Marian Schedenig

One of the greatest humans there's ever been, I think.

 

Indeed.
 

 

Let's hope Seth McFarlane and Neil DeGrasse Tyson can do his legacy justice.

 

I could definitely do with a nice science series in that style again.

 

 

Indeed.
 

Excellent fit on the suit Steefy.  Looks very sharp.
 
Almost made me feel a tingle of gay somewhere in my loins.

 
 

I know what you mean there.

 
 

So great he came out after!

...

So it wasn't the end of good music as we know it? Was it all mass hysteria?

Goldsmith's death was the end of good music as we know it. Or at least it was the point where I realised that very little worthwhile film music was written anymore.

There! Are! Four! Lights!

He might just have been speaking from experience. You could argue that, on average, they have always been doing another film "shortly" for the past 40 years.

Ordered from Quartet. I saw this announcement last week while on vacation in Ireland and couldn't see a limit number anywhere, so I figured it would be safe to wait and bundle it with Rosewood, but the stock updates here scared me.

It's a lovely score, and The Miracle is fantastic.

Marian, you are surely not comparing Horner with Korngold, are you? That's like smearing a national monument. 

to compare != to equate

They've teased the Conan sequel before doing the full score, so who knows.

Aside from unreleased material, I still wish for a new recording of Rambo III, and perhaps Lionheart. And a new recording of The Blue Max would be great. The Tadlow clip reminded me very much of Goldsmith LSO concerts from the early 2000s, and his Blue Max suite in 2001 was utterly fantastic.

It's Horner, it has to be similar to *something*.

Here's a great Gamasutra article about what makes LucasArts' adventure games legacy so great, with quotes from people all across the industry.

Also, let's not forget that they didn't "just" create games that stood the test of time thanks to their writing and comparatively little dated controls; they were also truly innovative at their time. For all I know, Maniac Mansion created the familar LucasArts flavour of the point and click adventure, which would then over the years be streamlined and optimised (removing redundant verbs, replacing the text inventory with icons, providing mouse shortcuts for common actions, adding a dialogue mode (!) etc.). But they were also technically advanced. Maniac Mansion looks ugly nowadays, and it probably didn't impress anyone graphically at the time, but it was based on a virtual machine running a custom scripting language - on a C64, in the late mid-80s! At that time, game developers were often experts at squeezing the last bit of power out of a computer's video and audio chips, but Gilbert's SCUMM showed a foresight and attention to well structured and portable code that was certainly highly unusual for an interactive game at the time, and for many years later. The result, of course, is that we can still play these games today, perfectly true to their original releases, on dozens of current systems (whereas many games from over 10 years later barely run on a modern PC).

Later iterations brought notable improvements to the music (iMuse!!) and the graphics - the first Monkey Island game added scalable sprites for depth effects, and MI2 and Fate of Atlantis brought light shading and "acting" - to this day, the characters' dialogue gestures play a large part in what makes these games so immersive for me.

They've been past their prime for probably over ten years, but...

Maniac Mansion
The Secret of Monkey Island
LeChuck's Revenge
The Curse of Monkey Island
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Grim Fandango
X-Wing
TIE Fighter
X-Wing Alliance

Even with the possible exclusion of Maniac Mansion (which was brilliant but uneven, and had not yet optimised the then new SCUMM interface), these are still eight of the best video games in history. A feat few companies can claim.

They lost their edge when they left adventure games lying in the gutter and focused on sub par Star Wars adaptations, but at least Jedi Outcast was still awesome.

Watch out for April Fool's stuff on this topic......

Apparently, both William Shatner and George Takei are now in the new movie.

This is cool news. Or would be, if only they wouldn't ban me from buying it. And not just because of the US only thing, but because I'd have to buy Windows or an Apple computer to access the store. Imagine if Amazon stopped their website and instead required you to install an application on your computer to buy books from them.

 

iTunes is evil. Give me a physical CD, or at the very least a DRM free download (preferrably lossless) in a standard web based store.

I hope to meet you in person, Marian!

I'm sure that can be arranged.

I wonder why neither John nor anyone else never ever have Parade of the Slave Children on the program. Such a rousing, crowd pleasing piece, perfect concert fair.

At least Muse took care of that.