Hy Bound

I don't hate the review; its not his best, and is certainly a hard act to follow after his awesome condemned review. However, I would have to agree that he really didn't play it, dare i say... correctly. SSB on all platforms has been a party-oriented, multi-player game. Playing it on single player is probably one of the least fun games I've played. At least in the past versions; it steps it up in this iteration though. And going over to a friend's house who doesn't seem to enjoy that kind of thing anyway is basically shooting yourself in your uninterested foot. On the other hand, I can very honestly say that I am by no means privy to Nintendo games of old, being as the Wii is the first Nintendo console I've owned and I really can't get into either Zelda or Metroid Prime. That being said, I've always loved the SSB games and have had some of the best multi-player experiences with a group of friends that enjoy SSB as much as I do. I don't go into it for the nostalgia, and I still enjoy it quite a bit. The simple, yet deep 'two button' scheme SSB uses makes the game so accessible, yet still so fun after such a long time. Basically, I think if he would have gone into it not knowing what to think, instead of knowing he would hate it he would have given it a higher recommendation. It kinda seems like he's one of those guys who condemns his favorite band after it sells half a million albums for "selling out" and becoming popular.

So.... Would someone who spends hours tweaking an initial patch of a synth or tweaking the shit out of a weird sample find Kore 2 worthy? And I totally thought those were the bx5s, I guess I have a different kind of BX8s.

BGC, how are you liking Kore 2? Its something that interests me quite a bit, since the academic version is close to my price range . Do you find you can make a sound from the soundbank sound a lot different than it originally did just by tweaking shiz? I don't like the idea of soundbanks, but if you can change the original sound sufficiently i think i could live with it. The search function looks sexilicious. Nice set up btw, BX5s/BX8s are amazing, even if they are in wonky spots

I think you're thinking of Zils. I'm no instrument guru though, so i definitely could be wrong. The remix is reallllllly good though so far. The bass seems a tad too harsh in the lower regions (which is saying something if i think its too harsh). It tends to rumble a tad more than usual in my shit headphones. Overall mood, mixing, sounds and arrangement are extremely high quality as far as i can tell on the crappy headphones. The percussion is awesome! The little break up in the minute section are a little distracting, but im guessing thats just a break. The one thing I have to say, on the 8th listen, I found that all of the sounds run together; I would suggest some really obvious instrument (like an erhu or shakuhachi, possibly) making a cameo to carry the main melody to really crank the mix up to 11. On the whole though, I friggin' love this so far. This needs to be your priority, even possibly above breathing. Get it done, son!

This one was absolutely awesome, best yet! All of his little quips were pretty flippin' hilarious.

Good interview. When i turned back after the interview to this page after having just read the Ms. PacMan -Hot or Not answer you gave, Pac Man was up at the top of the page winking knowingly and giving a big thumbs up... I found it oddly ironic... or something.

I C wut you did there... ...sadly, i didnt at first...

Yay! I'm glad someone else was annoyed as well. ...though my problem with it is prolly cuz i never got a happy birthday thread...

This is wonderful! This is probably my favorite kind of DnB feel and you captured an amazing mellow, yet ass-kicking feel throughout. The production is top-notch and the backing jazz cymbal is really awesome. The only problem I had was that it never really feels comfortable in where it is; like the song feels it needs to change things up quicker than necessary. Otherwise, this is incredible work and I hope to see more from this artist. Great work!

Awesome song from an awesome awesome from the awesome kingdom in awesometon... I've enjoyed all of your songs greatly and I'm very glad that my favorite mixer from yesteryear is now back and making awesome mixes again. Great work McVaffe, and I can't wait to hear more.

I have a crappy on-board one that uses a conexant sound driver. but i have an m-audio mobile pre usb preamp/audio interface and a toshiba media center out-board sound card.

So, I'm trying to set up my MIDI/Audio keyboard (Novation X-Station) and i find it needs an ASIO sound driver. I set it up in my DAW host (Ableton Live 7) and find that there is an input, but no output. Not even a choice of an output. WTF? BTW, I'm sorry this is kind of a noob question, but its really getting frustrating.

Yay! Get a damn Live thread in here! I had a lot of questions when i first started that having a Live thread here would have helped with. On another note, the people on the ableton forums are a bunch of sniffy, pompous pricks.

Truthfully, if I was going to buy something for 2,000 bucks I'd want something that didn't look like it was made in the '80s... That wouldn't be a deal for me even if it was 500 bucks. I admit it sounds nice and is made well, but seriously, if people are gonna spend that kinda moolah, it makes me feel better if the packaging actually looks like there was thought put into it. ...On topic, I'd say if they put a Korg Oasys on there for 2000 bucks I'd buy it in an instant. MMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

I completely agree! I've been hearing a lot of the "software makes music for you, its gonna be the end of music as we know it!" theories for a long time and its only recently started to bother me. This kinda goes along with the new Melodyne software update that can take individual notes out of chords to fix it up. This only will help the experienced people make music better, not make shitty people good. No matter what medium of art, no matter how good the tools we use are, it isn't going to suddenly make all of the music shit. Sure there will be more amateurs and idiots making utter crap, but the talented people will always rise to the top.

Dieselboy's the 6ixth session is a pretty good album, it was mixed pretty well. Its a bit more like photek's stuff, in fact i think photek is on it. Kinda out of left field, but Oakenfold's Live in Oslo is actually pretty DNB-centric if i remember correctly; a bit more ambient DNB, but still more in the DNB vein. I can't stand oakenfold now, but that wasn't too bad of an album.

In Live there is a "stretch" tool for the midi notes, so if you can figure out how long the notes need to be (in your case twice or half as long) you can do it. But for other programs I dunno.

I don't think Brawl even has a release date there yet.

This review actually made me completely rethink my waning interest in ZP. Thank you Yahtzee, thank you. ...hehehe, gay jokes...

Heh, well you could've about 2 weeks ago; my comp crashed and i lost everything. I went to look for it and can't find anything. The closest thing i was able to find was at a website: http://www.webplaces.com/html/sounds.htm it brings you to a japanese site where i can't find anything to do with audio files... So if you can find anything there please let me know.

Hey that just happened to me!!! Hooray for the "it'll never happen to me" mentality. As for being on topic, I'd have to say not getting serious in music sooner. There are a lot of people younger than me that I wish I was a lot better than just because I'm older.

I was actually able to find that YOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo sound for searching 'Noh Theatre sounds' a while back. As for the shamisens and such, I use Colossus and haven't been able to find free or cheap versions of most of these samples anywhere.

This is quite the awesome mix. Extremely well-engineered and fun to listen to. Although it was incredibly frenetic it never seemed to lose any sense of direction; it always felt like it was going somewhere good. I really hope to hear more from this mixer. 10/10 if I ever saw one.

I was actually kinda 'meh' on this one, which is something I never thought I'd say about one of his reviews. I'm sorry to say my interest is waning in his reviews and it makes me quite sad.

Let me preface this by saying that my wife works at Blockbuster, which, for the uninitiated is actually pretty awesome for me since we get 5 free rentals a week, be it games or movies. The downside to this is the fact that we have one car; meaning there are days I have to spend insufferable amounts of time in Blockbuster attempting to amuse myself by seeing how many movies I can correctly guess were directed by the same person. Anyway... So during my time spent meandering down rows of games and movies i tend to overhear conversations of some of the many people browsing through games. Usually its made up of the different grunts of the 13-17 year old emo kids that live in my neighborhood, but a fair amount of the people i see looking for video games are parents. And while I'm sure those Emo kids make a good amount stupid choices, these parents are the sole reason games like "The Ninja Bread Man" (a game I hadn't heard of until i looked it up online and saw the reviews pan it for not even registering the Wii-mote most of the time) exist. Now, I admit that there are games out there that are considered to be bad by many people's standards that I enjoy quite a bit (Dynasty Warriors for example), but for god's sake, come on people. I don't need to think twice about whether or not a movie called "Meet the Deedles" (which was directed by Steve Boyum, who also directed You, Me and Dupree, incidentally) is gonna be a good movie. It isn't even a fringe group of people buying/renting this dreck either, its an overwhelming majority. What made me want to post this rant in the first place was what happened yesterday while I was waiting for my wife to get off work. I was looking through some of the games to see whether or not they had DiRT (they have one copy, compare that to 4 copies of Spider-man 3) when I overheard a woman talking to someone on the phone about what game to rent for her kids. She hung up the phone without deciding anything and continued to stare at the games in a way comparable to a blind, semi-retarded Alzheimer's patient choosing which Quantum Physics book to buy. After about 5 minutes of this I chimed in to say that Smash Bros Brawl or Mario Galaxy were my favorites and that many of my friends loved them more than their own children. She mumbled something like "hehehehe, cheese" and grabbed a copy of both the Ninja Bread Man and Spider-man 3 and left. Now I understand if I somehow confused her with the quip about loving games more than children or even scared her by snapping her out of her semi-conscious stupor, but damn! My wife then told me this afternoon that the lady came back today and told her The Ninja Bread Man wasn't registering with the Wii-mote and asked if she could rent something else... She rented Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, which from playing it at a Target once I found was pretty dern boring. I know this comes off as rather elitist and pompous, as someone who spends much of his time reading up on several different web-sites about even the worst games available, but its really starting to bother me that the average consumer of video games, movies, music, midget butlers, etc. only seems to look at the box art and exclaim "pimp-slap boxing! wow, and it even has graphics in it! I got's 'ta git me some o' dat!" But since it sells, more and more games are made based off of that same business-principle. Its nothing new, but I haven't really been exposed to the level of mediocrity people are expecting (or not expecting) from window-dressed games until lately. Discuss.