MALADROITHIM'S PROFILE

author=iamnot link=topic=788.msg11042#msg11042 date=1206502318
Yea, I have only been once, to Czech Republic. It is beautiful there.

Also I hear that you can trade a pair of designer jeans for a car.

You should split up Bands, Groups (string quartets or jazz bands), composers, and songwriters so that you have a month's worth of good top-10 topics and not just one week. Seriously man.

So I'll just list my favorite bands and hope that like composers come next week or something. This might be tough because I always follow songwriters more diligently than bands but:

10. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - I think of these guys as a band rather than Tom Petty as a songwriter (I think the label views them this way too and that Tom Petty albums are not the same as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums). Anyway, it's pretty unremarkable music but it's so catchy that I can't deny it isn't some of the best music ever.

9. Beatles - I think we all know why the Beatles are an important band. Some people think they are overrated but I have never met anyone who does not like them at least a little bit (unless of course you discuss people who haven't really heard their music).

8. The Doors - I think the Jim Morrison is sort of an elevated, god-like and stupidly overblown fake tragic hero and that really pisses me off. People claim that he never wanted to be a famous musician? Yeah right. He could have always stopped touring, you know. Anyway, the Doors are a brilliant group with incredibly well-written music. The keyboard parts are seriously awesome. I think it's odd that people always talk about Pink Floyd when discussing keyboards in rock music, because in my opinion the Doors had a much more clever and probably more impactful use of them. Also, the Doors didn't have a bassist which is awesome.

7. Death Cab for Cutie - Millions of middle school girls agree that Death Cab for Cutie is the best band in the world. I love these guys so much. Their latest album from a year or two ago is pretty awful but they have a solid discography behind them.

6. Coldplay - Another band like Death Cab that actually gets worse with every album. However, they started out incredibly strong, and their downhill decline has been very slight, so they keep putting out awesome music. Their strong jazz influences which were what set them apart continue to be stripped from their music as they get more popular but man they're still pretty awesome.

5. The Flaming Lips - Another group frequently written off as a novelty band. However, their songwriting is astonishingly good. Also, they have the best stage show I've ever seen. Unlike the previous two bands, the Lips started out pretty terrible (like 30 years ago!) and continue to get better and better as they get more popular. I particularly like their newest album.

4. Muse - These guys are basically a crappier and more goth version of Radiohead but that's fine by me! They really only have brilliant album (Absolution), but it's such a good album that I continue to have faith that maybe they'll do something just as awesome again someday. Absolution is probably my favorite rock album ever written.

3. The Strokes - It's weird to hear the strain between intentionally bad audio production, country riffs, punk rock power chords, and a sort of garage-rock mentality, but it all comes together beautifully. I don't think The Strokes get enough attention as being good at really academic music (like Radiohead or Coheed and Cambria do) because their music is subtle and minimalistic rather than in-your-face-million-riffs-per-second, but I guess that's fine by me. The next time you listen to The Strokes, try to pay attention to how the rhythm guitar and the lead guitar lines weave in and out. It's as delicate as choral music -- this is music written by people who know good music. Every Strokes album is better than the last and I can't wait to see what their next album will be like.

2. Styx - They are probably my personal favorite band. Ridiculous in exactly all of the very best ways. Their music is the kind of music that makes you feel nostalgic about things that have bever happened even the first time you hear it. Dennis DeYoung has the most awesome and most annoying singing voice I've ever heard. However, I will be the first to admit that a full 2/3 of Styx's music is completely 100% unlistenable. I recommend that you stick with their Greatest Hits releases and their singles because their albums can get prety bad. Trivia: When Styx broke up once and for all somewhere around 1990, the rest of the band sued the frontmand, Dennis DeYoung, for the rights to the music (they all hate him and want him to die). This is ridiculous becase DeYoung wrote all but a tiny handful of songs and especially wrote all of their huge hits and the band might as well have been called Dennis DeYoung and the Styx. However, since his lawyers were not as slimy as the other band members', he lost, and now does not own the rights to the music that he wrote. The other band members continue to tour under the name Styx and earn all money off of royalty sales, while Dennis DeYoung, who wrote all the music, has to tour with a cover band and explain to the audience that he wrote the music but that he cannot claim to have been a part of Styx.

1. Radiohead - Regardless of what you think of the band, history will look back at Radiohead as the defining rock group of the beginning of the 21st century. Their influence on what happens not only artistically in the world of music but also their influence on the business of music is enormous. Not only that, but they are probably the very best rock band in the world.

author=Shmeckie link=topic=810.msg11062#msg11062 date=1206550210
I could swear he posted on some forum some time back, just saying that he was working on it, and he's moving it to XP... Maybe I'm going crazy...?

It was a joke.

author=iamnot link=topic=788.msg11003#msg11003 date=1206434263
I would love to just travel the world, and help people whom I find.

Actually I think the profession you are describing is RPG Protagonist.

author=kentona link=topic=578.msg10843#msg10843 date=1206111866
I say screw the naysayers and make random battles!

Actually if you sit down and think about it random battles are bad game design on a very fundamental level. They were an invention of memory restrictions and absolutely nothing else. Even if you look at early pen and paper games like D&D you'll find that encounters with enemies are something with design surrounding them; no DM would randomly throw batches of orcs at the player without giving the player some advance warning or giving the player some alternative means of maneuvering around the encounter if they so chose. With random battles you have no design whatsoever and you are functionally dividing the game into two separate game types without any transition between them. By implementing some sort of event that occurs between the exploration phase and the battle phase you are unifying your game design and making a more cohesive and fundamentally better game experience (the most basic form is by putting enemy avatars on the map and letting you run around them or whatever). If you do not implement such features you are asking the player to make jarring transitions between two games that are completely different. It's like playing a round of Tetris and then playing a round of Street Fighter and then going back to Tetris.

Just saying.