Arcana

profits down 97.5%? Well, I guess they're making a profit still, at least?

There's something really exciting about seeing a project that until a few days ago had no deadlines, and seeing so many WIPs.

Some Blizzard fan art wankery: By emeraldarcana at 2010-02-04 By emeraldarcana at 2010-02-04 By emeraldarcana at 2010-02-04 By emeraldarcana at 2010-02-04

iTunes? Or, if you want, head down to the mall and check out HMV or whatever the local equivalent is in your area. You can even listen to CDs in the store, just bring it to the counter and say, "Can I listen to this?"

It was first brought up on Page 4, most everyone ignored the comment. With respect to this, I think it's more an issue of managing release dates rather than one project helping out the other. If you release BadAss six months before Bad Dudes vs. OCR (or the other way around), and insert at least one album release in between, the overshadowing won't be apparent. The real damage, in my opinion, is the apparently prevailing opinion that the Bad Dudes project will be "better" than the BadAss project (and will release sooner, will be bigger, etc.).

I heard there was actually a bit of an uprising on the MA2 forums from GBLT groups about the lack of male on male relationships in Mass Effect 2, especially when Dragon Age did a good job of treating all relationships equally.

I keep hearing stories about how game testing sucks, but there seems to be no shortage of people who want to go into it... so good for game companies.

I groaned when that guy was like, "She's attractive. AND she plays games? That's a double win." or whatever. It's no wonder gamer stereotypes don't go away - it's because, like it or not, so many of the gamers are actually like that.

We could go that way if you like.

IT'S A REVOLUTION DARKESWORD They put two and two together, just like video games did in the 90s. "Fun game.... but people like story, too!" So they mashed up the game with the story with the characters and ta-da! Reality TV!

Gameshows didn't run for 45 minutes.

The teaser video made me cringe. I merely sighed when I saw "Survivor: Heroes and Villains" appear on TV as a commercial, but I think that Survivor's almost more acceptable to me because the ultimate goal is just cash. It's not a job or anything like this is.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/02/sonys-tester-mixing-worst-of-reality-shows-with-worse-job.ars Playstation Network's "The Tester" - where contestants have to go up against each other in drama and singing contests to win... of all things, a Playstation Network Testing position. Official web site http://www.thetester.com/

Happy birthday to diotrans! *clap clap clap*

Despite what some people like Zircon have to say, I am highly in favour of having project source files available, even if many of the source instruments are unavailable, simply so you can SEE what the instruments are and what the MIDI data looks like. Back in the day, SGX made a few of his project files for Reason available and I learned an immense amount from them, including concepts like filter sweeps and off-beat bass for trance. If you're reading this and thinking, "Oh, what a noob, he doesn't even know what a filter sweep is?" then you have been doing music for far too long and have become so embedded into it that you have forgotten that there are people out there who simply aren't as smart as you are. Back in the day, many people started out with MIDI rips or WAV rips, a drum loop program, and then did a remix overtop some pads. Nowadays, this experimentation is discouraged - it says in big letters not to submit your MIDI rip to OCR. People catch on to this. They realise pretty quickly that there's a "right way" and a "wrong way" to do music. A project file, even if it has no sounds, is useful for two reasons. First of all, it allows people to analyze the structure of a song. A lot of people don't know how songs work, and as a result, you get arrangements that are difficult to follow. Seeing a project-file, even if it's not laid out that well, gives you a sense of what instruments are active at what times. Second, it gives you an idea of what the individual notes are in the song. Believe it or not, there are people out there who try remixing without having a clue what a chord is (I was one of these people, and eventually gave up and took piano lessons). Almost every book on "How to use FLStudio" or "How to use Reason" or "How to use Cubase" doesn't go through the process of putting notes that sound good on the piano roll. Again, maybe you're simply too awesome to have ever gone through this phase, but in a video tutorial where they go through a bunch of stuff and then say, "Okay, let's enter a quick bass line. ... there you go." The thousands of unsaid words in that "..." is what someone who's totally new can get out of looking at a project file. Anyway that's my view on it. If anyone wants some of my Logic Pro project files let me know, though I'm hardly an example of a stellar musician

I'm going to await soul-killing dumb Wii gimmicks like bad sword swinging and mini-games. Because with a name like "Xenoblade" (get it, you've got a blade??) and a picture of a mecha fighting an Evangelion-angel-like creature with a sword... get it, gear with a blade, swinging swords, Xenoblade!

I don't know the original source, so I can't compare to the original. This is a nice song, I enjoy the acoustic sounds. It's very natural, very intimate. I have a love affair with diotrans's voice, because she's an extremely capable singer who has a gigantic range. The backing instrumental is very good, and I enjoy it. Congrats on your first mix!

The character templates in many of these games are simply too strong. One of the reason why I liked FF9 was actually because the lead character acted a bit out of normal JRPG fare by being charming, and the lead female was capable and even rejected the character's advances. Yeah sure, eventually they get together and all, but 50 hours in actually makes it believable. A big reason I really liked the game "Kartia" is because the characters tended not to fit into the normal stereotypes either. Other than featuring extremely vibrant, vivid in-game character art (Yoshitaka Amano, you all know who he is), there's actual character conflict where the characters just plain don't like each other but tolerate each other for the sake of succeeding at their objectives. A lot of JRPGs focus too heavily on the same themes as well, including "friendship", "love", and "being true to yourself" as well as focusing too intently on issues like morality, justice, and even spirituality (most Final Fantasy games focus very much on faith in things like the Planet or in whatever the game's spiritual life force tends to be). Granted, people tend to love JRPGs because of this "heart". If you compare a game like Dragon Age to Final Fantasy, a big difference is that Dragon Age, when you get down to it, doesn't really have any underlying meaning to it. It's just a big story where you're the main character and you get to do stuff. JRPGs tend to play out like fables, where you get a "lesson for life" afterward.

In a lot of ways, The World Ends With You totally breaks normal "JRPG" conventions and does its own thing. The term "Japanese Role-playing game" is kind of misleading - it's meant to suggest an ethnic origin of a game and in proxy is supposed to be a stereotype of the types of games that Japanese developers tend to produce. The reference "Korean grinder" (reference to MMORPGs) is the same way. Of course, if a company then breaks conventions and does something like World, which has more in common with a fighting game than a traditional RPG, then I'd almost argue that the implications that come along with the phrase "JRPG" almost doesn't apply anymore. That's just my view.

While many people suggested lots of good games I'd keep in mind which games are good on SNES, and which ones are better on rereleases (usually to Game Boy) or even emulators. For example, Link's Awakening DX is better in its color incarnation than on Super Game Boy. Breath of Fire and Breath of Fire II are released almost exactly (translation errors included) on Game Boy Advance as they were released on SNES. Tactics Ogre (Super Famicom classic) was never released in North America on SNES, get it for the PSX instead. Do get Final Fantasy II and III (the translation errors in the original are quite nostalgic and many became inside jokes), as well as most of the action games that show off the system (Uniracers as mentioned comes to mind and it's an excellent game, other games that come to mind are Stunt Race FX and StarFox).

Relevant part highlighted. The issue tends to be though that the gameplay of the majority of most JRPGs don't have a lot going for them.

Watching some of those reminds me of why I stopped watching anime.

Japanese RPGs were great when you were between the ages of 10 and 24. Each new game that comes out needs to continue to pander toward this 10-24 crowd.

To download songs on a Mac when you have Quicktime Plugins installed: Step 1: Go to the song's page and click normally on the download MP3 link. You will get brought to the mirror's page. Step 2: Right-click on the mirror you want, and then select "Save Link As...", it will give you a dialog in which you can specify where to save your song. (If you haven't enabled right-clicking on your Mac, then you will have to do that first under System Preferences->Mouse, that's another tutorial though). Hope that helps.