Forgive my obvious n00bishness here; the last RPG Maker I used was 2003, and I've never had any luck getting demos of the later ones to run (and haven't attempted to pirate them) but if I wanted to play any games made in XP or VX, am I right in guessing that any such game worth its salt will be runnable (holy shit, spell check allowed "runnable?") without having their respective makers' software or resources installed on my machine?


I ask only because I, yet again, wish to make another attempt at getting back into this, and I'd like to play some games to see what the makers are capable of.

Yeah, so I've been posting in Salt World somewhat sporadically, but I don't recall doing an introduction thread at any point.

Anyway, in case I have and you find it and laugh at me, I instead use this opportunity to ask:

What's the relevance of the name and what happened to the original GW? I notice its URL brings me straight to this forum. Will there ever be a front page again...?

I was gonna post this in games but it seems like a much broader subject than that so...


I really suck at poker, as well as pretty much all fighting games (except for, possibly, the Smash Bros series) but they seem to be among my favourite recreational activities. I dunno if it's because they're something you'd usually play with someone else and I probably more enjoy the social aspect or what, but for the sake of a point of discussion do any of you ever find that you enjoy something you're completely useless at?

So here's a little oddity.


Normally when I play an RM2K game I constantly hold the Enter button during battles to make the battle animations and messages go by quicker. However, for one or two games I have, holding Enter makes the battle animations slow down instead (gotta use Escape to speed 'em up instead, but holding that also pauses battle messages, so there's this annoying little thing of needing to alternate them just to make things go by quicker... picky I know but I'm an impatient man) and trying things like switching out one RPG_RT file for another doesn't seem to fix anything.


Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Yep, two college assignments that I've been able to put online. It's from me so you can expect to see something stupid!

I'm currently in my second year of college (in UK terms) doing a course in Film and Television Production, so none of what you're gonna see here is my own personal work (I don't have any of my own equipment to use), but rather things I was "commissioned" to do by my tutors.

My main strengths are in planning for a production and the editing process afterwards, but my actual skills in production itself are still a bit lacking, which really shows in some to most of my work. Nevertheless I'm gonna share some of my crap as and when I'm able to upload it.

Video quality in several cases is gonna be horrible because even my tutor, who lives and breathes Final Cut Pro, can't figure out how to export in a format that gives good quality and a filesize under 1GB for uploading to YouTube. I sure as hell don't know anything about it either as I'm not very computer literate.

I'm being too negative now. Anyway, here goes!

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MTV Ident

As the only piece of work I've been able to salvage from my first year at college on the Film and TV production course, this MTV ident was done under fairly un-limiting limitations: it had to appeal to MTV's audience somehow, and it had to be less than fifteen seconds in length. Other than that, it was a case of anything goes. I was able to bullshit my tutor into believing that a lot of MTV viewers played video games with some vaguely established secondary research, as I really wanted to do something using MS Paint and RPG Maker.

Graphically, it looks pretty sparse because I'm not actually all that good at creating original graphics; the style draws heavily from Pokemon but it's all original and it shows :P Nevertheless my tutor gave me a distinction grade for it, citing the original graphics and soundtrack, as well as the faithful recreation of a byegone graphical style.

The music, which is a parody of Video Killed The Radio Star (the first song ever to be played on MTV) was made in Mario Paint Composer in about three minutes.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=93q422xWcR8

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The Sordid Shenanigans of Magic News 5

Ah yes, the news/documentary assignment. For those who aren't gonna read the background on this and jump straight in and watch, I will warn you that it a) is likely to need earphones or loud speakers, b) was required to contain certain information that was designed to earn higher marks and will otherwise seem unnecessary and c) a lot of music from Chrono Trigger.

The kind of ill-fated first assignment in my second year. The premise was that we had to create a mockumentary about a British news team who had violated guidelines set out by OfCom (Office of Communications) and/or the Press Complaints Commission. We also had to show that we understood the role of a commissioning editor amongst other things.

Production of this one was made harder by the fact that our tutor tried something new: she assigned specific roles to the members of each production group, which meant that if one person was assigned "camera", nobody else was allowed to film, only the one assigned to do so. So our cameraman decided to treat it like he was filming a freakin' Blair Witch parody, which is why everything is wobbly. To make matters worse, I was assigned the role of "Director", something at which I'm totally fucking useless (I'm a very pre- and post-production person). Thankfully, everyone had to edit their own version in post, something I'm way better at doing.

But enough moaning! On to the happier side of things!

In post, I had some problems with the sound quality, so put some music in to help hide the static, which meant I also had to lower the volume of nearly everything so that both the music and the dialogue were audible. That's why I opened this by saying to use earphones or turn your speakers up high. Also, because of how bad some of the footage had turned out, I felt that the original serious tone it was meant to have just wouldn't work, so I decided to write and record some extra narration and send it up into a complete piss take! This also means that it exposes GW to my awesome (it's not) voice acting for the first time in about four years. The voice I used to narrate is one of my favourites to put on that for some reason makes my two year-old nephew laugh like a hyena.

As I always do in my college assignments, I used music from video games throughout. This work in particular drew heavily from Chrono Trigger, mainly because I'd recently been playing it a lot and because it has a lot of music that says "Uh oh, we're in trouble now!" in a cheerful, farcical way. The Trial anyone?

This one also got graded distinction, reasons including having shown my understanding of various roles in news broadcasting and for being able to edit the documentary in a way that manipulated the meaning of the footage and gave it an obvious bias.

K go.

Don't forget: whisper quiet! Needs high volume!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=U6SHaArcta0