Savaged Regime

I always had a good guess that it was absurd degrees of duplicate assets that was mainly responsible for the bloated file size of modern games, rather than just blaming it on fidelity. To see just how much is saved from eschewing this industry practice is quite telling.

The reason why the date of Geese's death in the Fatal Fury 1 ending is always in the early 1900s is not due to some typical localization screwup. It is based on the Neo Geo BIOS clock which wraps back to 1900 after the turn of the century. Neo Geo has the dreaded Y2K bug.

As is tradition with the pop culture influencing Gen X developers in the 90s, the internal video filename for the ion cannon FMV in Command & Conquer is simply called "akira.vqa"

The original arcade cabinet uses simple discrete analog synths for each sound effect, which is an insanely cool pre-digital solution. You could likely make some digital analog emulation to reproduce the audio since the schematics are in the manual which has been archived.

Magical Girl Slasher feels like an untapped niche

Certified HUH moment

After the first 5 years or so, seasoned Japanese devs converged around 2 main aesthetics that worked best on NES: Cutesy chibi characters with bright colors and room for facial expression, or grimdark as fuck noir shadowed graphics with more realistically proportioned faceless characters.

The Quake 1 axe sound is just the Metal Hit sound from Korg M1, and the signature grenade bounce is in fact the same sound nearly 2 octaves lower.

I find the first wave of GB titles to be fascinating when devs were still feeling out the hardware and those games feel markedly different from later ones. I kinda preferred it when they aimed for smaller graphics with more screen estate instead of the cramped size with large sprites later on.

My mind still defaults to assuming this was a decision driven by some technical issue they were having, since it was still the early days of the Game Boy and people weren't experienced with the architecture yet.

I've always assumed the fireball works the way it does in Super Mario Land because they gave up programming any semblance of gravity physics for them. No idea if that was the actual reason or if there's an explicit design reason for it.

Funny part is how an interview with the JP composers decades later revealed they didn't even know the music had been replaced until the interviewer told them, and they were pretty pissed since they put so much effort into it and had it done at one of the most prestigious production studios in Japan.

Late decision by management/marketing who had also just set up a multimedia studio at SoA. Likely also influenced by dance music being largely ostracized in the US mainstream at the time, and SoA were a lot more branding-conscious about how they wanted to portray Sonic.

Trying to wrap my head around these themes being arranged by Haim Saban.

I always thought this aesthetic was called Kirbytech. The article says Greebles was coined by Lucas during the production of Star Wars, which would be after Jack Kirby started drawing these kinds of elaborate machine embellishments.

This is something FM can do very effectively, but it was kind of a moot advantage when hardly anyone bothered to take advantage of such nuanced programming at the time. Guess it was just not part of the zeitgeist. I always make sure to leverage this for more expressive performances.

It can reproduce instruments superficially, but the main bottleneck is the low RAM necessitating very short looped samples with no life or texture to them. There's no room to convey natural decays or swelling, like a sustained guitar gradually settling into a different set of harmonics.

Guess that's true in that there wasn't a robust pipeline from hobbyist computer musician to professional dev. Having computers with integrated sound hardware was an important ingredient in fostering those amateur scenes.

I think it shows an interesting cultural divide between US dev culture with the rest of the world at the time. US composers largely deferred to third party middleware solutions. EU composers were usually coders themselves, and JP was a mix of that and composers relying on sound coders to arrange.

Good example of a GEMS score where a lot of care is taken into the programming and sound design is Demolition Man which uses a lot of different articulation variations for guitars making for much more expressive and dynamic sequencing.

There are better ways of conveying the public stigma for the soundtracks using GEMS than this which is just false. The plain reason is simply that GEMS greatly lowered the barrier of entry for American composers who were largely uninterested in dealing with the technical nitty gritty at the time.

This kind of stuff is exceedingly common in soundtracks where composers are expected to churn out full scores on very short notice. They'll pick their battles on where the brunt of bespoke writing goes.

Sonic CD US Metallic Madness is mostly just riffing on top of this sequence preset from Korg Wavestation

You can probably count on the convenience of youtube embeds with timestamps disappearing.

YouTube video by gen16com gen16.com Acclaim motion capture studio making of

Saw this archived video promoting Acclaim's mocap tech which was apparently pretty ahead of the curve at the time in the mid 90s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGwY...

Not just dungeon design, but also a foundational influence for the level design discipline as a whole.

I dunno if this is the same free pack of drum machine samples I've had forever. I remember the Korg M1 recordings had this slight vibrato to them as if the mod wheel had been stuck while they were sampling them and I thought that was kinda hilarious.

At least they still let you have your legacy plugin. When I tried to reinstall Steinberg Padshop which I bought many years ago, I spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn't fetch my license from their awful kafka-esque DRM apps and it ultimately led me to boycott all of Steinberg.

It's definitely by design because they treat the plugin itself as just another venue for selling you more shit.

Nothing makes me not want to support an audio company quite like having a plugin UX acting like a glorified storefront deceiving you by presenting presets (alongside the ones you actually own) you don't even have full access to. There's so much annoying friction like this in Addictive Drums 2.