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Arcana

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Posts posted by Arcana

    PlayStation Move: cool ideas or Wii rip-off?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    There was a comparison once of a Sony device and the reviewer made frequent comments about how difficult it was to hook up Sony device A to a Sony TV and lamented something about, "Sony should have learned from Apple and made sure that their own products worked in unison with each other".

    As for the Playstation Move, I wonder if people will care, or be interested in the fact that this machine can do HD!

    Final Fantasy XIII

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    so this game is officially ruined for me

    my hotel room was broken into this morning (i'm on a week long training trip) and my xbox was stolen

    barring the police actually finding it i'm not going to be playing it anytime soon and i'd have to start over even if i went and bought it again

    fml

    That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that.

    Hmm, can you report it to Microsoft? I don't know if they'll take any action but maybe they can help the police find it if, for example, the thieves plug it into a network and it logs into XBox Live.

    Female Game Characters

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    In general people like attractive characters. You don't see a lot of ugly characters in games that play a fully central role, unless their ugliness has some kind of deep-rooted link to their secret past (see: disfiguration). This goes for men portrayed in games as much as women in games.

    OCR02006 - Donkey Kong Country 2 "Trapped in the Minds"

    in ReMix Reviews & Comments

    Posted

    A lot of people are hating on this track. I don't see what the big deal is - yeah it sounds like Linkin Park, complete with HARDCORE BADASS lyrics! It's pretty cheesy... but that's just the nature of the style.

    The chorus section is really cool, the lyrics are great. My personal issue is that the rap sections could have been a bit more tightly aligned with the rhythm (it sometimes sounds out of sync). As DJP it sounds like they were pasted on. But as an overall package this song was really fun to listen to.

    Questions about Composing video game music..I'd really appreciate some answers.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    As someone who studies software engineering, I would like to point out that in the dot com craze of the late 1990s, it was commonplace and expected for you to work far over 8 hours a day in the office. To make it more tolerable, you got perks like a weight room, in-house (free) catered food, free coffee and tea, regular snacks, and game rooms.

    Eventually, the bubble burst and the first things to go were all of these free extras like gourmet coffee and tea (they replaced it with ordinary coffee and orange pekoe), free lunches, and the personal trainers. Next to go were people's jobs.

    For a while longer there continued to be a culture of "who can stay the latest" due to fear of layoffs.

    Now the industry (outside of gaming, to many extents) has righted itself especially as the workforce is getting older and as the experienced, valuable employees get families. However, one big difference between gaming and other software industries is that other software tends to need to do things like maintain large codebases, support customers, and maintain legacy code. In gaming, that doesn't happen quite so often - you often have a lot of creative staff and much of the work is spent on that side of things (art, design, music, etc).

    The reality is though that 60-hour work weeks is starting to become the "bad thing" and if you're an employee who expects 60+ hours a week from your employees when it's not critical (ex: the week before your project goes gold) then you're going to be finding new employees.

    OCRA-0017 - Donkey Kong Country 2: Serious Monkey Business

    in Album Reviews & Comments

    Posted

    Thanks I've had a hard time thinking what is the best way to say all this.

    You don't get off quoting me scott-free. :)

    Yes, it's a free album and you reserve your right to comment on the tracks, but it is polite to give the tracks a good listen and then to comment on what elements that you didn't like. Be specific. Maybe you didn't like the timbre of the vocals or the lyrics or the annunciation, or you thought vocals didn't fit into the originals.

    But, don't be rude. Be critical, but not rude.

    I'm still going through a lot of the tracks personally. A lot of them are really funky tracks. I like the style and the overall vibe the album's presenting so far. It's a very fast-paced, upbeat album. Lots of heavy beats and rhythms. It's a very fun listen. I imagine that a lot of this music will become a permanent part of people's car music.

    OCR02001 - Donkey Kong Country 2 "Sturm und Kong"

    in ReMix Reviews & Comments

    Posted

    I was actually a big fan of the funky hybrid. Someone said that this track was all orchestral and I was like, "What? I want my funky rhythms!"

    Glad I got it with this track. The verses really do it for me, as well as the marcato strings that back the entire track up. The chines are a lovely touch. Yeah they channel Elfman a bit. :)

    The thing I would have liked to hear more of would have been more of a 'rocking' synth solo at 2:22. No matter. Good work!

    OCRA-0017 - Donkey Kong Country 2: Serious Monkey Business

    in Album Reviews & Comments

    Posted · Edited by Arcana

    I'm beginning to feel like I'm in Shutter Island... I know in my heart that people should under no circumstances be angry about any aspect of a free offering of music, but it keeps coming up again and again that I'm beginning to think that I'm the crazy one.

    Granted, I know most of the posters who say these things really aren't ANGRY, but still... OCRemix is an offering. Let's keep things in perspective.

    Everyone has the right to offer their opinion on something, just as we each have a right to dismiss their opinions ans biased, unfair, or just plain silly. Alas music is something people feel strongly about regardless of how much it cost them.

    Personally? I skipped directly TO the vocal tracks. :) The two that I knew where vocals (Flickerfall and Nicole Adams, et al.) were just fine. The only reason I would want to see an instrumental version of them would be so we could karaoke at a meetup or something.

    Questions about Composing video game music..I'd really appreciate some answers.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I mostly wonder about the workload. Just doing the music alone is a full-time, 30-40 hour a week job, what does the rest of that add on to it?

    A lot of that stuff looks clerical, like doing paperwork and making purchasing decisions or setting up appointments with voice actors. Obviously those are things that happen once or twice in a project but need to be done at some point by someone.

    Final Fantasy XIII

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    if that's your biggest issue with the game, then leave it alone already :<

    It's not, did you read anything else in my post or did you just zero in on this one issue because it looked like an easy target? It's the only thing that people chose to discuss out of my post out of my 10 or so paragraphs, so :dstrbd:

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