The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

as in "help, i can't listen to this fucking music on repeat anymore because it's like a midi version of dragonforce and makes me pray for death."

my wife is monopolizing the ps2 (our dvd player) and i felt like playing a bit of sotn so i got an emulator running and it plays pretty nice (pSX). is there a way to re-rip my copy from disc to kill the music? i'd like to listen to something good but obviously don't know enough to get there.

sadly, SOTN has no individual volume controls that i can find. almost like they knew how fucked up it was.
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[Shapermc]

I don't know what to say because I've played it on ePSXe and had no problems with the audio. Well, after I got everything situated which took a lot of futzing with it.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Scratchmonkey]

I think the only "problem" he's having is with the relative quality of the soundtrack, which is to say, is there any way for him to turn it off because he thinks it blows chunks?

[JasonMoses]

Couldn't you just, y'know, play the game muted or something?

I'm not too sure how you could not enjoy the music while enjoying the game at the same time. I would think that not enjoying one would preclude the other. I mean, I've never head anyone say they didn't really enjoy SOTN's music, so I guess I'm impressed that you've managed to pull out another interesting new opinion that I've never heard before. That's what the internet's for, I hear.

[Lestrade]

I...

nevermind. :-/

[seryogin]

That's not cool, Mike.

On the other hand, I'd like to meet you for a drink in grassroots one of these nights. I work for neocons now and I'm pretty sure you'll appreciate the hearty discussion that should result.

Also, I can't get your wonderful coinage "Japanese supremacist" out of my mind, because I think that describes me too well.
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[dhex]

dude, drop me a line about what's good for you this week. everything but monday is fly.

[JasonMoses]

I'm just wondering how you could possibly think SOTN had shitty music if you've, I dunno, played video games before. Maybe that's the entire point!

[dhex]

i may be misunderstanding here, but let me explain: the music is bad and hurts to listen to and makes me sad inside. like peaches or the yeah yeah yeahs.

in the first castle, you're in the colliseum, and it's playing weather channel music. (i.e. in the us there's a channel called the weather channel that does nothing but weather. all the music is "smooth lite jazz" - the soundtrack to an insurance salesman weeping alone in a hotel room, his sobs being choked by the barrel of the gun in his mouth...)

so they decide to spice up the level by giving you some "muy caliente" smooth lite latin jazz. which is hilarious and bodes well for my lyrical toolkit because now i can add "muy caliente" to my "eat a dick" song and turn it into a call and response thing.

muy caliente!
eat a dick!
?tocas muchos discos?
eat a dick!
?donde esta luis?
eat a dick!

etc.

i accept that badness is part of the package; i would just rather play to good music if there was such a chance.
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[Mister Toups]

Man, you're crazy, SotN has an amazing soundtrack. I mean yes, it's cheesy, but the whole game is cheesy. And there are some pretty amazing compositions (thinking mostly of the marble gallery and the alchemy laboratory), as well as some awesome cheese-metal. We used to call the Clock Tower level "80's rock land" because of the awesome wailing guitars.

The production hasn't aged perfectly, but, well, that's because it was made in the mid-90's. Still, I don't know how you can't enjoy the soundtrack.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[JasonMoses]

Yeah, I seriously don't see how you can't love the music in the coliseum. It's fairly well-produced fusion that you listen to while slashing kung-fu hobos and picking up half-open pizza boxes. It's like, you write one paragraph that is supposed to indicate your reasons for disliking the music, while I could write the same thing and end it with "and that's why it's awesome" and be completely sincere.

It's pretty interesting, I think.

[Scratchmonkey]

It is important to remember when talking about music with dhex that he thinks that say, the Ramones are completely awful*. Seriously, half the stuff that I listen to he's honestly shocked that I could in any way find palatable. And then the other half overlaps. It's pretty weird.

(Although to be fair, I don't think that SotN has a particular great soundtrack either. I also find the vast majority of "good" videogame music, especially after the 8-bit generation, to be pretty boring.)

* - Musically, this is pretty much the case. However, that's when you get into the thing where Joe Satriani is an objectively better musican than pretty much everybody else, even though the thought of actually owning one of his albums makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

[JasonMoses]

Opinions are pretty rad. Typing about them on the internet is pretty cool too. I don't like the ramones and really enjoy Joe Satriani by the way. The test of this was when I had a bunch of both on an ipod I was borrowing from a friend for a few months, and found myself skipping every ramones song that came up. Their music is just terrifyingly homogenous. I couldn't stand it. I like the idea, though.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Not caring if dhex hates the music ITT
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[Scratchmonkey]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

In theory, there should be an option to disable music in the emulator and keep the SFX enabled.
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[Scratchmonkey]

Yeah, the audio options in pSX are pretty minimal, there's not really any options to turn it off. (There's no "music" or "SFX" distinctions, the only thing I've seen in PSX emulators is "audio" and "XA audio". I have no idea if that difference lines up with music and SFX, in any case, it's a moot point because pSX doesn't offer you the option of turning one or the other off (although ePSXe does).)

If you have some way to take ISOs apart and then put them back together, you could just take the big music files out; that might just mess the whole thing up if there's some sort of checksum -- I don't know because I've never really done any PSX emulation before.

[JasonMoses]

[Scratchmonkey]

Some researching seems to indicate that "XA sound" means sound played during videos, so if you disable it, that means you won't get sound in any movies that were embedded in the game, so that wouldn't really solve your problem.

I think.

Time for bed.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dhex]

i did a bit more reading and i think i will give re-ripping sotn a shot, and just skipping the music data. of course, it might rip without the sound fx as well, which would be a shame.

and guys, i've beaten this game five times - five fucking times - and am familiar enough with the soundtrack. it's just...it would be nice to be able to turn this shit off. it's a great game, but just think about how much better it would be with "new jack hustler" playing in the background!

i disable the music in a lot of games, too, or at least when possible. it would be great if there were more options to disable voice acting in modern titles as well.

and i think it's pretty mathematically certain that the ramones suck beyond space and time. if you have to listen to musically untalented types, go buy some crass.
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[SuperWes]

Hey dhex. You know if you buy a 360 there's an option to play your own music in any game by streaming it directly from your computer, ripping it to the system's hard drive, or plugging in your iPod. This feature should also be in SOTN, which comes out on Wednesday as a downloadable game for $10. Devs are forced to put their music on a certain channel, which can be overwritten by media player shit at any time. It even knows to pause your music during cutscenes and resume when it's over.

Froth in the knowledge that the world will be playing SOTN again for the first time on Wednesday.

-Wes
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[Shapermc]

I just realized that I could play SotN with the greatest Castlevania mixed soundtrack ever.

Nice.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dmauro]

The thing about the SotN soundtrack is that it's mostly really good, but the areas you spend most of your time in have the bad music. My favorite part of the game is the area with all the giant flying ghost skulls because I can just hang out there killing skulls and listening to Tragic Prince. The library is also nice because the Wood Carving Partita is really good, but I hate those damn books.

[dongle]

[Persona-sama]