It's the same exact song, but the remake of the song is slower and sounds similar to the style in Etrian Odyssey IV. I honestly didn't get anywhere in the first game but loved this theme so much. So when I heard the arrangement for the remake, I fell in love with the song again and have been practicing it on the piano all year. Because of that, I wanted to use it as a practice in the new program. It was quite a challenge since the layout and mechanics of Music Creator 6 feels different from Mixcraft, Ableton Live, FL Studios, Pro Logic, and just about every other Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) I've ever used. Well, I've learned a great deal from recreating the song and will most likely finish it today. I was actually pretty disappointed with the program and VSTs I got with it at first and wanted a refund. The Steinway Piano VST didn't sound like a Steinway, the orchestra strings didn't sound that much better, the guitar VSTs are extremely limited, they keyboard synths were boring and didn't offer much in variation, and the world instruments consisted mostly (if not entirely) of African drums. The only thing that seemed decent were the drum kits (significantly better than what I have) and the bass (also much better than what I have). But after working on the song for a bit and learning how the program worked, I realized a lot of the instruments are better than what I have and expanded the possibilities of what I have to work with. The program is still kind of confusing and the VSTs can't be used on my older program, but at least I have more options now.
Whew, that was quite a rant. Here's the tl;dr version: started 3 music projects, finished 1, got a new music program and worked on 4th project to practice on it.
Another thing that took up a lot of time this month was reorganizing my iPod and deciding what to take out. It's so easy to add new songs in, but so hard to take old songs out. I've been hearing all sorts of interesting and weird music this month now that I think about it. I found out about PrototypeRaptor yesterday when I happened to watch this silly little video with one of his songs in it:
And then a friend of mine shared a music video with me that went viral and sort of enjoyable to listen to and down-right absurd:
There's also the reveal of Mighty No. 9, a project led by Keiji Inafune of Megaman fame who launched a Kickstarter campaign to ask for the community's support and has reached up to 3 Million dollars in funds as of today with 25 hours to go. I really liked the interview they had with music composer Minami Matsumae.
And I definitely liked the documentary prelude they had for Mighty No. 9 and interviewed Keiji Inafune. At one point in the documentary, they asked Inafune "Do you have a personal goal for this project?" He said he had an assortment of goals, but mainly to make everyone happy.
"I don't just want to make users happy; I want the creators to be happy, too.[...]I hope we can reach that point, because there's no worrying about our sales this quarter, or our profits this quarter, or what the shareholders are thinking. If the gamers are happy and we're happy, we've succeeded."
It was an inspirational documentary and I think this project will be very inspirational as well. As I learn more about the game industry, I am saddened and hesitant in what I might be getting into as the Videogame industry isn't too different from other businesses nowadays where profits and business overrules creativity and ambition. I teared up a little when hearing Keiji Inafune talk about his own ambitions.
This is the main theme she composed and produced that was played during the reveal video of the game.
We're not going to get to play it until 2015, but I'm pretty sure it'll be great.
Other than that, I have put Etrian Odyssey IV on hold because it's taking me forever to complete it (and yet I'm about to get Etrian Odyssey Untold tomorrow with Pokémon X/Y approaching, guh...) and so I started up Project X Zone up this month because I've waited all year long for it (pre-ordered it and everything and still didn't play it for 2 months because I've been too busy. To be blunt and straight-forward, Project X Zone is freaking awesome and the best fan-service to fans of gaming could ask for this year. Every time a new character appears and it's one I recognize with their theme playing, I get all excited and nostalgic. Theme songs like this:
and this: OR HOLY SMACKS THIS: I would've pointed out some more obvious ones like the Volcanic Rim Stage of Street Fighter IV, Tekken Tag Tournament Piano Intro, or Devils Never Cry from Devil May Cry, but I listen to those pretty frequently. Some of these themes I haven't heard in years! Seriously though, I think Project x Zone might be Game of the Year for me. The visuals, music, THEIR SIGNATURE QUOTES, the game mechanics, the memories, the challenge, and everything in-between just makes me remember why I loved all these video games I've played in the past. I have a serious problem with that in the past few years where I'm playing a game, I'll ask myself "am I even having fun? Is it worth it to playthrough?" I remember I wrote a post about it last year with the opposite problem: The Problem with Fun Games. I'll leave it at that since this post may never end if I go too far into the topic.
Two other games worth mentioning that I played recently are Krater and PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+. Krater came out last June and I bought it last November, but I never got around to playing it until just last month I convinced a friend to get it when it was $3 so that we could play multiplayer. Sadly, multiplayer was just 3 separate missions from the main game that players could "grind in" essentially.
Krater has had me interested for the past year it's been out, and I got it despite the lower scores that it got in reviews. The music really got me curious and the gameplay looked pretty crazy too. After completing, I can say that it was an unrealized project that had a lot of potential but never reached it and was released prematurely. Krater is a party-based Action-RPG (think Diablo with 3 characters to control, or Dungeon Siege if you've ever played that) that had a lot of great ideas but lack polish, content, and variety. For a game that allowed you to control 3 characters at once, you'd think there would be more classes (there's only 4 classes with a variation for each one), more skills (each class only has 2), and a lot less grinding. There are a lot of side quests, which is pretty cool if you want to keep playing more. I wanted to rush through the game, but it was impossible to. Side quests didn't reward the player with that much money or experience points, and so what I ended up doing was soloing multiplayer missions over and over again. I seriously got sick of staring at bears, wolves, boars and mooses. I could've given up on the game, but for some strange reason, I was very stubborn about finishing the game. And so, I finally completed the game 42 hours into it. I didn't feel like playing it anymore because out of those 42 hours, only about 15 hours was spent playing to progress the story and not grinding/farming for levels/currency. I was hoping I'd feel satisfied completing such a difficult game, but just went "this is stupid" when I finished off the last boss because honestly it wasn't hard, it was just tedious. I can't say I hated the game, but there are some parts of it I really enjoyed. I loved the music, and the whole atmosphere had a kind of fantasy theme behind it despite being a post-apocalyptic Sweden. The only way I'm going back to the game is to help my friend grind through the game so that he can finish it too.
So PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ came out last week and I pre-ordered it a month beforehand to get 8 free DLCs with it.
I've already played through each course at least once and I gotta say it's a lot of fun. I have fond memories of playing Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man with my dad when I was younger and I didn't think they'd be able to change Pac-Man all that much. With the newer Pac-Man, it's similar to classic Pac-Man along with snake where you'll lure a bunch of ghosts to follow you and then chomp them all when you get a power-pellet. The game can get really intense and is a fun arcade-like game to jump back into once in a while.
Last month, I mentioned getting Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F for PS3, but I don't think I had purchased the controller yet. So there's a controller that works alongside with the game and was only sold in Japan. I hounded the Amazon page for it and waited for a price I was willing to spend for it. And then one day, I saw it for $117 (usually people put it up for $160+) and immediately purchased it (after 3 hours of pondering...so maybe not immediately). The problem was that I bought it from a new user on Amazon. After thinking about it for another 3 hours of purchasing it, I decided to purchase another one from a TRUSTED user on Amazon for $119 and asked to cancel the other order. I wasn't feeling too confident about buying for a new user. To my surprise, the seller sent me a message along the lines of "Thank you for purchase, goods will come in mail soon". So I immediately sent another messaging explaining I want to cancel the order and even had a friend find the suitable way to write it in Japanese so that they would understand. And I didn't hear back from the seller and saw that it was shipped out the day after. They responded 5 days later saying "Goods have been sent, send back after you receive". Both order said it would take a month to get here, and so I was pretty irritated with the situation and still am. Amazingly, I got the controller from the TRUSTED user a week after I made the order and have been playing on it the past few weeks while I'm still waiting for the other controller to get here, not knowing if it's the real thing/functional or if it will ever get here. I might actually have to file an order claim or report the user to Amazon if anythings goes wrong with the order (like it already hasn't). In any case, my point in telling this story is to tell you guys this: Buy from trusted users with experience and positive feedback on Amazon. Apparently there has been cases of counterfeit items and orders gone bad.
To end things off for this month's post, Tokyo Game Show was this month and I saw some interesting videos. Lightning Returns - Final Fantasy XIII was the one that stood out for me, right next to Deep Down.
I'm not sure what I want out of October, but I guess I mainly want to continue working on my music projects.
