The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[NeuralStunner]

Oh man, it barely resembles spring here. Was seeing snowflakes on the way to work this afternoon.

And check it out, GOG has started their spring sale, and they're doing their lootboxes mystery game boxes again.

[Shadelight]

Amid Evil is in early access now. I didn't really care for the look of Dusk, but I love this.

[NeuralStunner]

I'm definitely interested. I think these guys know what they're doing.

Also, I've done another playthrough of Dark Messiah. Playing on Hard, even with the mod that keeps it from increasing enemy hitpoints, is just what it says. I never used the Sanctuary spell in other playthroughs, but this really demonstrates the value of it.

[Captain J]

Splendido! Looks really shiny and magical even more than review video of ICARUS. Hope they can bring up some more fancy gloom effects and magic sparkles!

[Oberron]

Okay, I'm going to rip a ton of PS1 stuff as of now. By request of someone, I'm going to rip the sounds of Parasite Eve, since PSound is quite useful for such things. Yes, this may include the gun sounds.

[SiMpLeToNiUm]

It's called Lo-fi hip hop, and it's really chill. Sometimes jazzy elements mixed in with a grainy, low-fidelity (hence the name) background noise.

Here's a good example: Look - Knowmadic

There's also some cool streams on youtube, specifically designed for studying and such: lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to

You can find this stuff on Spotify as well.

[NeuralStunner]

Okay, I'm going to rip a ton of PS1 stuff as of now. By request of someone, I'm going to rip the sounds of Parasite Eve, since PSound is quite useful for such things. Yes, this may include the gun sounds.

Did PS1 titles use standard formats for everything? I know the N64 sound system was pretty standard at the time.

I kind of miss those days. Just getting a soundtrack from a PS2/GC/etc. disk can be a crapshoot. Newer consoles are so close to PCs that they have the same selection of software kits, one can only hope a game is built with something that doesn't use a proprietary format. (TimeSplitters 3 was about the easiest I've ever seen, all the music and cutscene audio is in OGG vorbis on the disk. God Hand was slightly more complicated, but oddly a ton of players seem to support ADX once the files are decrypted - the has for that is floating around.)

The GameBoy Advance sound system seems like it would only have one possible format, but while most everything uses it, a few special snowflakes use something different that isn't supported by rippers & players. The Lord of the Rings titles are a good example - A shame, because the music is really good. (The only one I've seen has been The Third Age, and I believe that had to be converted manually to GSF.)

Also MP3 "rips" are garbage. If I can't listen to a seamless loop of one track for 15 minutes, it's no use to me.

[Gez]

I kind of miss those days. Just getting a soundtrack from a PS2/GC/etc. disk can be a crapshoot. Newer consoles are so close to PCs that they have the same selection of software kits, one can only hope a game is built with something that doesn't use a proprietary format.

For Microsoft consoles, the development tools are designed to strongly encourage you to use Microsoft's proprietary formats, such as XMA for audio.

[NeuralStunner]

For Microsoft consoles, the development tools are designed to strongly encourage you to use Microsoft's proprietary formats, such as XMA for audio.

MS has practically always been that way.

Speaking of ripping: I found a music rip from Fire Emblem Awakening. One of the cool things about some of the map tracks is that they blend between a normal and in-battle version ingame. I thought the alt versions were missing from the rip. Then I realized the ones I didn't have alt tracks for sounded weird... Then I guessed (correctly) that they're 4-track files. A bit of fussing with a disk writer and Audacity has me on the way to making a complete music pack.

(Unfortunately the playable copies will have to be in vorbis because vgmstream doesn't appear to have a loop feature for FLAC. Even though it supports vorbiscomment just fine.)

[Oberron]

PS1 uses a ton of sound formats. .BIN is for games like Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and WRC Arcade, .CDB is for Galerians (which uses sample-based music) and (maybe) Incredible Crisis. Sound playback is either: 8khz to CD-quality 44khz. Apparently, some games like Hybrid use MIDIs. Even the horrible Crow: City of Angels uses MIDIs as well. Both aforementioned games use music utilized by the sound chip.

[TheFerries]

Man AMID EVIL is such a big improvement in comparison to DUSK if you ask me, specially on the level design, the weapons are really cool too

Something I didnt notice is how much nicer to look at the level design is, some of DUSKs levels looked really blocky and and it had high amounts of brown or red, AMID EVIL on the other hand is really goddamn pretty to look at and boy there are a lot of colors in the screens, without going too overboard for the most of parts.

[Scripten]

Man AMID EVIL is such a big improvement in comparison to DUSK if you ask me, specially on the level design, the weapons are really cool too

Something I didnt notice is how much nicer to look at the level design is, some of DUSKs levels looked really blocky and and it had high amounts of brown or red, AMID EVIL on the other hand is really goddamn pretty to look at and boy there are a lot of colors in the screens, without going too overboard for the most of parts.

This bodes well. I thought DUSK was fantastic. More and better games of its ilk are only good things.

[Bigger C]

I saw Two Best Friends Play take a go at it and the common grunt enemies seem REALLY aggressive. Do they seem OP to anyone, or is it just a matter of gitting gud?

[Shadelight]

They are pretty aggressive, yeah. But there's usually plenty of space to circle strafe them so it's not too much of an issue.

[Bigger C]

Noted, I love Dusk so I'll check it out.

(Also, I don't get why people are so harsh on Dusk when STRAFE is arguably far, far worse and a much less adequate inheritor to the retro-FPS throne, though I think it's improved since launch.)