RedOctane
announced recently that they will be holding a special contest titled
“Be A Guitar Hero,” for a very unique prize. The winner of this contest
will have their song included in the actual Guitar Hero
game. What better way to help jumpstart your band than have your song
be in a bemani game alongside The Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Bowie,
and White Zombie? I sure can’t think of one!

More Info

Anyone in and around Toronto (Ontario, Canada), or anyone willing to
trek from further, is welcome to come to the “Summer Edishun”
of the OCR Toronto meet. We had about a dozen people come out last
winter and all had a good time.

July 23rd at Noon is what we know so far. Probably going to meet downtown somewhere, just not completely sure yet.

Also a VGDJ podcast will be recorded during the meet so come be a part of it!

Get slightly more info here.

Thanks to the people over at dvdtoons.com we here at GAF have learned that Sony Music is planing on releasing the Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. cartoon series on DVD on October 11th and 25th of this year respectively.

More at : http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=5164

Via GamesAreFun:

During their press conference today, Sony
announced various new titles that will be appearing on the Playstation
3. Though details are a bit sketchy at this time, the ones we know of
for sure right now are…

Devil May Cry 4

Final Fantasy XIII

Gran Turismo 5

Killzone 2

Metal Gear Solid 4

Tekken 6

The Getaway 3

Unreal Tournament 2007

WarHawk

unnamed game similar to God of War

Little info is known about these games, but there will likely be
more to follow in the coming days. At the very least we should have a
trailer or screenshots of most of these games by the end of the week,
so stay tuned!

Update: It appears a new Grand Theft Auto has not been announced, though Rockstar did announce its plans to support the PS3.

CompoST’s are one-hour composition contests, held on IRC, in which original songs are created from a given theme. The theme is always a scenario, location, or idea from a video game that a composer might have to write when working on a game being developed. They test your speed AND your skill, so bring your best tools and your best game but don’t worry – it’s a friendly competition.

To participate, you simply need to show up at the scheduled time and participate, uploading your song when the hour is up. The server is irc.esper.net and the channel is #soundtempest.

Voting may or may not take place, but it’s all for fun. Usually, they are held in the evenings, around 9-10PM Eastern Time, so show up a little earlier if you want to participate. One is being held tonight, June 16, 2005, at either 9 or 10 PM Eastern.

P.S.: Even if you can’t make music, we’re always looking for people to vote on the entries. Come in, have a seat, hear some music.

News has been breaking recently about a plethora of new films derived from the video games, don’t expect the drought of original ideas in Hollywood to go any time soon.

First up,
Ain’t It Cool News Vin Diesel will portray the shaven-headed contract
killer known only as Agent 47 in a film based on the successful Hitman
games. Funny how a series of games most obviously influenced by
numerous movies is being made into a game. Imagine how derivative this
film could end up looking to people who have never heard of the games,
it’s convenient that the film studios have this ‘video game filter’
they can put these films through in order to make them appear fresh.

Uwe Boll has yet another goddamn film project, he will be wasting his time adapting Postal.

For those who have never played either of the Postal games, they were
average games where a guy basically goes crazy and starts killing
everybody. Boll claims he’ll be keeping all of the ‘original
characters’ but with his own hideous Boll-fied story. I’m sure it will
involve people jumping in the air in slow motion a lot. Add this to the
list of Boll projects based on games that also includes the soon-to-be
critically panned Bloodrayne, Hunter: the Reckoning (did anybody actually play this game?), Dungeonsiege and Far Cry, and damnit, I really liked Far Cry too.

Finally, because you idiots actually paid to see the first two, we’re getting two more Resident Evil movies. Part three will be called Resident Evil: Afterlife and Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, this time they will be shooting in Australia and pretending it’s a Southwestern American desert. Evidently
American deserts are just out of control when it comes to charging
filming crews these days. Afterlife will be based on a script
by, joy of joys, Paul W. S. Anderson, I’d love to get a look at it and
see the eight million cues for slow-motion shots. Part four is already
planned and will be set in Japan, whether it’s a good idea to plan a
the third sequel before the second has even started filming remains to be
seen, The Matrix this is not.

Anyone remember the first Auld Lang Sine contest? Hosted by Ubik this
time around, this contest is mainly centered around the Hellven.org
community. Because Hellven has so many major members from the VG
remix scene, such as Ubik and mv, the contest spilled over into VGmix, with past ALS1 submissions by myself, Gwilym, zyko, and
Dennis Mott.
For more information, visit
http://www.hellven.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=64
or
http://als.ubikmusic.org/

Anyone familiar with the old contest will see a new change. Remixes,
covers, and arrangements are now acceptable as long as they take up
1/3rd or less of your tracks.

The deadline is August 1st, folks, so mark your calendars. This is a big event!

This week’s round of Song of the Week
was one of the closest of recent history. All of the tracks were
excellent, and as a result the top two tracks tied in total points (a
tiebreaker was necessary) and the next five tracks were separated by a
total of five points.

For those who don’t know, Song of the Week is a friendly competition
designed to showcase more obscure music. Anyone can submit a track (new
nominators’ tracks are automatically considered in the upcoming week),
and the top eight tracks in the queue are selected each week to be
voted upon by anyone who wants to pick his/her favorites.
In third place was “Koroku’s Theme” from Genso Suikoden III Music
Collection ~Rustling of the Wind~, a jazzy arrangement of the original
theme. Relaxing saxophone lines and smooth percussion combine to form a
mellow, laid-back vibe.

The second place track was “L Map (General)” from Tengai
Makyo II Manjimaru Original Soundtrack, originally composed by the
noted Japanese film composer Joe Hisaishi. Its lighthearted orchestral fare
won the hearts of this week’s voters.

This week’s overall winner was “Pop Station – Track 4” from The
Sims 2. It has relatively simple guitar, string, synth, and percussion
lines, but they’re flipped and switched throughout the piece to give a
flowing groove that doesn’t get boring.

Be sure to check out this week’s winners, as well as all previous winners, at http://www.songoftheweek.info/.

After hearing Ellywu2’s Cosmo Canyon arrangement, ‘Smoke Signals’, on one of the final episodes of VGFrequency the other evening, I decided I HAD to go over to VGMix and grab it, and see what other songs of E’s I didn’t have. While there I decided to pick up Final Fantasy 7 arrangement by him, as well as an arrangement of the Minoc music from Ultima Online (For the record that UO pre-3D when they changed it to the U9 music).
Anyway, after checking out what was new on the feed’s today, I had
noticed that Elly had released another new arrangement, this one of
Frog’s Theme from Chrono Trigger, entitled: ‘Frog’s Intervention’. Being a newly found fan of him, and being as Frog’s theme has been absolutely excellent through-out history, I had to get this. In his description of the song Elly mentions that this is actually an arrangement for the Chrono Symphonic Project.
He also adds that it was done in the style of “Zimmer and friends.” I’m
not going to claim to have a good enough ear to be able to decypher a
Hans Zimmer-esque song, but I can say that I was absolutely satisfied
with this song both as a symphonic arrangement and as an arrangement of
one of my favorite songs in any game. Definitely worth checking out.

The next song I want to talk about it GeckoYamori’s newest arrangement, ‘Industroscout’, from Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Gecko has made quite a few
impressive tracks in the past, so I knew that this one couldn’t
POSSIBLY be disappointing, and I was indeed correct. Gecko, whom has
shown countless times in the past that he is an avid Klepacki fan, had this to say about his mix:

“The idea of the mix was to take the original and make it more
intense and hard-edged, and I think I achieved what I was going for. I
chose the title Industroscout as it sounds a bit similiar to
Industrofunk from Red Alert 2. I tried to keep myself from making it
sound all too buttrock-esque. The original track was pretty much built
on 1 riff, though I made some additions to keep it relatively fresh
sounding. The weird flanged thing in the original was a defining part
so I made a fairly accurate recreation of it. C&C music is very
hard to remix, I’ve tried dozens of times but this is the first time
I’m actually satisfied with what I’ve made.”

C&C music is indeed quite difficult to arrange, I myself have
tried, and I must echo Gecko’s statement in saying that he did do an
excellent job with this one. Absolutely worth listening to.

Via GamesAreFun:

If you missed it, we reported
a few days ago that the official Japanese release of FFVII: Advent
Children will take place on September 14. Well, we now know that it
will be released in the US on the same date, for DVD only.

Full story: Here.