The VocaFarre!!-Act 0- event was streamed live on Nico Nico from the NicoFarre live hall in Roppongi, Tokyo this afternoon. It served as a press event to introduce some new Yamaha-created characters to the Vocaloid v3 software suite, as well as a demonstration of the already-released core Vocaloid v3 software (they did a quick demonstration of Cutie Honey's OP). Note that the most famous vocaloid v1 (Meiko, Kaito) and v2 (Miku, Rin, Len, Luka) characters were all Crypton Media's creations, not Yamaha's. While IA isn't exactly one of those new characters introduced today, I think it was the best voice pack among all the v3 voices so far.
To me, Creative has always been on the forefront of the mp3 player market in terms of features. This time is no different. Fresh from its recently successful and feature-packed Zen mp3 player, Creative has managed to pack even more features into the Zen X-Fi. As its name suggests, integrated X-Fi technology powers this music and video player. Additionally, it is WiFi enabled, allowing you to sync your music wirelessly and even instant message your friends with the built-in Yahoo and MSN messenger. Other features include: - available in 8GB (w/o WiFi), 16GB and 32GB - bundled premium in-ear earphones (EP-830) - SD card slot - radio - MP3, WMA, AAC (.m4a), WAV (ADPCM), Audible 4, MJPEG, WMV9, MPED4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD support - organiser
As some of my friends know, I am quite a huge fan of Creative's X-Fi technology. Yes, it might be just a glorified upscaler, but its a GREAT upscaler. I even own a Xmod. So it was with great anticipation that I put on the Creative Aurvana DJ headphones and pressed play...... Well, it was simply underwhelming. To be sure, I went to the X-Fi settings and switched them on and off while listening out for any difference. Not much changed, so I concluded that the X-Fi technology in it isn't that good. However, the music sounded like it was coming out of a $30 to $50 pair of headphones instead of this pair of $169 Aurvana DJ. Was there something wrong with my ears? Perhaps I was too used to the X-Fied music I listen to regularly at home? Just 3 steps away was a demo station set up with a Zen player, a set of 2.0 speakers, and Xmod. Woooaaaah! That pair of 10cm high speakers instantly produced sounds that felt powerful and full of flavour! So I wasn't wrong. X-Fi technology is still going strong, but the Zen X-Fi simply doesn't deserve to carry its name.
Regarding its other main new feature, WiFi, I think it is either a) being under-utilised, or b) an unecessary feature. For option A, it could have an integrated web browser to further sweeten the deal. For option B, I think these features are necessary as this is supposed to be a MUSIC/VIDEO player, why use it as an instant messenger? And is there really a need to wirelessly sync? A simple USB would suffice. However you view it though, points should be given to Creative for trying to shake things up a little in the mp3 player market.
Maybe I was having hearing problems that day. Maybe they were actually really great! I don't know for sure. But these are just my first impressions and I could have been harbouring too much expectations for it. I'd advise you to go down and take a listen (with the rest of your own audio gear) to decide for yourself before you make any mp3 player purchase.
PLAY! was performed here in Singapore as part of the Singapore Arts Festival, by the Singapore Festival Orchestra, the Vocal Consort, and the NUS choir. As a bonus, Streets of Rage composer Yuzo Koshiro came down to DJ some of his works before the concert. If that wasn't enough, SEGA composer Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (Shenmue, Virtual Fighter 2) performed Daytona USA's 'Let's Go Away' on the piano during the concert. Anyway, here's my personal take on the event:
From http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01945/esplanade.html
From 6.45pm to 7.15pm, lucky bystanders at the Esplanade's Concourse were treated to the techno beats of Streets of Rage mixed by DJ/Composer/Really-cool-guy Yuzo Koshiro. Didn't get a photo of him performing though as I arrived a minute or so before he finished (and was busy taking in the sounds, atmosphere and sight of little children and otakus enjoying the music). He wasn't exactly DJ-ing on the spot. The music and visuals were prepared way in advance and all he did was probably tweak the volume, bass and treble once in a while. The music and visualizations were good though.
I was half expecting a crowd of nerds in specs, polo tees and backpacks, but the crowd I saw was one of well-dressed 19 - 30 year old Singaporeans (slightly more guys though). That was before I went into the concert hall. Once in there, I saw families with kids and some ah-beng gamers. Where are the nerds? Well, they came late. Streaming in one by one, most of them sat by their lonesome selves while others traveled in packs. Ah well. Expected. Not that I have anything against them. I'm probably 80% nerd myself just by being a computing student and reading kotaku.com on a regular basis. Anyway, on to the show!
The concert hall
Maestro Arnie Roth (also the MC for tonight) introduces himself and the SFO. Concert begins with a short Fanfare composed by Nobou Uematsu specially for PLAY!. The SFO seemed to struggle with this piece (and the trumpets (I think) were quite bad).
Next up was a Super Mario Bros. suite. It was a fun piece, but the arrangement wasn't very good. The problem with most retro pieces for the night was that its just a string of many short tunes, many of which could not mix well together. The audience had a fun time looking at the visuals and even giggled when the cute underwater theme started, so it ended up pretty much OK.
Shenmue was next. Composer Takenobu Mitsuyoshi was here to attend the concert so he stood up and waved ecstatically to the audience when the MC announced his presence. I haven't played Shenmue before or even heard any of its music. Wasn't very interested in the game in the first place. The music turned out to be quite good though and it seems that at this point the SFO has just started to warm up...
Yet-to-be-released Xbox 360 game by Mistwalker, Lost Odyssey, was up next. The first of many Nobou-san's video game music for tonight. And we get to hear the choir sing. The choir didn't have to sing much though, probably just a warm up for them. The visuals fit the piece nicely and overall it was good. SFO seems to be done with their warm up...
Ah. Sonic. Good stuff. Better than Mario, though it did suffer the same problems. A giggle from the nerds this time when Robotnik's theme started playing.
Metal Gear Solid. Easily one of my most anticipated pieces for that night. The arrangement wasn't very good though. Yes it felt "grand", but it was pretty flat all the way and didn't really have much of a climax. Should have been a lot better.
Second of Nobou-san's work for tonight. Xbox 360 RPG, Blue Dragon, made by the same team from Mistwalker (Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobou Uematsu) except with Dragonball's Akira Toriyama instead of Slam Dunk's Takehiko Inoue. Ew. Anyway, the music was quite good. Appropriately epic and playful at the same time.
The first SquareEnix piece in the list. One word. FANTASTIC. When they started playing 'Passion' at the 2nd half, I grinned and thought "This is what I'm here for. True video game music heaven." The orchestra managed to bring out the emotions of... well... passion. The SFO was at its peak. Or so I thought.
The SFO didn't hold back for this next piece. Nor did the choir. Final Fantasy VI's Dancing Mad. SFO showed off some seriously mad pipe organ skills. This dark, epic and simply mad piece sent audiences into a frenzy. Loudest applause so far.
Intermission: Quick stop at the toilet (longer queue at the male toilet than the female toilet) and off to see the merchandises for sale. Bought a More Friends CD (S$40) and a PLAY! t-shirt (S$30). Was tempted to get the S$30 official concert program for no reason. They also had PLAY! and More Friends posters. The More Friends poster was signed! But what's the point of getting a More Friends poster at a PLAY! concert? It was tempting though...
(When I went back to my seat in the hall after intermission, I heard a pipe organ playing the Final Fantasy score. =D I hope they play it as an encore!)
After the intermission, composer Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (from SEGA) came out with a Sonic soft toy to play a rendition of Daytona USA's 'Let's Go Away' on the piano. A really fun performance to watch. The audience laughed as scenes from Daytona played on the screens while Takenobu-san belted out off-key cries of "Daytona!!!" in the Engrish way.
The tone became serious again as the SFO started playing a suite from The Elder Scrolls. The composer, Jeremy Soule, is one of my favourite MMORPG/RPG music composers. His style lends a hand in making the scores sound very grand and epic, very appropriate for the grand and epic RPGs these scores were written for. Starting to sound like a normal orchestral concert now.
Then came along the Chrono series. Mad applause from the otaku crowd. Most of the audience, including me, didn't know what we were in for. I've heard that this piece is often a fan favourite at concerts and I've played around 4 hours worth of Chrono Trigger. Nice midi music. But it wasn't as memorable as the Final Fantasy tunes. However, my opinion changed when I heard the orchestra play. This piece was purrrrfect for an orchestra! The beautiful Oboe and Flute solo lend a nice touch to the piece. Kinda like the cherry on top of a very delicious cake.
"Next up is one of my favourite pieces" announces Maestro Arnie Roth. World of Warcraft was quite good, although not as good as some of Jeremy Soule's works. Composer Jason Hayes did do a good job of blending 'Epic' and 'Fantasy' into one though, and the arrangement was good too.
Next up was one of MY favourite pieces. HALO! Brought to this world by Composer/Heavy Smoker Martin O'Donnell (aka Marty) and arranged by Maestro Arnie Roth himself, Halo's main theme did not disappoint. It didn't surprise though. Maybe I already had high expectations?
The visuals for the next piece satisfied all those with a fetish for hot vampire guys (yes, you). Castlevania was pleasantly good considering that I thought my interest level would dip between Halo and One Winged Angel.
"It's Zelda time!" proclaimed Arnie. Crowd cheered. Wasn't as loud as Chrono though. Pretty nice tunes. Especially the main part. Everything else was a little bland though.
It had to come eventually. No video game concert is without the Nobou-classic One Winged Angel. Before that, a short video message from Nobou-san himself. You could hear all the fanboys chatter in excitement, shock, awe, whatever. SFO began playing. I think they had practiced this piece the most as they really showed confidence in the way they played. Maybe over-confidence. They were playing it too fast. That was the only flaw though. Everything else was perfect.
"Encore! Encore!" some crazy fangirls (or ladies wanting their money's worth) shouted. So Arnie came back on stage. According to him, local game website GameAxis conducted a poll to see what we would like to hear as the encore piece. Shinobi won the poll. WTH. Ok, so maybe it was a good game with a famous level of difficulty, but that doesn't mean it would make good music! The piece was the typical oriental score, uninspiring and uninteresting. Not going to comment more about it.
People shouted encore again. Apparently some of the audience shared my dissatisfaction for the previous encore piece. Was there room for more? Are they going to play Final Fantasy's main theme??? Arnie Roth came out and prepared to conduct the 2nd encore. It's One Winged Angel again. Crowded cheered. Ah well. Not a bad ending.
I'm sure for many of you old gamers out there, game music has mostly been in the form of annoying beeps that repeat over and over again as you try, for the umpteenth time, to clear a level.
Well, that was then.
We have since overcome the technological limits of the 8-bit and 16-bit generation. Most games have audio in 5.1 surround sound now to immerse the player in an alternate world. Creative Technologies and their numerous versions of EAX has lent a hand in the evolution of sound quality over the years. Even so, developers still never fail to amaze us with incredibly lousy sound effects and repetitive music that is just plain annoying. The first game that comes to my mind would be Pokemon (my sister is playing Pokemon Diamond on the DS Lite as I type...). The music isn't too bad, but it's kinda repetitive. This is a problem with most RPGs though. It would be inconsistent if a town has many different tunes to it, but a player would start to get irritated if he hears the same tune again as he returns to town for the 1384th time to sell some drops.
Anyway, bad music aside, lets talk about the good ones.
One of the earliest, and most recognizable, game tune would be Mario. The catchy little tunes worked those 8-bit consoles to their limit! The several tunes for each Mario level all became instant classics in the gaming world. No self-respecting video game music concert would be without the "Super Mario Medley". Along with other memorable classics such as Zelda, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy, these tunes set the standard for all game music composers to follow.
Here's a video of Martin Leung, a video game pianist for the Video Games Live series of concerts, performing "Super Mario Medley":
On the PC front, sound cards from Creative Technology made computers a "talking device". Did you know Michael Jackson visited Sim Wong Hoo's Comdex Fall booth in Las Vegas back in 1989 for 30 minutes because he was so captivated by the Sound Blaster card? The Sound Blaster went on to be the De Facto audio card standard, selling 100 million units in 10 years. At that time, it was games like Final Fantasy VII that changed the video game music scene. It wasn't so much about clarity or quality of the audio, it was purely just musical creativity and production quality. Compared to the consoles at that time, music in games for PCs weren't that big a deal. That was because computers could already play close to studio-quality audio. FF7 on the other hand had midi music. However, like its PlayStation counterpart, pieces of compositions like One Winged Angel became classics. It was compositions like these that make people start to feel that video games took music seriously. Unlike the music you hear on the radio and MTV, video game music (along with original movie scores) are like classical music; Timeless pieces of work that retain their popularity for years/decades/centuries. Composer Harry Gregson-Williams primarily composes for Hollywood movies like Shrek and Narnia, but he also composed the opening theme for the Metal Gear Solid series, showing how the production values of video game music is continually going up.
Here's a video of Eminence Symphony Orchestra, a video game symphony, performing Final Fantasy classic "One Winged Angel". This piece is almost always played as a final or encore piece at ANY video game music concert:
Following the birth of better sound cards for the PC and consoles (5.1 surround sound support for the Xbox), game creators were given alot more horsepower in the audio department than they knew what to do with. High quality surround sound audio? Check. So where do we go next from here? There can only be that many 'birds chirping' and 'trees swaying' audio layers. They decided to take in-game music a step further to match Hollywood quality. As you can see, the main difference between movies and games were that games were interactive. Players could speed up or slow down the action depending on whether they wanted to attack head-on or sneak pass enemies. To make the atmospheric music suit the action like a glove, game audio designers programme their music to change on the go. I'm not a music expert nor an ace programmer so I shan't go into the specifics, but basically that means shifting tempos and whatnot to suit whatever action the player throws at the game. One game that makes use of this technology/technique is Halo. The music rises and fades effortlessly as you take out the Convenant horde (not so effortlessly). It was a great game not just for its gameplay, but also for its story and overall atmosphere, undoubtedly bolstered by a fantastic score (and 'interactive music'). In fact, its so popular that 4 million copies of Halo 3 has been pre-ordered in the US ahead of its September 25th release date.
So what have we learned? A good game requires good music. That's for sure.
Here's a video of a group of students performing Halo's theme song for a school talent show, proving once and for all that nerds can be musicians and musicians can be nerds:
And good music requires soundtrack CDs and concerts. That's right. Concerts. Music from the Final Fantasy was ripe for orchestras and choirs, and the fans were aching to hear One Winged Angel performed with a full orchestra, so Dear Friends was born. A series of concerts held in the US from 2004 to 2005 for Final Fantasy fans and it was a great success. It wasn't exactly a world first (Sydney's Eminence Symphony Orchestra started in 2003, with their 1st concert featuring Final Fantasy music), but it was one of the most prolific concert series due to guest appearances by Nobou Uematsu, long-time composer of Final Fantasy music. Here in Singapore, part of Eminence (2 violinists, 1 pianist, 1 guitarist and 1 percussionist) and Yasunori Mitsuda performed at the Victoria Concert Hall on 23 December 2006 to the tunes of various games and anime. This was just an appetizer for what was to come in 2007. As part of the Singapore Arts Festival, PLAY! A Video Game Symphony will be performing to a sold-out crowd on 15 and 16 June at the Esplanade. Just read Net Crawl: The First for links and more details about this concert. Expect the works of Jeremy Soule (The Elder Scrolls), Harry Gregson-Williams (Metal Gear Solid) and Nobou Uematsu (Final Fantasy) in an unforgettable night, produced by the same people who did Dear Friends.
Here's a 6 minute behind-the-scenes look at PLAY!:
I'll be there for the 16 June, 7.30pm show. Can't wait~!
Ok, here's my first review. I hope you find it informative :)
My sis just received her 4GB Zen V Plus today (preordered it and got a $50 voucher which I'm probably gonna spend on i-Trigue speakers). She wasn't home, so I got to play with it for a while :P.
My first impressions: It's tiny and cute! For those of you who don't know, this is Creative's Nano-killer (like that will ever happen). It has FM radio, video and photo playback and line-in capability. It comes in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB capacities. Features-wise, this player is packed. Video playback at 15fps and 128X96 resolution might not seem like much, but the screen is small anyway, so no complains here. Photos load a little slow though (slower than the videos). FM radio reception is relatively clear, but it can't receive Power 98FM from my room for some reason.
On the audio front, it's a pretty solid player. I've read some reviews that say Creative players generally give better bass, but lose to Apple in everything else. I can't help but agree. The bass is great, but everything else isn't really spectacular. Maybe it's just the lousy headphones they provided. Oh well, I won't know till I get something better to test it with.
There are 2 things that I really love about this player: The user-interface and Media Explorer software. My sis' old 1.5GB Muvo2 had a crappy software bundle and a firmware that had problems with Chinese font. The software here is much improved, with synchronization options and "ZenCast" subscription support. The whole Media Explorer interface reminds me of Windows Vista's welcome screen, which is definitely great. So far, I had no problem transferring 1.5GB of music and some videos. Oh, and speaking of which, the bundled software automatically converts your video into a format appropriate for the player (128X96 pixels, 15fps). The "organic” menu is truly a joy to use. Similar to the iPod Nano's (since they copied Creative's idea), I find it simple to navigate and the contextual menu is pretty useful for accessing options that are not displayed.
Now for the complaints. Unless you have really small fingers, you would find the tiny joystick hard to use. Other reviewers criticize about the cheap feel of the joystick, but I think it’s sturdy, NOT cheap. Moreover, this system makes it hard to scroll thru all your songs (as compared to Zen Vision: M's vertical scroll). Although they claim to support avi, divx and mp4 formats, I had problems converting my anime videos (which were mostly avi, divx and mkv) to be stored into the player. There might be something wrong with my codec though. Anyone who has a solution to this please let me know by posting a comment!
Overall, despite its shortcomings, the Creative Zen V Plus is a small, cute, value for money player that seems to be able to do almost everything, albeit with some minor support problems.
Score: 4/5 (I would have given Apple's Nano a 4/5 too FYI)
