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Yay, new update!

Just popping in to report an error on the Mid for Big Blue. It appears to stop after the first measure.

An even simpler and more user-friendly solution: Mark the games where we have the full OST arranged. Don't consider the quality of the arrangements just yet, chances are many users wouldn't know enough about that to need it, but I think they'd be interested in seeing which games have the entire soundtrack on site.

Yay, update! Always nice to see!

Absolutely agree with this one! If we had a weighing system that ranked tracks in terms of importance using qualifiers such as game sales, game notability, in-game notability of the track, and overall goodness, this one would rank very highly. WindWaker is a well-received and popular installment in one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, and the song is a credits theme - usually considered one of the most important tracks in a game. I'd put it up there with the Super Mario Sunshine Staff Credits theme in terms of important songs not yet arranged on-site.

Uh, hi!

I've been on this site for quite some time, but been pretty inactive in the past few years. I might have checked upon the forums once or twice every six months or so, but not posted much. However, I remain just a PM away if needed!

I thought I should post here just to keep old friends informed about what I've been up to. After a few years of student life and student housing, with little time nor room for piano playing (subsequently leading to a wane in enthusiasm), I've finally graduated and may call myself a Master of Science, which is an actual title and not something I just made up. More accurately, I'm a civil engineer who specializes in building physics, a field which considers heat, moisture, and air transport in buildings and building materials, branching into energy use in buildings, and sustainability, and a lot of other cool stuff. In 2016 I graduated from "student" to "unemployed", but after nine months of job searching I found a relevant position... back at university. I'm now doing a PhD on green roof technologies, which will be finished in spring 2021 if all goes according to plan. It's like studying over again, but better paid and a lot better structured. Now I've got my own little apartment, which is big enough to have room for my keyboard and shelf space for piano sheets.

I think I'll be back on here a little more regularly now, to pick up sheets and participate in the occasional conversation, but I still fall off whenever somebody go deep into music theory. I can talk for days about building insulation, but I'll be completely stuck if somebody asks me to explain what the heck a "chord" is supposed to be. So I guess I won't be of much use when it comes to reviewing sheets (although I've got a knack for calling out for the use of 8va or 8vb markings, since any notes more than two notches above or below the note bar is completely unreadable to me), but at least I can talk about some other stuff.

You also find me on the Smogon forums, previously under the same username as here, but I had to change it to "Codraroll" after losing a bet. I later decided to keep it that way because it put a unique spin on what really was a rather bland username.

By the way, it looks like this site has really kept the steam up while I've been away!

I do see the merit of splitting up the section a little bit. I don't think it needs to be in 7 different categories, because all of a sudden our sidebar is flooded with Mario, but maybe, like, the Mario RPG's could have their own section, and/or Mario Kart.

Oh, sorry if I wasn't clear. Or maybe I hadn't thought it through entirely, I can't really remember. I realize that making 7 new categories would rid us of one problem at the cost of making a dozen more. The "sub-series" I listed in the previous post would be mostly for discussion purposes. Say, if we made two or three new pages, we should avoid splitting up the various series (for instance, we shouldn't put two Wario games on one page and the rest on another). And which series would go on which page? How many/few pages would we need to put every game on an appropriate, but distinct page?
 
Would it be possible to have sub-menus of each section? That is, when you click "Super Mario", you are not taken to a new page, but a bunch of smaller categories pop up underneath the button: "Super Mario series", "Mario Kart", "Mario Party", "Yoshi", and so on. Or maybe the main Mario page would be a disambiguation page. Both solutions would require a bit of extra work, though, which I agree is a heavy argument against them.

I think that if the current system is kept, and we seek to do this as easy as possible by making new pages, we should seek to:

• ...split into as few pages as possible. Again, there's the argument of flooding the sidebar, and it could be difficult for visitors to understand which page to look on, or frustrating to browse through multiple pages in search of one specific sheet (again the ambiguity of SMW 2: Yoshi's Island, for instance).
• ...take out as many sheets and game titles from the main page as possible. We won't reduce the clutter of the Super Mario page by removing the 6 games and 15 sheets from the Yoshi series, for instance. That would still leave 64 games and some 7-800 sheets, hardly a noticeable change.
• ...make it as clear as possible where to look for which sheets. For instance, a "Super Mario RPGs" page would include the Paper Mario games if I understand correctly, but that's not very intuitive.

My best suggestion that satisfies the criteria above would be to take out the Super Mario series, those considered the "flagships" of the franchise. Twenty titles with a few hundred sheets in total, that fill roughly half the current page. All other Mario games would remain on a page named "Mario spin-offs". This approach would also be directly applicable to the Pokémon series.


Anyway, I'm glad to see the discussion, if nothing else. Even if we end up agreeing to do nothing, at least the issue is addressed, and/or we will determine whether it is a problem or not. Discussing the problem is addressing the problem! (I might have spent too much time in academia already)

I think I have the two simplest sheets on site, both in the Mario section:

"Countdown to race start" from Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and "Retro Theme 2" from Super Mario Galaxy. That last one might require a rather large finger/arm span, but the timing and keys should not be particularly hard to pull off.

[70]

Hello! I know it's not really polite to stroll into here after being away for a year and a half, but I'm afraid my presence is a little more sporadic these days since I no longer enjoy near-infinite spare time (that being said, I usually respond if thrown a PM). But now I've finally got my own apartment (after living in student housing/collectives for the past five years), and have some time to play piano again, so I may be around a little more now.

Anyway, the Super Mario section of the site is getting awfully long. I think we should look into splitting it up. By my count, it features 70 games, each with a large handful of sheets. Breaking it down a little, one can identify at least 7 "sub-franchises" under the overall Mario umrella:

Super Mario core series¹: 20 games (Bros., Bros. 2, Bros. 3, Land, World, Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, World 2: Yoshi's Island, 64, Sunshine, New Bros., Galaxy, New Bros. Wii, Galaxy 2, New Bros. 2, New Bros. U, 3D World, Maker, Run, and shortly, Odyssey [As well as The Lost Levels, but we don't make the distinction on-site]). Plus the re-releases, some of which have their own sections (Super Mario Advance, Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario 64 DS).

Mario Kart series: 8 games (Super Mario Kart, 64, Super Circuit, Double Dash!!, Wii, DS, and 8 - we have no sheets from Mario Kart 7 at all). With an estimated 10-15 sheets per entry in the series, that's roughly a hundred sheets, more than several franchises with their own page.

Mario Party series: 6 games (out of 9 existing - we miss sheets from 4, 6, and 8 ), with a total of 31 sheets. Still more than on the Dragon Quest and Metal Gear pages, for instance. More sheets than them both put together, actually.

Mario & Luigi series: 5 games, 45 sheets.

Mario Sports series: 6 games (Mario Golf, Mario Golf GBC, Mario Golf: Advance Tour, Mario Tennis, Mario's Tennis [yes, that's a separate game], Mario Power Tennis, and a handful of titles we don't have on site ). Not that many sheets, though, but it is one of the most successful Mario spin-off series by sales numbers.

Paper Mario series: 4 games (Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Color Splash, Super Paper Mario, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but two of them seem to have more than 50 sheets each.

Wario series: 9 games (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Wario Land II, Wario Land 3, Wario Land 4, Wario Land: Shake it!, Wario World, Wario's Woods, Wario: Master of Disguise, and WarioWare: Smooth Moves), with a total of 21 sheets.

Not sure on what to do with the Yoshi series, since the biggest and most well-known installment (Yoshi's Island) technically belongs to the Super Mario series, but apart from that there are still sheets from 6 games on site, although four of them only have one sheet, and the two others 5 and 6, respectively. Those 6 games and 15 sheets still outnumber the Metal Gear sheets we have, but I seem to recall from a few years back that that page shouldn't really be taken as an ideal example.

¹Wikipedia makes the distinction between the Mario franchise and Super Mario series.

At the very least, I think we should give the numerous Mario spin-offs their own page, since they either bury or are buried by the main series games people generally look for sheets from. The same could be said about the Pokémon games. And speaking of giving games their own page, I think the Undertale section of the "More" page is big enough to warrant separating, even though the franchise only has one game. It has, what, 120 sheets?



And as for the popular suggestion of difficulty levels, let me throw out another approach to that. People would usually want to look up only two difficulty levels: Easy sheets that beginners can play, and ultra-hard ones because complicated music pieces are interesting. I'd say we gain no further traffic or enhance the visitor experience from focusing on the latter, but the people looking for the former probably constitute a big portion of our "non-regular" visitors. Instead of ranking ever sheet in the database with difficulty scores, I think we could make a little page recommending some easy sheets for beginners, with direct links to the relevant arrangements. Of course, it's hard to really quantify what counts as "easy" or "difficult" to play, but I think there are some sheets out there that our more professional members can agree are suitable for beginners. Being very far from a professional myself, I wouldn't know for sure, but for instance, "File Select" from Super Mario 64 looks like it wouldn't pose much of a challenge to aspiring piano players. I think it would be helpful - and not very work-consuming - to dig out a few easy pieces from the database, and feature on their own little page.

We've had three to four updates every month since October-ish, and all the sheets have been of a consistent high quality.

The contrast to the NSM I once was used to is astonishing. We used to go months between updates. This is awesome. Great work, everybody!

Achievement points for starting topics is an idea I'd like you to reconsider. It encourages lots of pointless topic-making.

In general, though, I think achievement points are a good idea. Especially for getting sheets on site, or (even more so) giving meaningful feedback to others.

Minor and very well hidden error: In the "Other" section, there are two themes from the game Golden Axe II, made by PseudoMario16. Neither of the files from either sheet will open properly.

Wow, again! Nice new sheets!

Seriously, we need a "fawning over the new system" thread. Just mask it as "one-year review of new submission procedures" or something.

Also, that Pinna Park arrangement is great.

Just saw the new site update and holy dam*, that Pinna Park arrangement sounds great. What swing! A little out of my league to play, but really nice to listen to! Keep up the good work!



*Not a typo, I dabble a little in hydropower

Woo, updates all the time! And a really awesome one, too! Thanks!

Woo, yet another update!

This is awesome. That's all I have to say.