Arcana

Yeah, bleck is right, FF XIII removed a lot of the things that hardcore JRPG fans thought they'd find in a Final Fantasy game (or even generic JRPGs), like overworld maps, a boy with a sword, a sexy bishi bad guy, boring turn-based combat, and stupid cutscenes of the main male lead being teased by all of the females in one room. And other dumb anime tropes like that. So all of the people who wanted turn-based grinding, huge maps, towns with item shops, and a chocobo farm were invariably disappointed. There are a few problems with what they built now (mostly due to the story pacing being really slow for the first 10 hours, and the crawl at Chapter 11, and some key missing interactions explained only in the catalog, not to mention the cheesy ending) but I enjoyed it precisely because it wasn't another typical JRPG where we first went into a big city to win big at the casino, then we had to go take a ship and invariably that ship will be either a ghost pirate ship or it will be wrecked in a deep sea disaster of some sort. I feel that in many ways, FF XIII was designed to appeal more to an adventure game/action game crowd, while still trying to maintain a character-driven story. I think it succeeded in this respect (as much as you might all hate on it, it's been the fastest-selling Final Fantasy game to date) though it possibly went too far into the "action-game" direction where you'd fight in part of a map, get a cutscene, continue on, get another cutscene, and then fight a boss.

As Necrotic said: This bundle has now raised over 1 million dollars in about a week. Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture are planning to go open-source, so if any of you are interested in how these games work it might be a good place to start.

He wrote that post, of course he will defend it.

Hey it works for what I want it for, which is reading PDF papers and sometimes surfing the web and playing games. (what's a pud?)

I bought an iPad for PDFs and textbooks (among other reasons). It works much better than eInk-based devices for PDFs since the refresh rate is much higher than most eInk devices. You can scroll around and zoom in freely and it's about as fast as doing it on your computer, but more natural due to the touch screen and slate form factor. Granted I haven't tried using a modern eBook Reader since they got "big" (I used one that was from about 2007) but AFAIK about eInk, the refresh rates are extremely low and thus are bad for textbooks, comic books, and PDFs in which you have to scroll around. My main problem with the iPad right now is that I don't have a good PDF annotator. I could probably buy one but I don't know which PDF program is "the best" at such things.

Okay, JRPGs have really always been about two things: 1) Story (and characters) 2) Battle system It's not like Final Fantasy XIII is light on storyline or something. It's definitely not traditional JRPG fare, despite what everyone wants to think. It's funny. People complained to hell about how Final Fantasy is filled with too many girly boys and stupid plots about angsty heroes with swords that save the world and get the girl (who is invariably a white mage of some kind) and then when Final Fantasy XIII comes out and actually changes a few of the conventions, the same group is all eyeroll about how bad it is and how it's not as memorable as ___. In many ways, Final Fantasy XIII was an experiment to see if a Japanese development team could take the "J" out of JRPG.

It's a project track and thus I don't want to make it available or else I'd link it here. BTW added a picture above in my post

Well when I say near clipping, I lied. I actually meant "I use a limiter, without it my song is 4 db over peak" . I actually really wanted to mix the song without relying on the limiter, but even with it it sounds really quiet. However none of the individual tracks approach clipping levels and none of them use limiters either. the waveform of my song is pretty wide, with lots of peaks and valleys but I will do some Audacity stuff tonight and post it for discussion. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Hey guys. I am wondering what suggestions and tips you can give me for making mixes sound louder. I have a mix where I'm already pushing all the levels to max, but yet it sounds relatively quieter compared to most other songs I have, including most OCR tracks. As this is an electronica song, this relatively low level of volume is not acceptable. I've been applying the tools that you common associate with mixing, such as raising levels, EQing, and compressing, but I'm not having success. Pretty much everything's being pushed to almost-clipping levels but yet it sounds like I'm listening to this song from ten yards away. Can you guys help me out with a general process for making the perceived sound of a song louder? As for the song itself, I can't post it because it's for a project and thus cannot be distributed. Regards,

I dunno, I realised this about 10 hours in and it just made things more interesting. The enemies hit hard and you often have to switch just to take a hit or heal, and then switch back. You can't always go Balls to the Wall 3x Ravagers to fill up that chain meter, not all of the monsters you can fill up so easily.

Well if you watch American Idol (I don't, I swear), they'll often kick out all of the baddies for a good reason - it's the phenomenon of Garbage In, Garbage Out. They basically say that they need someone with a good foundation to build off of. It's much easier for them to shape and train someone who can sing than someone who can't.

Also it sounds like weird advice to give, but if you're mixing, make sure you experiment with different volume settings (of your actual hardware amp or whatever). While your mix should never clip, it's going to sound different if someone listens to it on their home stereo with Volume 1 vs Volume 10. I personally have a tendency to make everything sound loud in my song and then having to adjust levels later to avoid clipping. It feels that this could be easily avoided by simply turning up the volume on my speakers before starting. Also I heard (from the manual of my Mackie monitors of all things) that if you do have to choose a volume to mix at, do it at low volumes since if your mix is going to sound bad chances are it'll be when the volume's turned down. I don't know how accurate this advice is though. Any comments?

Usually what I try to do is simply to listen to your mix (and other mixes) on many different sets of equipment. Crappy laptop speakers, hi-fi home theatre systems, good headphones, bad headphones. If it makes sound, listen to some songs through it and get a sense of what your speakers do. All of the headphones I've had colour the sound in different ways, but once I realised this I worked around them. I've had some headphones that were too bassy (actually most of the pairs I have are more bassy than my speakers but maybe that's because they're compensating for something). And I respectfully disagree with Taucer's chart, I think that even entry-level studio monitors in an untreated room are better than mixing with headphones (but he's right, they will go for close to that $1000 point and I'm sure that treating your room makes a huge difference). But, even though I have monitors, I'll still listen to my mix on tons of different speakers and headphone systems still, just to get a sense of what it sounds like in different situations.

There's a reason that The Remixinator gave you a choice of Ice Cap, Terra, and Schala as base songs.

Oh by the way there's about 5 days left in this offer so if you're interested in it you might want to jump on it before it goes away.

I was REALLY tense when you got to world 8-4! It was like an epic drama.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble There is a package of games available here for windows, Mac and Linux by donation. Offerings include World of Goo and Aquaria (which has a remix by Danny B. Basically you donate what money you want and send it either to the developers or to a charity like Child's Play. Check it out and support some indie developers.

Well, it's not optimal to mix on headphones, but it's better to mix on good headphones than it is to mix on cheap speakers. Headphones will serve you fine until you get serious about music and are prepared to drop $400+ on a pair of studio monitors. And even then the headphones will still probably be useful. Here is the thread about the topic: What headphones or monitors (speakers) should I buy?

My parents barely listen to music for fun, they tend to prefer news, television, and movies. If they do listen to music, it tends to be 60-70s rock (The Beatles). My mom likes Randy Travis and Cantonese pop songs (obviously). I don't think they'd really get into any OCR music. I played a few songs for my sister that I thought were funny back in 2002 or so, but even though she plays games, she was like "What the hell is this?"

Well they are enhanced graphic versions of the PSP version and are also much much cheaper than their PSP counterparts. I was enjoying FF1 until I broke my iPod Touch. The only problem is that the games are SLOW - like not only loading and touching is kind of slow but the act of touching "attack" then touching the monster you want to kill takes much longer than mashing 'A'.

VSTs basically allow you to be able to load custom "programs" so to speak. Many of them give you the potential to be able to make better sounds than ones that are General MIDI ish. However it is a challenge in two directions and most artists on this site are good at both. There is the composition side of things, where the songs sound good from a musical standpoint, and then there is the production side of things, where the music sounds sonically interesting and appealing. Good luck, it is a long but rewarding process especially when you first start out and your abilities increase rapidly as you learn new things!

MechWarrior 4 is like 10 years old.

Yeah, the story's turned into an absolute zoo now. Gizmodo kind of proved that they have no class overall now and Apple confirmed that their new phone looks like.. well the thing that was found.

Well you got my gamer tag from my forum info so....