lazygecko

Here's an example of Steve Reich's phasing technique: He got the idea completely by accident when playing samples at slightly different speeds on tape recorders, then decided to apply this to playing music. Of course, he was not the first. When studying African drumming he found out that they had basically used the same principle for thousands of years. But in contemporary music history it was something really fundamentally different.

Genre mashups are done all the time, I don't find anything particularly groundbreaking behind that concept. The only thing that pops to mind for me is Steve Reich's experiments with phasing.

They were probably expecting something funny, but all they got were a bunch of random pop culture references.

Mr. T was the undisputed master of omnipotence before some brats started throwing around Chuck Norris jokes.

Its spirit will live on in the myriad of terrible myspace profiles.

Yeah, I've been playing around with emulating guitar techniques with sequencing as well. I think it has a lot more impact on sounding convincing rather than relying on higher quality samples (case in point: Tim Follin's SNES soundtracks). It's also fun just applying on synthesizers to make things sound more interesting. I have a decent free guitar soundfont that has some built-in things like sliding down on release, or the sliding attack triggered by higher velocities.

I believe Quake 3 for Dreamcast supported dedicated servers.

Well, I found some things a bit undesirable like how bloated spell rank handling is compared to WoW, but overall the steeper learning curve was part of the charm for me. I've also played a lot of MMOs and EQ2 is the one game I feel compelled to return to.

EQ2 is WoW with the "hardcore" aspect intact, for better or worse. By hardcore I don't mean the grinding as much as how in-depth everything is.

Cross-platform multiplayer will not happen because players with mouse and keyboard would completely steamroll those who play with gamepads. This has already happened in UT3 PS3 which supported mouse and keyboard, where those players would find themselves kicked from the servers. That said, I predict CoD8 PC (if it's even released on PC at all) will disable mouse & kb support for an "equal" experience.

JoeFu nailed it. There is absolutely no reason why dedicated server support shouldn't exist as an option along with matchmaking. It's all about control and money. Since paid DLC was introduced this generation, some publishers have found themselves at odds with modders and map makers (and developers who have traditionally offered free extra content for their games). Microsoft have already made sure to block these things on the 360 by regulating the hell out of Xbox Live. So far the PC market has been relatively free from this bullshit, but if anyone was bound to try and kill modding culture, of course it would be Activision. Valve doesn't do it. Epic doesn't do it. Not even EA does it. Instead they officially support and promote it. And EA have already scored free PR points by having Dice state the opposite of what Infinity Ward said for the upcoming Battlefield on PC.

All games are time and money sinks.

They want to control all the servers so they can eradicate custom mods and maps. That way, they don't have any competition when they can instead charge people for the shit known as DLC.

The more popular a community is, the more shitheads you're gonna get. Aion is enjoying a burst of popularity right now because it's new, it'll diminish later like every other competitor to WoW. I've played a bit of Everquest 2, has a relatively small userbase but they are generally very kind and helpful.

Neogaf has been my primary source for a lot of years.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5pqukz Not finished just yet. I just need to figure out something to bridge the section starting at 0:38

Sounds like they've listened to a lot of Rondo Vereziano http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej_wRgBS5lI

I'm pretty close to quitting right now. PvP is the only aspect I'm really passionate about, and I only really play the shaman class because I like the playstyle more than any other class. After doing all the battlegrounds over and over the only way I can really have a sense of progression is to play arena, and this is where the faults with the class becomes painfully apparent. Shamans lack mobility (this includes extreme vulnerability to crowd control, and Elemental/Restoration not being able to accomplish much without standing completely still and casting non-instant spells) and lacks survivability (Crowd control again, and lack of "oh shit" defensive skills to prevent being nuked down in half a second). Compare this to druids who are pretty much the PvP kings, since most of their healing spells are instant HoTs, their shapeshifting removes anything stopping them, and they can cast the very effective Cyclone without any cooldown (compare this to shaman's hex that is only half as effective, less range AND has a 45 second cooldown). I've played arena with a frost mage and a paladin for a while now and we've had to fight real, real hard just to remain above 1300 rating. Most class setups we face are just inherently superior to us. When we lose, we are punished harshly and when we win, we barely get a pat on the back (ie, we often lose 3 times as much rating as we win). It's a downright disillusioning experience, and the paladin left this week. We've had pretty much the same issues throughout all of TBC and WotLK. I was hoping our problems would actually be addressed in WotLK, only to recieve the second rate treatment again. I remember in the WotLK beta when enhancement shamans would be able to get out of CCs with ghost wolf, then they promptly removed it because it was "too close to druids" (Meanwhile, they hand out portable strength of earth and windfury totems to death knights and mortal strikes to mages and shadow priests). Now it would just be naive to hope that things will turn out any differently with the next expansion. I think I'm going to spend my time with something more gratifying.

You can always use the Wii VC service to get some games at a more reasonable price. Obscure gems like Alien Soldier and Pulseman do make it onto the library occasionally. Pulseman was Japan-exclusive, and I've seen the PAL Alien Soldier go for around $90.

I wouldn't exactly deem Fallout 3 as the epitome of the western RPG. There's plenty of other games where you're given the option to be the cookie cutter hero if you want to. Hell, Fallout 1 and 2 probably had way more of that. All the NPCs that just fall unconscious when you try to kill them in Oblivion and F3 gives you good insight on the Bethesda way of doing things.

Sta- lin Vs Martians

Selling Jedi Academy was one of my most regrettable gaming mistakes.

I could just as easily simplify all the Mario games into just jumping on shit if I wanted to. Anyway, I find it stupid bickering about which was better and I found both of them to be amazing fun back in the day. The Sonic games had sophisticated physics for a platformer, which allowed for a blend of speed, momentum, platforming and psuedo-pinball gameplay which is what made the games so special and fun. Not to mention the simultaneous 2 player. So as for the sound, the Genesis had a YM2612 synthesizer (and an added SN76489 chip) and the SNES relied pretty much solely on sample playback, which turns it into an apples vs oranges debate. Unlike the SNES though most of the Genesis' best sounding titles fell under the radar and went by unnoticed by most gamers of the day. And yeah, the sample cutoff is one thing that bothers me about the typical SNES sound. Since RAM limited the amount of sounds you could store for playback, they would often shorten down the samples in every way they could. Often sounds like drums or brass sections would sound sort of tiny and chopped because there's no audible release in them. Or, if you listen carefully to some of the voices in the SNES Street Fighter 2, you'll notice they've actually cut out many of the more subtle consonants to save as much space as possible.

The Genesis sound chip(s) was fine, just under-utilized.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g1e4yv Original: Had a draft for this lying around on my HD for months which I started working into something more substantial today. I'm not a fan of the route The Prodigy took after the early 90's, so I took a song from the latest album to de-make it into the classic Experience sound.