Music March, what happened!?

This month passed by so quickly!  I felt like I accomplished very little in what I wanted to do.  So this month, I was planning to work really hard on music, but the first 15 days of March was mostly taken up by doing sound effects for Camera Obscura, going over to my grandma's to check up on her after her accident (check last post), and by getting sidetracked I suppose.  I actually uploaded my Street Fighter Medley mix on facebook 2 days after last month's post and decided to be done with it and move onto other projects.  Half way through this month, I buckled down and worked on the Mach Rider remix I had planned out ever since Jr. College about 5-6 years ago.  I had always planned to make it a rock/electronic remix, but over the last 1.5 years I decided I wanted to make it into a Bass 'n Drum remix.  I finished it and was really happy with "what" it sounded like but was dissatisfied with "how" it sounded.  Mostly, I wasn't happy with how weak the beat sounded and how quiet it was.  So I finally decided to learn how to do post mastering and realized I could easily do it in Audacity, which is free and something I already had.  So after a day of listening to ambiguous videos and tips from the internet, I messed around with the settings on Audacity and finally grasped the very basics of equalizing, compression and amplify allowing me to raise the volume, bass, treble, and overall quality of a track without making it sound distorted.  I also found out that I've been exporting MP3s at half the quality I could have been.  Furthermore, high quality audio takes up a ridiculous amount of hard drive space!  I tried to keep my audio files in the highest quality and realized it can take up 300-700 MB just for a few minutes of audio!  Still, it was good to know I can make my songs sound even better.  The problem is that I have the obligation to return to all my previous songs and rework them so they sound all just as good.  So in the end, the Mach Rider turned out really great (though it could probably be even better if I knew what I was doing).  Still, that's just 1 song out of the entire month and now I'm scrambling to work on more these next 2 days before I start "Art April" and switch over to drawing.  Today is seriously a busy day for me: change bed sheets, writing this, working on an art project, reworking my older songs, experimenting with a new VST I got, etc.  I'm really disappointed in myself as I hoped to get at the very least 5-6 type of music projects done this month (I was actually thinking more of 12, but I have to be realistic here).  Still, I'm really happy I looked into mastering and learned how to handle the basics now.

So in terms of gaming, I'm actually making good progress...in a way.  I jumped from last months 21 completed games up to 34 completed games as of last night.  I'm actually hoping to make even faster progress of this after learning something scary about my back log of games.  In the middle of the month, I decided to count up all the games I haven't completed yet and shared it with my friends since I usually complain to them about my backlog.  There's a slight difference in numbers since I completed a few games in the past few weeks, but here it is:

Gameboy DS: 1 (Pokémon SoulSilver)
Gameboy 3DS: 1 (Etrian Odyssey IV)
Gamecube: 8
Nintendo Wii: 13
Playstation 3: 22
Playstation 2: 29
PC: 150

As you can see, my list of PC games have grown into a sort of monstrosity that needs to be put down.  Despite the large number of PC games I had (it was 148 when I counted), I have bought 7 games for super cheat because of spring sales and completed 5 games in the past 2 weeks.  Thus I ended up with a count of 150 games at the moment.

I had completed Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D since my last post after 28 hours of playing it.  I mostly enjoyed it, but there were many groan-worthy moments throughout the game where I wasn't having as much fun.  Still, I rushed through it so I could start playing Code of Princess.  It took around 4-5 hours to complete the game the first time around, and I was able to play through story mode 3 more times with different characters.  At first, there were many things I didn't like about the game: graphics lagged when the 3D was on and lots of things were going on (explosions, lots of enemies, etc.), voice acting were sometimes pretty bad, attack variance were limited, and no branching story paths.  I guess I was comparing it a bit too much to Guardian Heroes (Code of Princess is developed by 2 of the guys who worked on Guardian Heroes) when I first started playing.  But the more I played Code of Princess, the more I loved it.  The game felt pretty easy for the most part, but was a big challenge during boss battles and later in additional quests.  I fell in love with the light-hearted humor and the animé styled character designs.  The music is absolutely amazing and reminds me of how older games were like.  I think I might like it more than Guardian Heroes!
 I ended up playing the game up to 20 hours while acquiring all the characters, finishing all the additional quests, and beating the game a few times with several characters out of the 50+ that was selectable before I decided to set it down and start playing Etrian Odyssey IV.  Code of Princess was totally worth buying and worth my time.  It's one of the games I'll consider a classic for the 3DS.  In between completing Code of Princess and now, I was able to complete Garshasp: The Monster Slayer, Torchlight 2, Inside a Star-Filled Sky, Dead Pixel, 007 Goldeneye, and Titan Attacks.  To make a short run through of them:
-Garshasp was pretty good/bad at the same time but made for a good study game
-Torchlight 2 was really fun and significantly better than the first one
-Inside a Star-Filled Sky was dumb in which I gave up really quickly after understanding how the game worked
-Dead Pixel was short but fairly entertaining
-007 Goldeneye is an interesting take on the original N64 game and I mostly enjoyed it other than the ending part of the game where it had a VIP/Escort mission, quick-time event boss fight, and an annoying problem with graphics lag due to the explosions which made aiming and seeing anything clearly difficult
-Titan Attacks is reminiscent of Space Invaders with influences from Galaga, Asteroids, and other classic Arcade games.  It was an okay game, but I didn't feel like playing it anymore after beating it one time through.

So now, I'm mostly focusing on Etrian Odyssey IV which I'm really enjoying.  Other than that, I'm slowly taking on all the other games I have while resisting buying any more games.  I have no updates on Animé since I haven't been watching any at all.  I think I watched one episode of Sword Art Online since my last post.  I really need to finish that series.  I suppose that's it for now.  Hopefully I'll be a lot more productive in April with Art than I was in March.

Pressure building up

The title is a bit misleading as pressure now is nothing compared to when I was in school or working.  It's just time constraints here and there with everything I'm in I suppose.  With a progress report on my New Year's Resolution, I have only completed 1 artwork and I only finished my first music project 2 nights ago.  On the bright side, that first music project was an original track for Camera Obscura.  And speaking of Camera Obscura, we have a demo now!  For completed games, I'm up to 21 right now.  So pressure #1, I don't have nearly enough music projects and art projects down as I had hoped so far.  I plan to turn this around by having "Music March" and "Art April" and putting effort into my work.  Pressure #2: I still have to build my portfolio and that takes time out of my day.  I'm also not 100% complete with Camera Obscura so I have to balance my work around that as well.  Pressure #3 is that Spring is approaching which means I have to start sending out resumés again to try to get a job.  Job offers are slim, hire rates and narrow, and my patience with applying to dozens of studios with not even a reply is rather low now.  It'd be nice to land an honest to goodness position in composing and producing music for a game I know that people will play: something I can be proud of.  As much as I enjoy doing music for indie games like I am now, it's not promising me any employment and there's not income.  Pressure #4: My grandma got in an accident recently and is injured but okay.  Still, it makes me worried and uneasy which isn't a good mental state for me to be in when working.  Finally, pressure #5: a pressure that isn't a problem at all and one I can enjoy: Too many games!

Despite completing 21 games thus far, I still have an enormous back-log of games to go through and new ones are coming out!  Metal Gear Rising: Revengence and Crysis 3 just came out, but I definitely have to wait for those as I have close to 15 unfinished PS3 games not counting fighting games (if I include those, I think it's up to 20).  Still, it's hard to resist new games and games on sale.  This past weekend, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was a free weekend game on Steam and was on sale for $40.  I've tried ignoring Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 as best as I can since Black Ops 1 disappointed me.  But given the chance to play multiplayer, I really enjoyed it and ended up buying it yesterday.  I'm getting worse with each passing Call of Duty game, possibly because the game is becoming more balanced and require a lot more skill.  It's a good thing though, the game should be more fair and rely more on skill than the ability to exploit easy kills.  I haven't tried campaign yet, but one of the main reasons why I bought it so I'll eventually check it out.  Then last week, I was talking to one of my friends who worked at Atlus and he said he was able to get Atlus games cheaper for me if I wanted to buy them.  Etrian Odyssey IV for the 3DS comes out tomorrow and even though I had a really rough time with the first game, I gave the 4th one a try since there was a demo.  I loved the music (Yuzo Koshiro!!!) and graphics as well as the much improved menus and faster combat system.  And so, I asked for a copy of that as well as trying to get "Code of Princess" (3DS) in which I love the music and art style for it as well.  Both are going to be shipped out tomorrow, so I'll be able to play it sometime this week.  I only have 1 uncompleted 3DS game at the moment, so I don't feel too bad about getting 2 more at the moment.  But the one 3DS game I'm playing right now is "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D" so that might take a bit of time.  I'm gonna try to rush through it this week.  With that, there are a few more games coming out soon that is pressure me to complete more games.  Castlevania for the 3DS is out early March while Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate comes out mid-March.  I had the opportunity to play MH3U demo and really liked it.  I need a game that can last me a long time that I can keep going back to and I think MH3U might be that game.  BlazBlue: CS2 and Tetris 3DS are okay in that category, but I guess I want more of an Action-RPG sort of game for that and Heroes of Ruin had lost its flame after one completion.  Besides that, there's games like Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires (PS3), Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm (PC), Pandora's Tower (Wii) and Project X Zone (3DS) coming out this year.  Sure, I want to play more games this year; however, I want to spend less money than I did last year buying games.

On an ending note, I finished watching Season 2 of K-On and really enjoyed it a lot.  The last official episode made me cry.  A lot of the songs in season 2 were boring and forgettable unfortunately, but one song really stood out:

With K-On season 2 done, I went back to Sword Art Online...or so I say.  I have yet to actually watch a single episode ever since I finished K-On, possibly because of I how busy I got with working on that song on Camera Obscura.  Animé hasn't been my forté, but it's something I still try to follow and watch when I can.  I think it's really good for my mental state of mind since it helps me relax and makes me happy.  Still, I gotta be pumped up for work in the next few months.