“CRACKING!” is a bit odd for the stage, but “INTO DARKNESS” is perfect. Since they’re so similar, this poses a problem to those who like “CRACKING!”‘s sound to the point where they want to shuffle it off to stage 5 and get a new theme for stage 4.

“THE PLOT THICKENS” seems unnecessary and unfitting with “QUARTZ” there. If stage 7 was a short “power up” stage, it’d be more appropriate.

“DOOMSDAY” was a poor play, I think. TAMAYO tried to fix this by upgrading “THE FATES” into “INTOLERANCE” for RayStorm, but the-scars-still-run-deep and all that.

Everything else is pretty solid though. One bit that adds a bit of character to this game is the lack of stage transitions; you beat a boss, and the next level’s already scrolling. With that in mind, the end-of-game stage progress seems to “fit” better, and then “REASON FOR IT” comes in to chill your bones…

(I await the day when we can stop talking about “ZUNTATA” and start talking about the individual composers behind each game. The brand means as much as “SuperSweep” or “Basiscape” do.)

re: SEMO — patience, patience. My hope is that once they get their new name finalized and they get into the swing of things, they’ll be a true force for great game music coverage again.

re: perfect world — that’s what I also wanted for quite some time. I don’t know that it will ever happen. But I am satisfied with the present state of things, sans my inability to contribute regularly to OSV. vgmdb has all the info anyone could ever want, you just have to take initiative.

I hate to say it but I somewhat gave up on SEMO, which is not to say anything toward the quality of the site or its content (which are both fine, though a less painful layout would be much welcomed but that’s IMO purely) and like you said their interviews are nearly second to none.

In a perfect world there’d be one awesome site dedicated to all the game music news the internet could shake a stick at, where all the contributors passed along packages of unicorn-blessed candy fudge and readers such as myself were up to speed on all the comings and goings/etc. But, a few core sites covering content in different ways is hardly anything to balk at (and most certainly is better than no sites at all).

Personal differences with the site’s lead aside, Nubuwo is a solid resource for up-to-date news and info in the VGM scene.

I am personally looking forward to Jayson’s continued contributions at Destructoid, as well as the long-term plans of SEMO to take on a domain change and continue their strong, in-depth coverage of VGM (IMO they have some of the best interviews out there, lots of great details).

As for this site, I too hope that we are able to keep bringing the occasional bits of worthwhile content that I know we can do even without any strict structure or deadlines. We’ll see what happens. More details on my inactivity in the next post, as promised.