Linearity

God damn.

I'm just now finishing up a transcription of the Main Theme from Skies of Arcadia, and I was wondering if anyone else around here transcribes game music. By "transcribe" I mean arranging and notating the music as closely as possible to the original recording rather than writing a remix based on the original. As I thought might be the case, the Skies of Arcadia Main Theme is effectively a string quartet piece. It's damn hard sometimes hearing the inner voices of a chord, but I've gone through the whole piece and found four distinct and continuous string parts. I never took notice of the "viola" part even though, back in the day, I waited multiple times at the title screen, basking in the sweetness of this song. Now that I strained to identify this viola line, which is sometimes gorgeous, I think that I appreciate the whole piece even more now. If you haven't tried transcribing, you might like it. We could even start an OCR sheet music team and get sued.

I've driven over that bridge. That's a weird idea. That certainly isn't fair. It's rush hour with around 50 cars on the bridge, and it just falls out from under them. Maybe next we'll all be struck by meteors in our homes.

Finally. I fell in love with the Guilty Gear XX soundtrack two and a half years ago, and finally it is here on OC ReMix. And in just the way that I'd have hoped: it's a broad piece that diverges from the source material. I figured that if I were to rearrange a GGXX song I'd have to do my own heavy metal version of it, but you've done what I thought too difficult: you've taken it completely out of its normal context and developed it into another strong piece of music. Congratulations.

But this way we know that there aren't any spelling errors.

Does anybody have any recommendations on where to travel in northern Germany? I'm studying there in the fall but I'm doing some traveling beforehand. I'm studying in Berlin, so no need to spend extra time there. I'm visiting Leipzig (and going to the Fifth Symphonic Game Music Concert!) and from there I thought I'd go to Hannover for a few days. After that, I don't know where to go. I've been to a few places in the south, but I never hear much about the north. Is there anywhere in Schleswig-Holstein that's worth visiting?

Holy fucking balls formatting these bios is a lot of work. They're all edited, but I need to put in the tags, the italics, the reference links, etc.

Okay now he's just fucking with us. I'll take care of writing up Otacon, since I played MGS The Twin Snakes recently. I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm putting the finishing touches on the first 50. They should be ready in the near future.

My work is finally resumed. Hopefully done in a month?

ContinueTheEnd, I agree that there is no single piece or composer that can define all of video game music. What I mean by the word "standard" is along the lines of "classic" or "famous," although I delibrately didn't use those words. In jazz music, a "jazz standard" is a song that a lot of musicians and audiences know and, to a lesser extent, recognize for its quality. This is what I'm getting at. Jazz musicians all know "Satin Doll" even though it by no means defines jazz. "Aquatic Ambience" isn't really classic (Dave Wise wrote it only 13 years ago), but I'd say it's part of standard game music repertoire. Nor is "Corridors of Time" really famous like the Zelda overworld theme, but it has recognition among people who take an interest in game music. These are all good pieces everyone is naming. Keep them coming.

I've been wondering: there are plenty of favorites threads for video game music, but is there a body of music that we all consider "standard?" Anybody can recognize the Super Mario Bros. theme; more scholarly listeners might know, say, "Vampire Killer" and "Terra." What game music is in our literature? To clarify, I don't mean your favorite soundtrack that nobody's heard of. I love "The Launcher Mansion" from Evolution: The World of Sacred Device, but that is clearly not a standard.

Summer is almost here, which means I will finally have time to finish my editing. We're gonna finish this bitch.

So it's called "NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams" and is supposed to come out at the end of the year.

Guys I just got a fucking PM from DJP. Says he doesn't want the bios as part of the site, some copyright thing. WTF? A year and a half down the goddamn drain. To be honest, I'm glad it's finally done, whatever the outcome.

Man, that rumor a year ago was right. This is, so to speak, a dream come true. I'm glad to hear that the director was on the original team. Sonic Team isn't what it used to be, but if there ever was a game on which to turn a new leaf, NiGHTS is it.

The text files of the bios are purely for editing the actual summaries. I figure we'd paste the edited text back into the HTML at the end. The whole business is mainly to make spell checking smoother.

There are four repeats (Crono, Solid Snake, Princess Zelda, and Samus) but in both the list and the thread, Samus Aran (Prime) is being counted as a seperate bio. So, we have three bios each being counted as one that actually account for two images. Then the front page is missing Dr. Wily, for whom the thread has a bio, and the thread is missing Magus, for which there is an entry on the front page. Front page: 150 images - 1 extra Crono - 1 extra Solid Snake - 1 extra Princess Zelda - 1 Dr. Wily = 146 entries Thread: 150 images - 1 extra Crono - 1 extra Solid Snake - 1 extra Princess Zelda - 1 Magus = 146 entries So each is missing just one mystery entry, because if you count the lines on the front page and you count the bios in the thread, they're both 147. What is the missing link? EDIT: I realize that we do have a bio for Magus, it just needs a fair amount of editing work. I tacked it onto the end of both OCR_Mascot_Bios.txt and OCR_Mascot_Bios_(1-148).txt and fixed the links above. So, the thread count is 148, and the front page count is 147.

Okay, here are the lump files full of all the bios I could find. These are all the most recent--but unedited--versions of the bios to my knowledge. 1-147: OCR_Mascot_Bios.txt 1-50 (of which I have edited 1-23): OCR_Mascot_Bios_(1-50).txt 51-100: OCR_Mascot_Bios_(51-100).txt 101-147: OCR_Mascot_Bios_(101-148).txt Now, for some reason, I counted only 140 bios, so I went through the entire thread double checking my list. I realized that I hadn't included the final versions of The Coop's Darkstalkers bios, so that brought the total up to 147, plus his "What is Darkstalkers?" blurb. Otherwise, the thread and the OCR_Mascot_Bios.txt seemed to mirror each other. So...didn't we say we had 150? There is certainly a picture with the number 150 in the file name, but are there truly 150 mascots? EDIT: I just counted the number of bios on the list of completed bios and their authors. There are 147 bios completed.

So, do you want me to continue with proofreading the first 50? I did a shit-ton of editing work over the holidays, and I don't want to double it if it's not part of the plan anymore.

Fancy new posting scheme we have here. Anyway, I'm back at school and am working on schoolwork instead of the project. I'll try to get the bulk file up and hosted this weekend. I'd hate to think that I'm discouraging progress by keeping everyone hanging on something that really speeds up the frivolous part of editing (spelling, mostly). I'm still working on the first fifty bio's, but I think I'm more than halfway done. We're so close!

watkinzez, what are the British/Australian customs on hyphens? Specifically, I find myself wanting to add hyphens to things (i.e. "ill-fated" instead of "ill fated" and "bee-like creature" rather than "bee like creature") but I'm aiming to retain all of your regional differences from American English (like omitting full stops after "Bros." or "Dr."). Are hyphens like that supposed to be there?

There were the additions a few weeks ago (which we already covered), but none since, I think. BTW I've been proofreading the first 50; I'm maybe a third of the way done. I'll get the big Word document with all of the bios posted on "my" server soon, but it won't be complete until the aformentioned Mega Man bios are finalized.

Thanks for the input. If you're interested in editing at large, we might have a place for you, depending on how much time the regulars have for editing. I suppose it's ultimately up to Dafydd. Please don't post specific edits, though, because there'd be too many of them. About your edits: your first revision just replaces the word "tell" with the word "state" and then removes the grammatically-important word "that"; watkinzez is from Australia, where they use British spellings such as "realise," and I decided to leave those regional differences alone; if you remove the erroneous apostrophe and "s" from the last sentence, it works fine, I think. Edit: dueling grammar-nazis

Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up.

For references to old games, I'm maintaining the present tense: