This is one awesome video, and song! Arizona emcee Random, AKA Mega Ran
is currently working on a project entitled Mega Ran 9 (guess what game
it is about). I suppose this can be considered the first single from
that album. The music video is made by my good friend over at Music Video Mayhem, and he definitely knows how to make an ace VGM video!

The beginning of a new year and we are still doing things the same way, with a late podcast. This one is entitled Letters VS Numbers episode 012: “Science is Mischievous”.
And it most certainly is! This week we talk about every manner of
things, including Street Fighter, caffeine naps, scientific research,
and even Christmas seeing how this podcast was recorded last month! It
has been a while and we hope this gives you a good LvN fix to kick off
the new year! 

Also, as stated in the show, check out this footage from Z. of Hipster, Please! of LvN live! youtube.com/watch?v=-BD3x-tP5go Make it go all youtube viral and all that good stuff!

Oh! Also should mention we have banners for you to help support the show here lettersvsnumbers.blogspot.com/2008/04/banners.html

Listener Emails
We
have a very special email this week from one awesome fan, and also one
sort of confusing spam email this week. We enjoyed one of them! Be sure
to send in any emails you have to lettersvsnumberspodcast AT gmail DOT com so we can read them on air!

Tracks Played this week.
MC Lars & YTCracker – We Have Arrived (featuring K.Flay and the Former Fat Boys) – dglp.digitalgangster.com/
Combat Dave VS Supoerpowerless – Wasting My Time – myspace.com/superpowerless; myspace.com/combatdave
The Grammar Club – Red Cyclone (Vocal Version) – thegrammarclub.com
Jay Tholen – The Whistle Blower – jaytholen.net
Antisoc – Lone Warrior – antisocialrap.com
team.rocket – You, Me, Thunderdome! – myspace.com/teamrocketband
arcadecoma – Mega Man Is My Hero – myspace.com/arcadecoma
Illithid – Rapewood – myspace.com/funkyfreshfro
Metamystiks Incorporated – Warriors (feat. Kal-L) – myspace.com/metamystiksinc
Retro Remix Revue – Super Mario 64 – Dire, Dire Docks – retroremixrevue.com

Websites mentioned this week.
3-Way Split album review – gamemusic4all.blogspot.com/2008/12/3-way-split-album-review.html
8 Bit Instrumental – 8bitinstrumental.com
Hipster, Please! – hipsterplease.com
Nerdapalooza – nerdapalooza.blogspot.com
Pterodactyl Squad – ptesquad.com
Rocket Propelled Radio – rocketpropelledgeeks.com/radio.php
RhymeTorrents dot org – rhymetorrents.org
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix soundtrack – ocremix.org/
The Takeover – 247takeover.com/

hey, I’ve been doing original electro music for a while and thought I
might share some of it with you. Most of it is in progress, so bear
with me while I continue to work on it. My influences are artists such
as datA/Dimension/JUSTICE/Masashi Hamauzu…

You can find my music on myspace, so please ADD ME 🙂

and here’s a little something I wrote today called Trix Pt. Duex. This is because a sampled some synth chords from a Japanese fusion band called Trix.

Enjoy,

Phil

Bytejacker recently announced the results for the Free Indie of the
Year. Top 10 games are listed. One of them is Meat Boy, platformer
created by Edmund McMillen/Jonathan McEntee and soundtrack by OCReMixer
Daniel Baranowsky.

These games are pretty cool. Definitely worth checking out.

Here are the links:

Seven Minutes
8bit KILLER
Nanobots
Mighty Jill Off
Teeworlds
10800 Zombies
Rescue the Beagles
Meat Boy
Dyson
Iji

Have fun.

In yet another in a series of honors, Clawjob has had its legacy cemented by the world’s foremost lexicon of rock lore, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music!

The wise editors of this venerated tome have included Clawjob’s science fiction rock opera Space Crackers in a short list of greatest flop concept albums in history!

In a bold, forward-thinking move, these great compilers of rock legend have taken it upon themselves to alter the plot of Space Crackers in their synopsis, so as to preserve the album’s mystery for the sad few who have not yet heard it.

You can purchase a copy of the book here, and do not resist adding five of these to every order!

As you probably already know, our recent Capcom Digital Day event
was a media event. Meaning, the invites were extended only to gaming
press and media folks, as opposed to the general public. What you
probably didn’t know was that we actually extended a few “community”
invites to the Capcom community: Loyal Capcom community fans who
happened to be located around the San Francisco area.

I followed two of them, Tony and Alex, around for most of the event,
getting their informal impressions on what they saw and taking pictures
of the whole thing. At the end of which held a special surprise for them!

Alex is your normal average Street
Fighter fanatic, except for one thing: He was actually contracted to do
a few music tracks on the upcoming SSFIITHDR. Because of this, getting
to see SSFIITHDR was especially satisfying to him (He hadn’t actually
seen it even though he did some tracks for it), and the bulk of his
visit was spent on the SF Kiosks. He’s no fluke too, and handed out
plenty of butt-kicking to all challengers. As a gamer, he was no fluke
as well, as he set the record for the lowest time in the Bionic
Commando Rearmed Challenge Room challenge that we had laid down to
everyone present, besting all the gaming “professionals” (To bad his
score didn’t count, as he set the record on his second, unofficial, go
around).

Intrepid web programmer by day, closet gamer by night, Tony was
another community member we invited who was also a Street Fighter
fanatic. So much so, he was especially stoked that he got to meet Seth.
A well rounded gamer, Tony tried his hand at all the playable titles on
the floor, after which he assured me he would definitely be buying a
few of them given how awesome they were, with SSFIITHDR and BCR at top
of his purchase list.

After the event ended, came the special surprise we had for them.

Although it wasn’t on the itinerary, as the event winded down, I
escorted them to the elevator and snuck them upstairs. They thought I
was going to silence them permanently and then dump their body where it
wouldn’t be found since they had just seen all these then-secretive
announcements.

I was actually taking them to a conference room called Street Fighter. Inside of which held two arcade cabinets, which housed Street Fighter IV.

The two of them got about 30 minutes of alone time with Street
Fighter IV. GDC notwithstanding, I think Tony and Alex are among the
first in the “general public” to have gotten to play Street Fighter IV.
Up until the event, they had only seen screenshots, which they both
noted don’t do the game justice. The game has to be seen in motion,
with your own eyes, to be believed.

It was interesting to note that the first characters chosen was Ken
and Guile, even though they did eventually ran through the gamut of
characters, including Abel and Crimson Viper (Both of which they
thought was very cool).

In the end, I had to rip their bloody hands away from the controls.
For the record, Alex whooped on Tony pretty badly, no matter what
characters were chosen. In fact, Alex had to lose on purpose so that he
can check out some of the other characters.

So… the moral of this story? Keep an eye out on our community sites
(blog, forums) for news of the next event, because you never know when
we’ll be extending more invites. Perhaps we’ll even be willing to fly
some of you out here too…

Its seems like it’s been forever, even though we were only down for a
bit over 4 weeks. Most everyone probably knows the story by now, but on
January 17th the disc that holds VGMdb (and GFF) went down and wouldn’t
boot back up. We scrambled around looking for our backups, discovering
that what we had together was considerably older than we remembered, so
old that the only option was to attempt some kind of data recovery. Our
former hosting company LayeredTech agreed to send the dead drive to us
if we paid a ransom of $300 plus shipping. We had no choice, and
canceled our contract with them once Miles received the drive.

So at this, we were looking at spending a significant amount of money
recovering the data. This is where OCRemix steps into the picture.
Starla (Injury on OCR) works for a data recovery center. With her
expertise, Miles was able to repair the drive at minimal cost, after
which it booted like a champ.

A more detailed synopsis with photographs of the drive repair can be found here in the VGFrequency blog.

So we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Starla, Liontamer, and the
OCR crew, as well as to Miles for his skilled handiwork and for being
the point man for the operation, and to Gigablah for getting everything
up and running, even better than before.

One thing that I can promise is that this will never happen again. The
information in our database is priceless, and represents thousands of
hours of work — research, translation, submission — performed by
people all over the world. We hope to quickly reestablish your faith in
our ability to serve as caretakers of the VGMdb data. Our new host (Servint)
provides us with an on-site backup, which will make it easy to recover
quickly from future hardware failures. Moreover, we are going to keep
at least 4 distinct backups of the database and scans, in different
parts of the world, so as not to rely on any single means of recovery.

So with that, I’d like to welcome everyone back. If you find any new
issues with the site, or if something isn’t working as you expected,
please let us know by posting in the forum.

Timabaland’s record company settled with that Finnish individual, and
now both parties are trying to avoid giving GRG any recognition, credit
or share.

It’s official with Suni. Court action is still proceeding for GRG’s
case. I know lawyers are lawyers, but the morally correct thing to have
done was to join forces with GRG and get joint lawyers.

-Chris

In early 2007, Timbaland was accused of plagiarism regarding his work on the Nelly Furtado
track “Do It”. He is alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both
motifs and samples) in the song without giving credit or compensation.^[13][14]
The alleged original track, titled “Acidjazzed Evening”, is a chiptune-style 4-channel Amiga module composed by Finnish demoscener Janne Suni (a.k.a. Tempest). The song won first place in the Oldskool Music competition at Assembly 2000, a demoparty held in Helsinki, Finland held in the year 2000. According to Scene.org,
the song was uploaded to their servers the same year, long before the
release of the song by Furtado. The song was later remixed (with Suni’s
permission) by Norwegian Glenn Rune Gallefoss (a.k.a. GRG) for the Commodore 64 in SID format
– this is the version which was later allegedly sampled for “Do It”. It
was added to the High Voltage SID Collection on December 21, 2002.
A video which claims to show proof of the theft was posted to YouTube on January 12, 2007.^[15] Another video was posted to YouTube on January 14, 2007,
claiming Timbaland also stole the tune a year earlier for the ringtone
“Block Party”, one of several that were sold in the United States in
2005. A YouTube video comparing all the related songs was posted on
February 13.

Another song in Nelly Furtado’s album Loose has the same
allegations as ‘Do It’. ‘Wait for You’ is told to be plagiarized from a
Turkish folk music song ‘Allah Allah Desem Gelsem’ by Muhlis Akarsu,
famous folk music singer. It is believed that the Bağlama
(a kind of traditional instrument) sample is used in Nelly’s song by
Timbaland illegaly. A video comparing the two songs was posted on
Youtube. [17]

The owner of the record group of Muhlis Akarsu has referred to IFPI about the issue.

However, there are several other songs where it is believed that
Timbaland has illegally sampled from them. A video posted on Youtube
claims to show proof that Jay-Z’s song Big Pimpin has stolen samples from Abdel Halim Hafez’s song “Khosara” and Aaliyah‘s songs “Don’t Know What To Tell Ya” and “More Than A Woman” have the whole background from Warda’s Batwanness Bik and Mayada El Hennawi’s Alouli Ensa respectively.[18]

Another posted video shows similarities between Utada Hikaru’s Exodus ’04 and Aitha Al Menhali’s Meshkeltek.^[19]

Yet another video shows how similar are the songs Ne-Yo and Fabulous’ Makes Me Better and Sherine’s Aal Saaban Aleh.
The common point of these videos is that Timbaland took big parts of
the songs without making big alterations and without giving credit to
the artists.[20]

Shut up. I know, OMG VIRT music LOL! Whatever, the game has awesome music and it’s Contra, simple as that.

So
yeah, I REALLY like this soundtrack, it’s one of the best I’ve ever
heard and I think it deserves to be ruined by an overambitious project
that’ll span every corner of the “remixing”/”arranging” scene.

This will be open to anyone and everyone. Here are a few rules and guidelines for everyone to keep in mind:

1.
All songs are to be approved by me and a few others who I will choose
to “judge”. If you worked on a song for 2 months and it still sucks,
too bad.

2. All songs are to be arranged in a “conservative”
manner. Meaning, I don’t want you to take a fast, aggressive song and
turn it into ambient bullshit. The music has lots of intricate details
and layers to work with, you can arrange it without taking it to places
it shouldn’t go. Also, I have to approve your idea before you can be
considered for the project, and everyone is required to send me a 1
minute demo before I can lock them in to work on the song they chose.

3.
COLLABORATE! This music is really difficult to learn/play/arrange. I
encourage everyone to hook up in teams and really get to know the song
they’re doing and each members strengths.

4. What 3 said, the
most important thing here is making sure the music is KING. So yeah,
you will need to have spot on performances (if doing something with
live recordings), and good sounds. If you write a great arrangement but
your sounds are sub-par, consider letting someone take your work and
put it through their setup. I will do this for anyone who wants it, and
I don’t want any credit, all I want is for the music to sound its best.
If you can do a really awesome straight cover and just add a solo,
that’s great (and most likely all I’ll be doing!… trust me, learning
some of these songs is a project within itself)!!

This will not be OCR, VGMix or DoD exclusive, I have no idea how we’ll release yet. It’s a free for all at this point.

Now,
I know I’m talking like a dick, but I’ve had enough experience with
these things to know exactly what I want from the music and from my
team. This project is gonna have a “band” or “team” mentality. Everyone
can give input, help out on other tracks, or whatever, as long as it
sounds good. All that matters is the end result. I am recruiting people
as we speak, and this is gonna be cross posted to OCR, the Shizz and
anyplace else where I can get some quality musicians. This has to be
done quickly because the game is as popular as it’s gonna get and I
wanna strike while the mac-n-cheese is hot!

So I say onto you, the words of the famous George E. Nowik: LET’S ATTACK AGGRESSIVELY!

Also, link to the soundtrack (any mirrors are welcome! THANKS!):

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QXGLNXR1
http://inverteddungeon.com/triacesuperfan/…/Contra%204.rar

ALREADY CLAIMED SONGS:
Title – SnappleMan + Norg
Jungle 1 – SnappleMan
Laboratory + Waterfall – SnappleMan
Boss 1 + Pursuit – SnappleMan
Base – Sixto
Ocean – SnappleMan
Factory – Norg
Neo City – Sixto
Alien Hive + Heart Battle – Danimal Cannon (completed)
Harvest Yard + Final Battle – Christian Pacaud
Jungle 2 + Wall 1 – Danimal Cannon
End Credits – virt

SONGS LEFT:

Harbor
Black Viper
Tunnel Boss

As for the rest of the songs, they’re short event type tracks and they need to be incorporated into a few of the songs.

You
have whatever is not listed here to choose from. Get a demo together
and send it to me as soon as you can, contact me on AIM at SNKFreak,
email me at Andreas.Kotsamanidis at gmail.com, or Private Message me at
VGMix, OCR or the Shizz. Thanks!