DarkeSword

Learn words. Say "remake."

That's not a reboot.

How is it a reboot? It references the previous trilogy in such a specific way. It's a sequel. It has Leia, Han, Chewie, and Luke, all played by their original actors, all older, decades later. Nothing is being rebooted (except maybe the Expanded Universe?).

I loved the running gag with with Han finally discovering the joys of the Bowcaster.

I saw The Force Awakens last night and I'm so incredibly excited about Star Wars being BACK. The movie hit all the right notes for me. Really great, strong characterization, a fantastic, emotional storyline, great action sequences, and wonderful humor in the style of the classic trilogy. I cheered a lot while watching the movie. Han Solo in particular was just fantastic and exactly as snarky and funny as he was in The Empire Strikes Back. I was so sad to see his fate, but it was a great scene between him and Kylo Ren. I'm really intrigued about Rey's storyline. I'm subscribing to what is probably the prevailing theory that she might be Luke's daughter. All of the stuff with Anakin and Luke's lightsaber and the reaction Rey has to it when she holds it leads me to believe that she's a Skywalker. I really wish I could just watch Episode VIII right now because the mystery surrounding her and Luke is killing me right now. Finn and Poe were great. I love how they immediately became bros, and there were shades of Luke and Han's friendship between them. Another thing I loved about this movie was that, like the original trilogy (and lacking in the prequel trilogy), there was a really ancient, lived-in quality to the galaxy again, especially on Jakku, with all the old broken war machines laying around. This movie finally treated the Force the same way that Yoda spoke about it in The Empire Strikes Back: it wasn't a scientific phenomenon like it was in the prequels, and it wasn't just a substitute for magic like it was in a lot of old Expanded Universe material. There was a really mystical quality to it. I have a ton of other thoughts but can't really collect them all. I'm going to go see this movie a couple of more times so that I can unpack it more.

This thread has spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to be spoiled, do not read this thread.

Minor nitpick. This isn't really an issue with the new forum, just a stylistic request: Any chance we can get square avatars back? Not crazy about the round frame.

Just so you guys know...if you change your sig, it will change your sig on all your posts. You don't have to post again to see the changes.

Apologies to MindWanderer; I didn't mean to derail either. Though figuring out the key to a song is a very important skill to have, ESPECIALLY for compos like this one. I also want to clarify that I didn't mean that you should be able to figure out the exact key just by listening. I don't have perfect pitch, so I also sit down with a keyboard and determine what the "actual" notes are in a song. But you should be able to listen to a piece of music and at least say "that's major, that's minor, that's some other mode." Determining the quality of the key is probably the easiest part.

Just some thoughts about FFVII being multi-part. A couple of years ago, Square Enix released the MMO Final Fantasy XIV. The game tanked hard because of a myriad of technical and game design flaws. It was so bad that Square Enix pulled the game offline and reworked the entire thing. They eventually released FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, which has been a very successful game for them. A lot of the post-mortem talks about this game focused on the staff at Square Enix learning that they needed to shift the culture surrounding Final Fantasy games at the company to something that was more in tune with the player-base. SQEX has long been known as a studio that makes beautiful looking games, and that art culture was part of the reason the original FFXIV did so poorly. One example was flower pots in the game having just as many polygons as a player characters; this kind of hyper-detailed rendering of environment objects led the developers to limiting the number of visible player characters in-game, which made the game look pretty but empty, which is not what you want in an MMO. The failure of FFXIV caused the company to reevaluate their priorities, and they're much more interested in listening to the player base. The director of Final Fantasy XIV is still apologizing to players all these years later because he realized how important it was to make a player-centric game. A great example of this culture-shift is Final Fantasy XV's Episode Duscae "demo." The game isn't coming out for a while, but Square Enix has this sample game that they've released that players are playing and reacting to. The developers are using this as a kind of beta for the game in order to influence design decisions. They want to get an idea of what players want, need, and like so they can calibrate the experience of the final game accordingly. I think that this culture-shift is part of the reason they're taking a multi-part approach to Final Fantasy VII. I think they're going to release the first part, look at the feedback and player reactions, and take that on board in order to improve each new entry in the series. See what things players like, see what they don't. I think that the gameplay throughout the series of releases is going to evolve based on what players say.

I've heard it said that the Vita version of SFxT can be considered the definitive version of the game. I definitely have a ton of fun with it.

Played a crap ton of MM6 when I was a kid. One of my favorite games. This is too conservative and really repetitive. Percussion and rhythm guitar feel like they're on autopilot. Everything also sounds really mechanical too. Needs a lot more going on; more personalization too. NO

Helpful Review Forum Links: ReMixes with the Least Number of Reviews ReMixes that Haven't Been Reviewed in a Long Time Added these to the first post as well.

Well I mean, leaving all the technical solutions aside, being able to figure out the key of something is a pretty baseline skill you ought to have as a composer/arranger. Like when you listen to a song, can you tell if it's in a major or minor key? Can you figure out the tonic by listening to it? It also helps if you start thinking of melodies and chords not in terms of actual notes, but of scale degrees. So let's say you have this chord progression: C major, A minor, F major, G major. Think of it instead as I, vi, IV, V (1, 6, 4, 5) in the key of C Major. Let's say you have a melody, like the main title theme from Star Wars. That's in Bb Major: Bb, F, Eb D C Bb, F, Eb D C, Bb, F, Eb D Eb C Instead, think of it in terms of where the notes are in the Bb Major scale. Bb is the tonic/root, or 1; F is the dominant, or 5; the other Bb when the melody goes up is the octave so let's say for the sake of this example it's 1+. 1, 5, 4 3 2 1+, 5, 4 3 2 1+, 5, 4 3 4 2 Now that you're thinking of it in terms of scale degrees instead of actual notes, it becomes easier to think about the song in different keys. You're getting into your own head if you think about certain keys as "harder" or "crazier" than others as a composer/arranger. Keys are all relative, and they're only really "harder" if you're an instrumentalist who has some difficulties playing in certain keys because of the physicality required. Next time you listen to a song, like for Castlevania or whatever, sit down and figure out the key just by listening. Find figure out if it's major or minor (if it's CV it's probably minor). Then find the tonic/root. There you are. That's the key.

How d'you like it? I just bought Persona 4: Dancing All Night.

Really nice, intimate album. Loved it. Great job guys.

If you're talking about the post with the picture of Nic Cage as Cloud, I deleted that post.

Email notifications for thread replies are FORCED ON. This is not good.

Getting a weird error in ModCP. For some reason, TO's account is somehow showing up on this report. He is neither the reporting party nor the poster of the reported content. Is this a known issue with IPS?

It shouldn't matter what key your source tune is dude. You just...transpose to a key you're comfortable with.

OverClocked ReMix is 16 years old today! Like I said today on Twitter: "OC ReMix is 16 years old today. Older than YouTube, older than iPods, older than a lot of things on the internet. And we're not done yet." What are some of your favorite memories of OCR throughout the years? How has OC ReMix improved your life?

This looks awesome. I'm going to buy it.

Stop arguing about arguing. If you want to talk about the show, then talk about the show.

I'll quote my album comments here. Additionally I want to say that I've been listening to this album for a long time now and I have to say that I love pretty much every single track. This is exactly what I had in mind when I came up with the concept of the album, but it's exactly the kind of album I could never pull off, even in a directorial role. Flex has such a great, deep understanding of EDM and tons of wonderful connections with artists from all around. I think we'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could pull off an album with such consistency and originality throughout all of the tracks. Major props to all of the artists involved, especially the fresher faces we don't usually see at OC ReMix. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing this idea to life.

While we don't have a way of just linking this in IPS yet, you can find remixes with the least amount of reviews by going to the forum and selecting the following options from the sort bar. Once we update the forums to IPS4, we'll be able to implement some custom activity streams where the least reviewed tracks will be available through a handy link.