lazygecko

Das Boot is a text-to-speech software from the Atari ST. It's the utter lack of filtering and tons of aliasing that makes the signature sound.

Staff notation != music If anything I believe you shouldn't constrain yourself to writing with an instrument unless you are already very adept at playing whatever it is you can think of. It can get pretty limiting if you start to get issues moving out of your comfort zone. Doing chord inversions and stuff is second nature to me on a piano roll, but on a guitar you have to learn a whole different grip. I think it's stuff like that which is responsible for average singer songwriters on acoustic guitars sticking to the same old limited set of chords.

I believe Nintendo has never really known how to properly deal with third parties in an actual competitive hardware market. During the NES era, in the wake of the American console market crash, they had the benefit of being pretty much the only major player around. They set up some really strict rules which third parties had to follow in order to publish for their system, which was somewhat understandable given the anything goes atmosphere for the Atari which helped spur the crash with oversaturation. But they had some pretty ludicrous rules like putting a strict limit on how many games a company could release for the system per year, which is what made Konami form Ultra Games to get around those rules. Once Sega decided to directly challenge Nintendo, they saw an opportunity to attract third parties disgruntled by all this stuff by offering much more lenient terms. I think it was rumored around that time that Nintendo started using coercion tactics to keep several third parties under their lap, though I haven't read much into it. Nintendo remained largely complacent during the SNES years since they still had so much momentum from the NES so they could afford it. Once Sony entered the market and once again started doing what Sega did by offering third parties more of what they wanted, the real decline started happening. Like I said Nintendo is first and foremost a video game company and are more concerned with what works for them personally rather than third parties. I read some anecdotes from an interview with someone who was working with Nintendo during the Gamecube years, and they were approaching Nintendo's management with the idea of contracting a developer to sell a "Halo killer" for the system. They had held meetings with Reggie and the rest of Nintendo's management, and from how they acted this guy got the impression that this kind of stuff was a completely alien concept to them. Wish I could find that article cause it was pretty interesting.

Comparing multi-platform ports is usually a pretty bad idea when it comes to gauging how good a system is. There are so many factors you need to take into account from the developer's part. If the port is made by an inexperienced team or just as a cash-grabbing afterthought, then yeah of course it's not going to be very impressive compared to its original version (and this can even apply for ports to more powerful hardware). I remember when the PS2 version of Splinter Cell was coming out, I was reading a thread on NeoGAF (which was just called Gaming Age at the time IIRC) and everyone were laughing at how it looked in the screenshots. But at the same time amazing games made specifically for the PS2 were coming out like Shadow of the Collosus or Transformers which could easily trump the average Xbox game visually. This is also probably why a lot of Wii versions of games ended up looking way worse than they really deserved, because the ports were usually made by understaffed, underbudgeted teams in some cases even using macgyvered PS2 devkits.

Competing directly with Microsoft and Sony doesnt' really make sense for a company like Nintendo in this age so I can definitely understand their reluctance to do so. The console market of today isn't the one you grew up with. MS and Sony make these ludicious investments into their consoles because they want to establish themselves as the #1 middle man of all the media consumption going on in your home. They want you to watch TV and film, buy stuff and watch advertisements through their little boxes because if it goes through their services that entitles them to a piece of the revenue. Nintendo are still effectively just a video game company, not a multimedia behemoth. MS and Sony are in this for the long run and are pouring an insane amount of money into competing for the living room. Profit margins can wait. MS investors don't even seem to be particularly happy about their console venture. Nintendo on the other hand has traditionally been very cost effective when it comes to their products.

Syncopate. A lot. I think it's the lack of syncopation that makes many beginner melodies sound so stiff and rigid. It's also good to consider where your melody should start. It doesn't have to be on the first measure at all. I think a lot of good melodies get going a bit before the first measure but it could really be anywhere like right in the middle. Other than that I mostly think in building up patterns and then choosing when to deviate from them in order to create contrasts. Contrasts in both intervals and rhythm. Like over here I'll have a sequence of eighths, but then I'll break it up with a syncopated fourth, etc... It might even be a good idea to tap out a rhythm first to base the intervals on. Usually you pretty much do this if you already have a foundation with a chord progression, drums and bassline to add melody on top of.

Not really. This game is pretty much the definition of a mediocre theme park MMO. The content is extremly gated and offers you no freedom to just wander off on your own like in the other TES games. For the first few levels I was herded to 2 islands where I had to go through quest chains to let me off them. Then I got to Daggerfall on the mainland, so I tried running off to see what the rest of Tamriel looked like. But nope, hit an invisible wall when I tried to do that. The TES-style combat is very superficial and really does nothing to move away from the typical MMO combat feel. Clicking manually to attack and block merely places the burden of autoattacking on you, since the latency and lack of collision detection makes it feel nothing like the combat of a single player action RPG (not to mention that you don't have to aim with bows or magic staves). It's not even up to Morrowind standards. And of course you're not free to attack whoever you want like in the other TES Games. Just the mobs respawning out of nowhere in a typical MMO fashion. And then there's of course the magic which isn't divided into offensive damage from destruction, utility from alteration and so on. I tried a templar character and all offensive spells were typical holy-based stuff. It was for all intents and purposes ye average fantasy paladin and I think the TES lore/atmosphere overall made a point of moving away from that with more a ambigious magic system.

They really, really don't want details of this game coming out to the public. I have never seen such draconian measures being taken during a beta. Couple that with the very sporadic beta testing schedules (which is more of a server stress test than anything), the release in 3 months, and the fact that they're selling it for $60 with a monthly subscription fee in addition to a microtransaction shop, and you can tell the whole thing just reeks of cynicism.

So Youtube has issued a statement where they completely stand by their decision. They will not even admit that the automated system is making a lot of calls in error. At the same time I've gotten some worrying information concerning people's music from this video which reports cases where people have used commercial, royalty-free samples in their music. If someone else has used these samples in their music which is allegedly owned by one of these companies listed in the Content ID system, they will claim ownerhip over any other music that happens to use these samples. So if you just happen to have a Vengeance loop or something playing on your song which is on YouTube, some company with absolutely no affiliation with Vengeance can claim total ownership of your video on the basis of the (royalty-free) sample. Now I am no legal expert, but I am pretty sure that is not even close to legal. But of course, there couldn't be anything wrong with the algorithm YouTube/Google uses. Nope. It's working absolutely fine!

There were rumors floating around last week about some pretty dramatic changes to YouTube policies that would be very harmful to gaming-related channels, and a few days ago this really exploded and has started to affect the livelihoods of several professionals who are part of this new ecosystem of gaming press and promotion. There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding the facts and blame seems to be thrown around all over the place. Some thought all of this was pushed by game publishers, but that seems to be related to a separate policy that is slated for next year. What has happened this week is an extensive change to YouTube's automated Content ID matching system, which now automaticly flags videos based on a list of supposed copyright holders, removes ownership of video from the uploader, and redirects ad revenues to the company that claims to own the matched content found in the video. This is where it gets all sorts of messed up from a myriad of factors. For example, most of the reported Content ID matches come from entities that seemingly have no or an extremly vague connection to the content in question. One example given is the game Hotline Miami where many videos are being flagged and getting revenues redirected to CD Baby, simply because some music from its soundtrack also happens to be published under them. Another example can be Nintendo, who are much more aggressive than other game companies when it comes to their game footage being on YouTube. You could have a video talking about video games in general, and perhaps 10% of it is dedicated to discussing a Nintendo game with a bit of gameplay footage showing simultaneously, and Nintendo can claim ownership of that entire video regardless of the fact that 90% of the other video content has nothing to do with them. This is allegedly what happened to one of TotalBiscuit's videos. There have even been reported cases of game companies' official YouTube channels getting their own promotional game videos flagged by other companies, thanks to this blanket algorithm. This is getting a lot of coverage everywhere right now, but I think the best source I've come across is with Adam Sessler, a couple of prominent YouTube personalities who make a living from this, and 2 representatives from publishers Devolver Digital and Deep Silver. It covers a lot of interesting topics and bullshit surrounding all this.

More than likely this is a FOV problem. A bad 1st person FOV can make people naesous, and has been reported as far back as Half-Life. Since the 360 popularised first person games on consoles and made those games be designed with consoles in mind first, PC versions are often configured to have FOV settings far below what is optimal for PC monitors and resolutions. Usually they're in the 60s range, when in reality they should be up around 80-90 or even higher depending on the monitor. In Skyrim you can just open the console and type in fov followed by a number to change it (experiment with the ones I mentioned). You could also edit the .ini to permanently change the FOV.

SNES is all sample playback. It doesn't do any synthesis. Apart from some kind of noise generator I think, which was very rarely used.

Hard to tell without isolating the sound, but it's possible it could just be the same timpani sound pitched up several octaves. Tricks like that were common on the SNES to save memory.

I wish I could like this, but there's really nothing in here that compels me to listen to these over the originals. The arrangements play it very safe and don't do much to iterate itself from the voice/channel constraints of the old soundchips, and the production/sound just feels sterile and lacks character. I feel as though I've already heard this stuff plenty of times from typical fan remixes like you can find at KWED or AmigaRemix, not to mention the 1993 soundtrack CD.

I think men generally have more flexibility and aren't as judged for what they're interested in. Women seem especially vicious to eachother when it comes to falling in line. This is why I hate gender roles so much because it surpresses individual growth, and women seem to suffer more from it than men.

Then why even bother participating in the thread if you don't want to talk about it? I see these lines being thrown around in gender discussions so often it's starting to piss me off. I don't know what it is that triggers people to suddenly act in such unrational manners when this subject is brought up.

Pretty sure I've read of several precedents where people have trouble with their iLoks, and they won't get reimbursed, and that's one of the major reasons people have an issue with it.

Dongles are dogshit. They're an artificial hassle and cost increase (let's not forget paying for shipping and waiting for the damn thing to arrive as well, if you're purchasing something which is a digital download). It's punishing legit customers and probably making the products more cumbersome to use than the pirate equivalent (stuff like EastWest is going to get cracked regardless of what protection they throw at it). I don't buy products using iLok based on these principles.

The naming conventions for GPUs are kind of stupid, what with how often they keep "reseting" them. But old ones are phased out from retailers pretty quickly. You should always be able to run current games decently with any card from the last 4-5 years, without having to worry about them being unplayable.

I forgot to mention one of the best and most unique personalities, Matt Barton. Mostly PC/computers like LGR, also with a very laid back attitude, but what sets it apart is how he often takes the time and effort to do video interviews with old developers that are very insightful. Many obscure and forgotten devs get some time to shine as well as more well known figures like John Romero and Richard Garriot.

Pro Tools can seamlessly switch between Piano Roll and Score/Notation display. I've never gotten used to working with staff paper. I had to transcribe some funk basslines I wrote to paper and doing that with all the syncopations, bends etc just made it feel a lot more convoluted than it really is.

Sometimes I just play games for casual fun, but mostly I like games in the same way someone is really into cars and tinkering around with them. The enjoyment of gaming is for me just as much about knowing how they work beneath the surface, modifying them to suit my needs if I can, and participating in communities centered around that aspect.

A lot of the old WoW team has returned to work on the next expansion, since the Titan project has ceased full production and gone back to the drawing board. That's one thing to give it a more optimistic outlook at least. I think once Wrath of the Lich King finished initial development, they switched to the new WoW team we've had up till today.

Some weird, crappy webcomic about the emulation scene.