Ⓐaron
Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
- AKA
- The Man, V
(wall of text incoming – would you really expect anything else?)
So… hi. How has everyone been? It’s been a hot minute.
I’d just planned to take a sabbatical until exams were over, then just… never found time to return. Whoops. 
That said, I’ve had a productive last, uh… two and a half years? I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity and information technology last year. And I’ve been working on a lot of game mods and music. I mean a lot. Here’s most of the music I’ve released, including several works in progress. I’m still quite pleased with these Cadence of Hyrule remixes from 2021, which answer a question that I’m sure every player of the game has asked at some point: “What would it sound like if all the mixes of each track, including DLC remixes, played at once?”
My favourite completed set of mixes by far, though, is See You Starside, an arranged album of Marathon’s OST that I formally released a couple of weeks ago. My three biggest influences by far were ’70s progressive rock (composition and arrangement), ’80s pop (the production style), and ’90s Japanese game soundtracks (atmosphere and arrangement). I’ve described it as an answer to the questions “what if ’70s Genesis had the production of ’80s Genesis?” and “what if Marathon had been a JRPG and gotten an arranged album?” It is not a conventional set of remixes: where the OST is about 40 minutes long, See You Starside is 77 minutes and 77 seconds. OK, fine, 78:17. (The number 7 is extremely important in Marathon.) You can also watch it on YouTube, but I strongly encourage the use of an adblocker for all videos on my channel, since YouTube has unilaterally decided to start running ads on my channel that I make no money from and emphatically do not want. I’ve also posted videos of “Cool Fusion” using my mix of “Flowers in Heaven” (my first time playing the level in about five years, incidentally) and “Bob-B-Q” using my mix of “What About Bob?” (featuring a riveting five-minute stretch for which I have zero health – in Marathon, you die if your health goes below zero, which means that for that entire stretch, a single hit from anything would’ve killed me).
I’ve also written some of my own tracks. A triptych I’ve cheekily entitled “Not Actually FFIV” (FLAC download) is probably my favourite of these recently; it’s so named because I thought I was rewriting “Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV” until I had another listen to it and realised the melodies weren’t as similar as I initially thought. The three movements are:
i. Not Actually 'Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV'
ii. Not Truly 'Another World of Beasts' including Not Really 'Infiltrating Shinra Tower' and excerpt of Almost but Not Quite 'Fracture'
iii. Technically Not 'Clash on the Big Bridge' including Legally Distinct from 'J-E-N-O-V-A'
All of which are, of course, Final Fantasy songs apart from ‘Fracture’, which is a King Crimson song from Starless and Bible Black (1974). I actually decided to rewrite the third movement a bit because I figured it was a bit too close to its source material. And I wasn’t initially intending for the second movement to contain a tribute to ‘Infiltrating Shinra Tower’, but then I played it back and realised it definitely did reference it in at least one place.
That said, I’ve undoubtedly poured more time by far into modding for the Aleph One engine (based on Bungie’s Marathon, one of their two big series before Halo). The mod I’ve been most involved in over the past few years is undoubtedly Eternal X, for which I’ve done *deep breath* level design, music, sound, story, writing, editing, scripting, graphics, and codirection. We recently released preview 5 of the forthcoming 1.3 release, which added over an hour of music to the soundtrack (which now runs for some six hours; the WIP soundtrack is available in FLAC here) and fixed several bugs of severity levels ranging from “mild annoyance” to “causes an infinite loop that leads to an unrecoverable freeze in gameplay”. There’s still a decent amount to be done before 1.3 is finished, but we’re on the home stretch and might, if we’re lucky, be done with it this year. Here’s a video of the game’s third chapter from a few months ago. The new level “The Midpoint of Somewhere” is probably 2/3 my work; it’s based on the game’s prologue “The Far Side of Nowhere” and epilogue “The Near Side of Everywhere”, but I added enemies, a mission, and a bunch of new areas to them.
If you’re not familiar with the franchise already though, Eternal might be an intimidating introduction. I also worked on sound design and scripting for Apotheosis X, a mod impressive enough to get its own PC Gamer article. You could do a lot worse for an introduction; Apotheosis X is shockingly modern in its gameplay and level design and doesn’t depend heavily on knowledge of the series’ story or setting. Here’s a video of me playing its first level “Cracks in the Pleasuredome” to test out the sounds for the recent 1.1 release (which made gameplay-relevant sounds louder, EQed the explosions to have more bass, and added variants for several sounds).
On the other hand, hellpak is, true to its name, a more intimidating introduction – but the soundtrack slaps. You can get the whole thing in FLAC here (and it’s licensed as Creative Commons-NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike, so you can use its contents for your own non-profit projects without asking as long as you subject them to the same license), or you can watch it on YouTube, complete with unique album artwork for each track (but again, please use an adblocker). Here are gameplay videos of a few of its levels: Bungie, did you get that thing I sent you? (this features music from several different levels, since I included eight separate completions and figured people would get sick of hearing the first five minutes of “Something” repeatedly; a couple of these tracks are previews of hellpak Vol. 2 tracks), Stairway to Aaron, Bob-B-Overcooked. The first two of these are my own design (apart from the enemy placement on “Stairway to Aaron” – which it actually took me months to beat). A lot of people have claimed that “Bob-B-Overcooked” is one of the hardest levels in the entire pack, but I somehow managed to beat it on the hardest difficulty on my first try (of course, I’d watched tbcr struggle through it for about five hours, and it happens to be perfectly suited to my play style); in fact, I found it significantly easier than “Bob-B-Q” (mostly because Marathon 1 fighters attack 33% faster than the fighters in its sequels do).
That’s not even all. I’ve been working on a few other projects, including Tempus Irae Redux (which is probably two months out from being done; sample levels: Gates of Delirium, Il grande silenzio, Mt. Vesuvius, & I Can Feel It, Lather, Rinse, Repeat; of these, “Il grande silenzio” is entirely my own level, and several of the others are the results of collaborations between me and others), Where Monsters Are in Dreams (quite a bit further out from release, but we’ve publicly shown most of chapters one, two, three, and four), and Marathon Chronicles (years out from completion at the earliest; some of the most impressive levels probably include Men Like Ravenous Fishes; Room a Thousand Years Wide; To Make an Idol of Our Fear and Call It God; The Black Angel’s Death Song; Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore; and Stranger Fruit). And between all that, I somehow found the time to remaster the soundtrack for Phoenix (another superb entry point to the series, incidentally).
So that’s a snapshot of what I’ve been up to for the last two and a half years. Since several of these projects are ongoing, I probably won’t be as active as I once was (I somehow still have the second highest post count in this message board’s history? I’d have expected to have fallen to #3 or #4 by now, if not #5 or lower), but I’ll try to remember to check in at least more than once every two and a half years.
I’ve missed the people. And all these Cookie Monster emotes. It’s cool to see that those are still a thing in this community, uh, 15 years later? 
So… hi. How has everyone been? It’s been a hot minute.
I’d just planned to take a sabbatical until exams were over, then just… never found time to return. Whoops. That said, I’ve had a productive last, uh… two and a half years? I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity and information technology last year. And I’ve been working on a lot of game mods and music. I mean a lot. Here’s most of the music I’ve released, including several works in progress. I’m still quite pleased with these Cadence of Hyrule remixes from 2021, which answer a question that I’m sure every player of the game has asked at some point: “What would it sound like if all the mixes of each track, including DLC remixes, played at once?”
My favourite completed set of mixes by far, though, is See You Starside, an arranged album of Marathon’s OST that I formally released a couple of weeks ago. My three biggest influences by far were ’70s progressive rock (composition and arrangement), ’80s pop (the production style), and ’90s Japanese game soundtracks (atmosphere and arrangement). I’ve described it as an answer to the questions “what if ’70s Genesis had the production of ’80s Genesis?” and “what if Marathon had been a JRPG and gotten an arranged album?” It is not a conventional set of remixes: where the OST is about 40 minutes long, See You Starside is 77 minutes and 77 seconds. OK, fine, 78:17. (The number 7 is extremely important in Marathon.) You can also watch it on YouTube, but I strongly encourage the use of an adblocker for all videos on my channel, since YouTube has unilaterally decided to start running ads on my channel that I make no money from and emphatically do not want. I’ve also posted videos of “Cool Fusion” using my mix of “Flowers in Heaven” (my first time playing the level in about five years, incidentally) and “Bob-B-Q” using my mix of “What About Bob?” (featuring a riveting five-minute stretch for which I have zero health – in Marathon, you die if your health goes below zero, which means that for that entire stretch, a single hit from anything would’ve killed me).
I’ve also written some of my own tracks. A triptych I’ve cheekily entitled “Not Actually FFIV” (FLAC download) is probably my favourite of these recently; it’s so named because I thought I was rewriting “Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV” until I had another listen to it and realised the melodies weren’t as similar as I initially thought. The three movements are:
i. Not Actually 'Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV'
ii. Not Truly 'Another World of Beasts' including Not Really 'Infiltrating Shinra Tower' and excerpt of Almost but Not Quite 'Fracture'
iii. Technically Not 'Clash on the Big Bridge' including Legally Distinct from 'J-E-N-O-V-A'
All of which are, of course, Final Fantasy songs apart from ‘Fracture’, which is a King Crimson song from Starless and Bible Black (1974). I actually decided to rewrite the third movement a bit because I figured it was a bit too close to its source material. And I wasn’t initially intending for the second movement to contain a tribute to ‘Infiltrating Shinra Tower’, but then I played it back and realised it definitely did reference it in at least one place.
That said, I’ve undoubtedly poured more time by far into modding for the Aleph One engine (based on Bungie’s Marathon, one of their two big series before Halo). The mod I’ve been most involved in over the past few years is undoubtedly Eternal X, for which I’ve done *deep breath* level design, music, sound, story, writing, editing, scripting, graphics, and codirection. We recently released preview 5 of the forthcoming 1.3 release, which added over an hour of music to the soundtrack (which now runs for some six hours; the WIP soundtrack is available in FLAC here) and fixed several bugs of severity levels ranging from “mild annoyance” to “causes an infinite loop that leads to an unrecoverable freeze in gameplay”. There’s still a decent amount to be done before 1.3 is finished, but we’re on the home stretch and might, if we’re lucky, be done with it this year. Here’s a video of the game’s third chapter from a few months ago. The new level “The Midpoint of Somewhere” is probably 2/3 my work; it’s based on the game’s prologue “The Far Side of Nowhere” and epilogue “The Near Side of Everywhere”, but I added enemies, a mission, and a bunch of new areas to them.
If you’re not familiar with the franchise already though, Eternal might be an intimidating introduction. I also worked on sound design and scripting for Apotheosis X, a mod impressive enough to get its own PC Gamer article. You could do a lot worse for an introduction; Apotheosis X is shockingly modern in its gameplay and level design and doesn’t depend heavily on knowledge of the series’ story or setting. Here’s a video of me playing its first level “Cracks in the Pleasuredome” to test out the sounds for the recent 1.1 release (which made gameplay-relevant sounds louder, EQed the explosions to have more bass, and added variants for several sounds).
On the other hand, hellpak is, true to its name, a more intimidating introduction – but the soundtrack slaps. You can get the whole thing in FLAC here (and it’s licensed as Creative Commons-NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike, so you can use its contents for your own non-profit projects without asking as long as you subject them to the same license), or you can watch it on YouTube, complete with unique album artwork for each track (but again, please use an adblocker). Here are gameplay videos of a few of its levels: Bungie, did you get that thing I sent you? (this features music from several different levels, since I included eight separate completions and figured people would get sick of hearing the first five minutes of “Something” repeatedly; a couple of these tracks are previews of hellpak Vol. 2 tracks), Stairway to Aaron, Bob-B-Overcooked. The first two of these are my own design (apart from the enemy placement on “Stairway to Aaron” – which it actually took me months to beat). A lot of people have claimed that “Bob-B-Overcooked” is one of the hardest levels in the entire pack, but I somehow managed to beat it on the hardest difficulty on my first try (of course, I’d watched tbcr struggle through it for about five hours, and it happens to be perfectly suited to my play style); in fact, I found it significantly easier than “Bob-B-Q” (mostly because Marathon 1 fighters attack 33% faster than the fighters in its sequels do).
That’s not even all. I’ve been working on a few other projects, including Tempus Irae Redux (which is probably two months out from being done; sample levels: Gates of Delirium, Il grande silenzio, Mt. Vesuvius, & I Can Feel It, Lather, Rinse, Repeat; of these, “Il grande silenzio” is entirely my own level, and several of the others are the results of collaborations between me and others), Where Monsters Are in Dreams (quite a bit further out from release, but we’ve publicly shown most of chapters one, two, three, and four), and Marathon Chronicles (years out from completion at the earliest; some of the most impressive levels probably include Men Like Ravenous Fishes; Room a Thousand Years Wide; To Make an Idol of Our Fear and Call It God; The Black Angel’s Death Song; Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore; and Stranger Fruit). And between all that, I somehow found the time to remaster the soundtrack for Phoenix (another superb entry point to the series, incidentally).
So that’s a snapshot of what I’ve been up to for the last two and a half years. Since several of these projects are ongoing, I probably won’t be as active as I once was (I somehow still have the second highest post count in this message board’s history? I’d have expected to have fallen to #3 or #4 by now, if not #5 or lower), but I’ll try to remember to check in at least more than once every two and a half years.
I’ve missed the people. And all these Cookie Monster emotes. It’s cool to see that those are still a thing in this community, uh, 15 years later? 
