lazygecko

TotalBiscuit is my go-to choice for keeping up with industry news. I've been following that guy since the very start when he only had his video of stalking WoW goldfarmers. I think we share a lot of sensibilities when it comes to taste in games, and I especially like how lately he has put a lot of effort into lampshading the regression of game design in favor of "cinematic experiences". Lazy Game Reviews has really come into its own lately. I just love the overall tone of that show, the narration and the obscurities covered. Stuff like PewDiePie strikes me as something that has turned into a very cynical cash-in for over the top commentary. It feels eerily cold and calculated in its sheer immaturity and presentation. Pretty much the Glenn Beck of gaming, just saying exactly what his target demographic wants to hear. Occasionally I check Vinesauce for the latest WTF-inducing ROM corruption using random Game Genie/PAR codes.

Spending years doing covers helped a lot for me. It's pretty much reverse engineering. After a while you just realize that it's not magic, that there are principles in everything that can be observed and then replicated. Also known as the John Coltrane Method.

Violence is so deeply prevalent in games because developers can't come up with any mechanical alternatives that are compelling and rewarding enough for gameplay. Or they aren't willing enough to experiment, at any rate. I'd hazard a guess that the plot and characters in game like The Last of Us was at least partly made in a design-by-limitation sort of way to give some justification to the violence, as a reaction to the genocide matinee adventure Uncharted. Every now and then you get some games that lampshade this problem, like Spec Ops The Line, or characters commenting on Gordon Freeman being a theoretical phycisist but spends all his time just shooting stuff and pushing objects around. It just shines light on how stunted game design is when you want to get more ambitious with the storytelling.

Not at all a weird question, really. You'll find that people at large aren't really very interested in music in itself. It's usually about lifestyle or idol worship. If you overhear teenage girls discussing One Direction, it's probably not the musical qualities they're talking about. It took me a while to fully realize but I'm simply into music cause I'm interested in the core building blocks. Harmony, rhythm and timbre. I like certain genres cause I think they excel in some of these aspects. For example I like jazz and progressive music because it generally encourages a greater harmonic palette, or in electronic music I lean more towards techno cause I like the greater focus on rhythm and timbre while forfeiting the more traditional pop structure of chord progressions, chorus/verse etc. When discussing music with others it became more and more apparent just how uninterested people tend to be in these things. Even among other musicians it's not uncommon to view composition as just a dull means to an end. Others may be into music due to lyrics, or the virtuoso aspect of instrument performances. I think those are probably much more common than the former.

The origin of the term progressive rock is disputable. I think it had less to do with the musical qualities in themselves. In the 60's radio stations would start adapting a "progressive rock" programming template which would have liberal-leaning political discussions inbetween the music being played. Same thing with AOR which started out as a radio concept but today pretty much means very 80's style melodic rock.

I think the core traits of the genre are the multiple time signatures and key modulations you'll often find in the genre. If that's what you define as complexity, then yeah. Some can be very blatant about it, but it doesn't have to be. The changes can be so seamlessly woven in you don't even notice them.

Some people like to evoke the defining acts of the 70's prog period, right down to the instrumentation and production styles. That's totally fine. I think there's plenty of progressive acts today that tries to do something new instead. The complexity just kind of comes with the territory. I think very often people will dismiss this kind of music as wankery and being advanced just for the sake of it. Which I don't think is true for the most part. Trust me that there's way more insane stuff out there if that's what you're after in the first place. In particular I think a lot of the flak Dream Theater gets is just mindlessly regurgitated statements.

Lately I have found myself strangely infatuated with the sling, usually considered the weakest and most laughable weapon in the game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppGR1b4ebFk In other news, Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior http://www.tornbanner.com/blog/official-announcement-of-chivalry-deadliest-warrior/

The acting was probably far from the worst issues in Daredevil. If they want someone older, I think they may as well bring George Clooney back.

I stopped doing remixes cause I grew tired of my original material being neglected in comparison.

Getting proper bass from headphones is physically impossible. You can get the artificial impression of more bass by amplifying the lowest registers capable of being reproduced, which is what most headphones do. This is why monitoring headphones with the most neutral frequency curves possible sound like they have no bass, since that's just the physical reality with those tiny speakers. I think my AKGs are a proper enough compromise in that regard. If I'm mixing with them, I've learned it's usually ideal to lower the overall bass by about 3dB from what I consider optimal when listening with the headphones.

Good headphones generally shouldn't cost too much. The really expensive "prestige" ones you might see will more than likely be coloring the sound in undesirable ways. AKG and Sennheiser are the only brands I really trust. I got the AKG K271 for about $130 and it's the best pair I've used so far.

"well art is subjective" and the likes usually comes off as a handwave method of attempting to kill any meaningful discussion. There are plenty, plenty of objective aspects about music, and laying these out in detail is usually a good way of better understanding what it is we like and don't like.

I've always thought Dubstep is a really fun genre with a lot more potential for iteration than the more rigid 4/4 dance music. Dubstep with the elements of complexity from prog rock/metal would be fucking awesome.

I don't see how it's any worse or better than the kind of token breakbeat remix with the occasional glitch/chip elements.

Mixing is really about arrangement/orchestration in orchestral music moreso than any other genre. So if you want that professional orchestral sound, that's what you'll want to read up on rather than EQ and compression.

http://www.explodingrabbit.com/games/super-mario-bros-crossover This game seems to get a new iteration every few years or so. I even recall djpretzel and Liontamer co-held a panel with the author on some convention. This latest version has an insane amount of customization. It's gone from a novel little game where you could play through SMB1 Contra style to everything and the kitchen sink.

Vanguard had diplomacy, but that was more or less a card minigame you played with NPCs to complete quests with. I never got to play Star Wars Galaxies, but I know a lot of people felt perfectly content playing shopkeeper/merchant characters. I think these things have mostly been hurt by the power fantasy notion of you being the hero, and thinking this is the only way to make the game fun and exciting. Not to mention how much more futile it is to maintain such a suspense of disbelief when everyone else around you brought the severed head of that big nasty dragon.

All surf rock is derived from Dick Dale.

Well, I don't quite see it as hardcore vs casual. To me, that would be more about players with entitlement issues who do want the content to be only reachable by the extremly dedicated, and I don't share those views at all. It's true there were some pretty big issues with getting groups for less current dungeons or group quests before the LFG tools were implemented. But I think the solutions implemented have been merely band-aid on what is fundamentally flawed design. The whole "stepping stone" design of leveling throug a ton of zones and dungeons in the world and then never having any reason to visit them again were starting to show its problems already during The Burning Crusade, with old zones, dungeons and raids turning into uninhabited wastelands. And it was made even worse by the instant teleportation to instances, making people flock to the cities. They solved the old dungeons never being visited, but that was harshly at the expense of the world itself. I think it really needs to be designed in such a way that there should be a meaningful way for players to be out in the world and play with eachother, regardless of what level they are. I also believe that raiding/dungeoncrawling has become way too much of a dogma for the genre. Perhaps if there were enough other things to do in the world, it wouldn't be such a huge bummer if you couldn't instantly assemble a random raid team at any time of the day. I've always felt kind of herded towards this playstyle without ever having much passion for it.

When I say convenience it mostly comes down to not needing to communicate with other players to get things done, which I think goes against the very spirit of the genre. It's mostly handled by automated systems these days. I haven't played GW2 but I know it also has one of those systems since it has become a staple at this point. One thing I do know for sure is that as these systems became the norm in WoW, in conjunction with limited grouping between servers, has led to the social interactions mostly consisting of fleeting encounters with random players you'll probably never see again (not to mention the kind of despicable behavior this can promote when you don't have to worry about your reputation). This feeds into the whole playing in parallel thing since often you don't even need to utter a single word to eachother while you're playing. All in all the social element has ended up feeling very hollow compared to when this was more up to the players themselves.

I actually use the Reflektor module that comes with Guitar Rig. I wish they'd make it a separate plugin like they have with other GR modules.

I think that's part of a larger problem that's holding back video games, where people have a very narrow and stunted view on what defines a narrative or story in a game. In the case of MMOs, the entire point is that they are social games where you find people and do shit together. The world should be designed to encourage and enable those kinds of situations. Instead, there's been an increased focus on shoehorning single player tropes into them, together with the convenience of playing the game without needing to interact with the other players around you. Since this is the playstyle most people end up gravitating towards due to the sheer convenience, it mostly ends up feeling you're playing in parallel with others rather than together with them, and that's a feeling I hate in multiplayer games. As the genre at large has entrenched etself in these paradigms, I've seen a lot more people starting to complain about this. I think that's what most of the "rose-tinted" nostalgia over things like old WoW, Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies was about. In those kinds of arguments you will often see the points brought up that design, balance and mechanics-wise they were much worse, frustrating and unpolished. And this is largely true. But the point is that the social experience was just that much more powerful and special that they could find joy in the game despite these drawbacks. And that's where the actual narrative lies, not in thinly veiled fetch quests, scipted NPC encounters or fancy cutscenes. As these games are increasingly designed to play like second rate single player RPGs, this is what has been eroding from the genre.

Well, if anyone has any actual credibility to back up those claims, it'll be the ones who made the original Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies. I was never really excited at all for any of the big MMOs being developed in recent years. And with the latest ones like The Old Republic and Elder Scrolls Online it has reached flat out ridiculous levels of disconnect from the core things that differentiate MMOs from single player or regular multiplayer games. It's no wonder so many people stopped playing The Old Republic after they were done with their respective class quests. Of course, they haven't actually talked about how most of the social aspects will work in EQN, but I have a feeling they'll have a healthier perspective on it.

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