MALADROITHIM'S PROFILE

Michael Jackson's birthday is today, August 29, 2007. He is now 49 years old!

We should take this opportunity to discuss the disenfranchised King of Pop. Is anyone here at rpgmaker.net a fan? I know I certainly am -- but as far as I see it, Jackson's career ended once he stopped being black and stopped doing music with jazz composer Quincy Jones.

My favorite Michael Jackson tune is definitely P.Y.T., second to Billy Jean. What is your favorite Jackson tune -- that is, if you like him at all?

And yes, I am 100% serious that I actually DO like Michael Jackson a lot.

Koichi Sugiyama is the best! He does music for Dragon Quest, and I'm firmly of the belief that anyone who doesn't love his music probably doesn't know much about music or legitimately hates orchestras. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I guess! Hint: it isn't Classical. I don't blame people for not liking Dragon Quest music, though, because it just isn't the same without a live orchestra (pretty bland, in fact).

I also like the Xenosaga 3 soundtrack a lot, but I'm not particularly a fan of the composer. It's one of my favorite videogame soundtracks. I think she got lucky with that one. The boss battle themes are good in particular, as is the music for the final dungeon. It's too bad the first two games in the series sucked so much, because Xenosaga 3 is pretty good and nobody played it.

Also, Moonlit Shadow, released only in Japan for PS2, and with a soundtrack that Mitsuda contibuted to, is awesome. It's smooth jazz and hip-hop the whole way through and is deliciously cheesy.

In general, I don't like videogame music very much! I'm in love with the *idea* of video game music, but after turning 19 or so, I realized that I listened to videogame music because I liked videogames and not because it was good music. There's a rare game with really good music here or there, and those games almost always come from Japan. Sega CD had particularly good luck with the music. The only US game with good music I can think of is GRAW 2, and I *think* it was licensed anyway. I certainly haven't been consistently impressed with the work of any video game composers in particular, regardless of whether you're talking about Jeremy Soule (who is a complete joke), Uematsu, Kajuira, Sakimoto, Mitsuda, or anyone else that everyone always talks about.

author=rcholbert link=topic=201.msg2853#msg2853 date=1188243130
Totally. Unfortunately almost all amateur developers fall into this rut. Even you maladroit, though we love you anyways.

Example: Brickroad likes dungeons and combat, so he focused his game around that. He stuck with the RTP graphics and stock music, deeming them efficient enough. He failed to see how the RTP aspects of his game would be negatively viewed and would undermine his efforts in the dungeon realm. Thusly, most didn't play Kinetic Cipher because it looked the same as Don Adventure's from way back when and they went to games that looked like they had more effort put into them. It's unfortunate, but you have to try to make your game for everyone unless you like being relegated to niche roles or even worse: obscurity.

Well, part of the fun is in realizing your very specific creative vision. If you don't have a financial bottom line breathing down your throat or an investment to recoup, you have relative freedom to make your game as bizarre and specific as you want -- I did that with my game, and you didn't like it, but I was exceptionally proud of it at the time and quite a lot of people enjoyed it. I would argue until the end of time that, when I made my game, I made my game for exactly who I wanted to, and that unfortunately, some people did not fall into my target audience.

Brickroad is a fairly good example, because his game was brilliant, but he had hundreds of downloads and not thousands. Nobody can ever dispute the quality of his game, unless of course, they did not play it because it had stock (though very competently-used) graphics. There's much more to a game than screenshots, though, and part of it is how you present it.

On GW's forums, which is the only place I recall Brickroad pimping his game, he presented it as a joke -- he showed the worst screens he could come up with accompanied by captions like "LOL testplay and debugwalk to solve this puzzle" instead of "Search for dozens of cleverly-hidden secret paths!" At no point did Brickroad present his game as a throwback to The Adventures of Lolo or Lufia II and that the puzzles were brilliant, nor did he tell anyone that every single battle as a careful game of battling debilitating status effects and overcoming sophisticated enemy behaviors. With Brickroad, if you weren't in on the joke, you had no idea what was inside, and I'd say that was much more important to his perceived lack of success than his stock graphics (most of the game used rips, anyway, and he could have taken screenshots of those scenarios). His friends played and loved it, but they were the only people he was willing to admit to that it was a good game.

You can also point at Kentona's new game, and argue that it looks terrible by conventional RPGMaker community analysis, but it's popular and a lot of people are very interested. This is because he advertises its features and tells players that it is an intentional throwback to old-school games with a lot of clever special gameplay systems. If his topic had looked more like Brickroad's, perhaps nobody would have played it, because his goal might not have been immediately apparent.

Yeah, if you are going to upgrade your PC for Fallout 3 and Bioshock, you 100% want a 360 over a new PC. PC gaming is a pain in the ass, and compared to the 360 library, the PC library just can't compete. Most big-ticket PC games end up on 360, so you won't miss out on much.