José the Bronx Rican

I want to marry Rhodes and have its babies. Seriously. You'll hear it in mine too.

One big reason I'm monitoring comments around the net is that, being hip-hop, I knew from the beginning this would be, by far, the most controversial selection, and I'm having fun gauging reactions. I'm already joking around at 1up: "What, no hate for the new BGM?" It's further from the norm than most fighter BGM, so the reaction is natural; should I bring up Marvel vs. Capcom 2? Fortunately, the word "crap" is a convenient indicator of ignorant commentary, so I can easily separate good points from bad. There is a valid point about whether the tune fits. My honest feeling is that, considering Capcom (working with a deadline of "yesterday") maybe had to put aside all the music's perceived "appropriateness," "Narcissism" works rather well, and is only slightly off to me because it seems a bit "empty" without vocals. However, game's not done yet, so we'll see.

This may be closer to the answer: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/17974

I said the same thing. I'm sure we've all had problems... mine is that I hadn't come up with a concept until two weeks had passed. Instead of a month, it's a fortnight. I'll tell you this, however: this is the very definition of a challenge. Putting aside unforseen events in real life, which are understandable, even if you thought, "there's no way I can make something happen with this tune," ya keep going, and don't give up until you have to. I happen to believe you can ReMix anything out of anything with enough problem-solving. My tune doesn't really have a melody, so I kinda made one, and the direction of this project is meant to be "late-70's crime-drama theme song." If the result doesn't exactly hit that mark, I'm at least confident I have something that'll work after Sunday, albeit perhaps with a sound and mix quality not quite where I'd really want it to be. But we'll see. Three more days. Not givin' up. This is coming from someone who normally takes a year-and-a-half to complete a tune.

SECOND! I programmed four MIDI's out of that game for vgmusic, so you know I like this one. I've got to have a ReMix done one of these days. I also dig TMNT: Tournament Fighters.

Good thing I saved Rama's hi-res logos. Here my original layout, with print border guides and a few notes (can't display it, so clickylinky). http://bronxrican.com/stuff/misc/OCR Badge.png Includes: a. Real Name - Surname, then first. b. "Rank" - Not really, but us members fit neatly into four groups: Community, for all of us; Musician, for the ReMixers; Staff, self-explanatory; Administrator, for guess who. Each group has a different color overlay. c. Titles - Include "Forum Member", "Contributing ReMixer", "Forum Moderator", "Project Director", "Judges Panelist", and so on. "Official" unofficial titles only, please. d. Membername - Of course. Text may be larger, but some long-ass names require the current size. e. Optional Items - maybe a "rank" icon, though I don't think it's necessary; perhaps a member photo (serious pics only... sorry); a barcode, if you really think it's worth it. Four examples:

If even noobs don't need to be told that, what does that make me? 10 char limit taken care of, yes, I was joking.

Dunno... ffmusicdj? I'm down with this concept, not necessarily as a membership card, but as a badge of identification (much like DragonAvenger's "Hello, My Name Is" thing during VGL at D.C.). Leaving aside the other stuff, during meetups and get-togethers, keeping track of everyone and their connections to OCR becomes extremely easy... and makes us all look important too. I'm on it.

Just to say, Tauce, I'm still in: that's a definite collab. I'm writing for someone else at the moment (not to mention working on Rama's mix challenge), then I'm puttin' in here. Just holler with details and what you need from me, and I'll look for inspiration playing the game and listening to the sources.

Happy Harmony Day. *salute* Now, I get back to work!

That's the bird. Jill is the birthday girl. *salute* Hope your vocalist lungs didn't splatter the cake blowing out the candles. Much love.

I'm trying again to have some of us crash at my place after this show, but my tiny flat can't accomodate more than three or four other people if I do.

I was hoping before this point to be certain I could spare the effort to set up a meetup for this event, once I got through yelling "IT'S ABOUT F#&%ING TIME WE GOT A NEW YORK SHOW!!!!" I also wished it wasn't so old to a lot of people by the time it reached my area. I'll take it, however, and will almost definitely come. I hope many peeps manage to make it as well.

I've had a mix of this tune in the works for a while now. Thanks for the reminder.

I've been working on the same kind of solutions as I build my music library. I'll have a lot to talk about soon.

I acchhhept. I'll lock in on that Rocket Knight joint, although any melody's virtually non-existent here, making the task somewhat difficult. My God, that MIDI... converters are never any good. Lucky I can get a .vgz file, and I own the game too. For those that don't know, give up on .gym's altogether, and get your Genny chippers from Project 2612. When this is done, I might even do a GOOD MIDI of the original.

It's alright; I'll take "BronxRican".

Meanwhile, registering at thaSauce results in: "José the Bronx Rican": "Illegal username..." "Jose the Bronx Rican": "Illegal username..." Is there something I'm doing wrong?

I've been on PSP for quite a long time, for all the images I've created up to now (including the sig below). I expect the full Photoshop would have all the tools one might need to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, but so far I've been managing wonderfully without it. However, what about Photoshop Elements? If you're gonna spend $100 anyway, the official cut-down version of Photoshop is at the same price and oughta be worth looking into. I've heard nothing but good things about it.

Dammit, I will, uh... what he said.

As far as I'm concerned, we could have a million projects running; the thing that keeps them from gaining traction at OCR is not enough good talent able to provide enough free time for them. But I actually appreciate anyone - vet or n00b - throwing ideas out there regardless. Nothing stopping us from going out on our own with a project if we can't drum up enough interest here (ask Brad the Prophet about Tetrisphere). I'm officially interested in 90% of the projects out there now, but my lack of time is keeping me from any real participation. (My official status: in on a DKC2 project, in for two tracks on Follin, collabs with djp and zircon, about to beat all of you to death with my OWN project: Yuzo Koshiro in 4 volumes! ) Rayman is no exception, but I agree about getting a good rep here first. I'm sorry I missed out on Project Chaos. The least one can do, I suppose, is call dibs on a concept and hope everyone honors it until you're seriously ready to go. Yes, there is a selfish motive behind that last sentence... NOBODY TOUCH YUZO.

Well, now that I've calmed down and returned from work, I'll hold out hope. I may be able to find someone who'll switch holidays with me (I do have plenty of co-workers pissed off about their own holiday assignments). I'm a person who can't stand planning for something so far in advance, but I'm forced to do that where I work: everyone's jockeying for most of the same days, so first come, first serve (I do have seniority on my side), and I'll put in my request the minute we get a definite set of days. I'm not wasting time concerning Otakon, either. I had to register at the MAG site, to share my thoughts and to ask, since I didn't make it this time, about transferring the cost of my M6 registration to that for M7.

DISGUST. . . . . Let me talk about how bad my luck is. Every year, assignments for working on the year's holidays are determined and handed out. This year, several weeks ago, some morons in charge decided to do it Secret-Santa style, allowing everyone to pick two dates out of a plastic bag thinking it's a fair solution; you're stuck with them. I was extremely busy with my own work that day, so after I got impatient waiting for my turn, I said, "this is ridiculous, why don't you just give me Christmas and New Year's already so I can head back to work?" Do I call 'em or what? No need to guess which two holidays I end up with. "Cost consideration" is fast becoming the dirtiest phrase in the English language. Bad enough the event was always too close to New Year's. Seems the people who benefit most from a cheap hotel in the area of Virginia on New Year's Day weekend are the people who live so close they probably won't need a hotel anyway. Californy-ites who are gamers - and who actually have a life outside of video gaming - will find true pain after celebrating all night, waking up at 11AM with a hangover, and killing themselves trying to catch a flight all the way east. M6 just ended, and I'm already almost guaranteed not to come to the next one. </rant>

I keep begging people not to get me started on cartoons, because I'm too busy to go in-depth. I was a fiend back in the day, and keep in mind I was an adult in the 80's, so it's not nostalgia talking for the most part. These shows today are definitely much more sophisticated in all areas. Sure doesn't always make 'em better, though. Old TMNT to new TMNT, in overall quality, seems like a lateral move to me. However, there are conscious efforts to appeal to wider age groups now, and that means better writing and better humor for the most part. Batman, Animaniacs, Justice League and so on are at the high end. Stuff was written almost strictly for kids before (calling on the same veteran/freelance hacks they've been using for decades), and that makes some of it fodder for youtube comedy, especially early 90's USA Network output ("YOU... HURT... MY... JESSICAAAAA!!!"). Plenty of these programs age badly, but plenty don't, and the same will happen to these new ones. Voice acting is not better. It's not much worse, but not better. And in localized anime? Hell no. Did everyone sound this effeminate in the original Yu-Gi-Oh? Don't let corny dialogue of the 70's and 80's fool you: a lot of those old-time voices were trained working in radio, and they knew how to read a line. Rob Paulsen is one of the last of the previous generation's greats. The fact we can have Peter Cullen-vs.-Gary Chalk arguments until the cows come home shows they did their thing in the old days as well. Generally better, IMO. Even the worst of the old days didn't reach the nightmare levels of Cream the Rabbit. I remember watching Dark Water after all the bragging about how much was spent on animation, and while it was quite a good show, I wondered where the money went. My lament about animation nowadays is the depressing sameness of it all during the course of a series. The main reason I watch animated shows is for the animation ("Duh," right? You would think so, but...), and its quality can affect my impression of the series, whether or not everything else works well. I wish I could explain it further right now, but stuff nowadays in many shows are just good. "Just good" is not enough for me. Some shows back in the day ranged from "incredible" to "horrible" from ep to ep, and even within the SAME ep. It's much more consistent now, and that's supposed to be a good thing. However, if it's just OK - not bad, but not particularly great - and there's no hope it would get better, that depresses me. I definitely speak from nostalgia about Transformers G1. What young male didn't think giant changing robots beating the shit out of each other was the coolest thing? That and Cullen were my reasons for Michael Bay's version not becoming a complete disaster. (But I'll be damned if I don't buy that RiffTrax!) Still, there's plenty of exciting (if a bit sloppy) Japanese animation I never get tired of. Season 3 was sure a turd, though, once they killed Prime and stopped going to Japan so much. Speaking of killing, wasn't that a beautiful pussy-ass cop-out in the G.I. Joe movie, when they also KILLED DUKE, then ran into the dead Optimus backlash too late to fix it, so they clumsily dubbed in lines like, "He's gone into a coma" and "Duke's gonna be A-O.K.!!" Everything from DIC sucked from my viewpoint, except Inspector Gadget and mayyyyyyyyybe Cops. I collected Disney stuff by default since Gummi Bears, but then I noticed the nosedive in animation quality after the original 13 eps of Rescue Rangers, and although Disney opened up studios in France and England and Japan and improved again generally starting with TaleSpin, tapered off again with Darkwing Duck, and improved again with Gargoyles, I stopped collecting. I have to keep my Chip 'N' Dale tapes, though, because they used the butchered Disney channel masters for the DVDs, and because I still have the "uncensored" copies of "Dirty Rotten Diapers" and "Puffed Rangers." Wish I had the time to pen a love letter to Tokyo Movie Shinsha of Japan for kicking everyone's ass without even trying in animation during the 80's and early 90's. The Smurfs just reached their 50th anniversary, but I hate them and I hate all of you (you know who you are!) who watched them as kids, causing the cancellation of Mighty Orbots. I hate having to keep telling everybody that Looney Tunes is not, nor was ever, a TV show, just a pile of varying syndicated collections. Shorts animated for movie theaters was on a whole other level, and shouldn't count here. Yet, idiot labels like TVT release "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" and "Merrily We Roll Along" on CD as "TV" Themes. Assholes. Before his passing, my father (in his mid-60's, mind you) became a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z, collecting everything he saw being sold on tape, bootleg or not. Go figure. I kept asking myself, how do you not get bored watching these folks talk for a half-hour, throw one projectile and say, "tune in next week"? I gotta stop here. Maybe I'll talk in the future about how much I hate Thundercats (get your wooden stakes ready!), and about Sonic the Mutant Shark.

I'm actually in the middle of a tremendous adventure on this sort of thing: my entire music collection is being ripped, tagged, flac'ed and mp3'ed, and the video game music part of it is by far the most difficult, because I have to tag these files with the correct information. There is no consistency whatsoever with the stuff that's professionally released, and to make it worse, I'm into some pretty obscure stuff. 75% of it (or not; who knows?) is officially "untitled," and I can't have that. The last thing I want to do nowadays is give a best guess on a song title and then present it to everyone as official. I did that with some of my MIDIs, but I'm gonna change all that too once my research is done. Unfortunately, the game music field is driven by composers and not artists, and even though they deserve front-and-center credit, I can't bring myself to place these composers' names into the "artist" tag. They're just not the artists. Chiptunes and such from the 16-bit era on back don't really have artists; one solution is to just place the console name in the artist tag, and technically it's correct: the console "performs" the song. It also works out because you can categorize Genesis, SNES, et al. music together, and because plenty of games get cross-platform releases and it helps to differentiate (e.g., SNES Cool Spot and Genesis Cool Spot). I actually have a set of rules in order to maintain consistency for titles and artists, and most titles must include "BGM" in capital letters to indicate that it's unofficial. There's so much I haven't even covered yet (I haven't even touched on stuff like mastering, and how I intend to rip older music the old-fashioned way: RCA cables, because as good as emulators have gotten, they're still not exact); one of the reasons for wanting to come to MAGFest is so I can talk to Larry at length about this and exchange ideas and suggestions. I'm as anal as it gets with this. I thought of ways to share this quest, because I think this could benefit a lot of us. I don't think I could find the time and effort to manage a blog, and especially find the time and effort to offer my collection when it's completed, but maybe this one could work. I'll follow developments here. I'm leaning toward a thread or three here, and perhaps at gamingforce and vgmdb, to chronicle what I've been doing and what I will do. Stay tuned.