularly bLiNd, so you might talk with him to get his take on it.

Yeah the early part of the game was terrible. Absolutely no wards on my team at all until about 40 minutes in, no MIA calls, etc. so it was very rough. They were like 10-15 kills ahead for most of the game. The big problem was the number of stuns; it was hard to chase due to DW stun, hammer stun, witch stun, madman stun....

I've played a pretty solid Warbeast in recent games. I turned this one around basically entirely on my own: http://replays.heroesofnewerth.com/match_replay.php?mid=26489497 They had two strong lategame carries and our Pyro died over and over throughout the game. However, my farm became so insane that at the end of the game, I was able to annihilate their base and any of their heroes in about 2 seconds. They actually killed me twice at level 25, I bought back both times, and ended up with 8800 gold (not a typo) at the end because I had bought literally every item I possibly could. 400+ damage, max MSPD, magic immune, unslowable, near-max ASPD = death. One really nice thing about him is his ability to use his dogs to kill at least 2 camps even if he is defending or chilling in the base. There was almost never a time when I was NOT using my dogs for that, and it was very effective at times when we didn't know where the enemy was and couldn't move out to farm lanes.

I was just responding to Arek who specifically asked for "PSP RPGs" not turn-based PSP RPGs.

PSP RPGs.. no mention of Crisis Core? My standards for RPGs are incredibly high these days but CC was one of the best, most engrossing games I've played in a long time. Genuinely emotional story and KICK ASS music too.

They're actually linked RAR files. Once you extract part1, part2 is automatically extracted.