The official Kingdom Hearts soundtracks for HD 2.5 ReMIX, Birth by Sleep, 358/2 Days, Dream Drop Distance, and HD 1.5 ReMIX are now available via the Square Enix Store. Each comes as a three CD set except for HD 2.5 ReMIX, which contains four CD's.

There are four soundtracks in total, including music from across seven games in the franchise. The music is created by composers such as Tsuyoshi Sekito, Yoko Shimomura, and Takeharu Ishimoto. Each is a re-release of products that originally debuted between 2011 and 2014, while the Birth by Sleep & 358/2 Days CD set also includes some extra music from the Japanese exclusive Birth by Sleep FINAL MIX release. The soundtracks for Birth by Sleep & 358/2 Days, Dream Drop Distance, and HD 1.5 ReMIX are available for $30.99 each, while the one for HD 2.5 ReMIX costs $42.99. Each is expected to ship sometime in September 2024.

Back in July 2024, Square Enix showed off some new hair clips themed around Halloween Town from Kingdom Hearts II. More recently, the company also announced the return of 4 metallic keychains shaped like the series' signature Keyblades.

The original soundtracks for Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX, Birth by Sleep, 358/2 Days, Dream Drop Distance, and HD 1.5 ReMIX are now available via the Square Enix online store. Each product is expected to release sometime in September, 2024.

The post Kingdom Hearts Game Soundtracks Come to Square Enix Store appeared first on Siliconera.

You haven’t been able to sleep after playing video games, but your mind and body won’t shut off? We’ve all had a great match or session, told our friends goodnight, and attempted to get to sleep but couldn’t. Then you should follow Good Sleep Habits

People with insomnia are very common all over the world. While gaming is fun, it can be difficult to sleep if you do not properly disengage before bed.

While it may seem impossible to achieve, getting enough sleep each night is essential to a healthy physical and mental state of mind – and gaming energy. Resting your body more often and getting into a routine will help you feel better.

However, before heading towards the tips, let me tell you one of the easiest, safest, and quickest ways to achieve a good sleeping habit through DreamBig. Natural sleep supplements such as DreamBig can help you easily achieve better sleep.

Using the DreamBig supplement, people looking to improve their health and live a digital nomad lifestyle can improve their performance and health. DreamBig’s primary goal is to promote a faster and healthier lifestyle by promoting a sounder sleep every night.

After waking up, you will feel refreshed after taking the formula, which helps regenerate the body and mind. The formula has been developed using only natural ingredients. You can use it safely and comfortably every day without fear of side effects. Further, check out our best tips to achieve good sleep habits after gaming.

Methods to Achieve Good Sleep Habits

Following are the methods to achieve better sleep habits.

·      Wear Blue Light Glasses

Blue light is one wavelength of light in the spectrum, and our technology devices emit it on screen. It is also one of many wavelengths of light on the spectrum, such as red light and ultraviolet light.

The wavelength of blue light is short, it is very energetic, and it scatters easily. This scattering results in less focused light, resulting in your eyes having to work harder when looking at devices, which causes digital eye strain.

Gaming devices emitting blue light can cause eye strains resulting in insomnia. However, you can avoid it and achieve better sleep if you wear blue light glasses while gaming.

·      Try Sleeping on Time

It is hard, particularly if you’re a student, gamer, or freelancer with varied workloads. However, it’s well worth the effort. Researchers have found that they sleep better when people wake up each morning and go to bed simultaneously.

The important thing is to get to bed every night simultaneously, no matter the time. As long as you are consistent, sleeping is more important than what time you choose.

You may still be awake when you try to sleep early and exhausted when you stay up late if you regularly go to bed at 7 PM on some nights and 2 AM on others. If this happens to you regularly, your body can get confused.

·      Regular Exercise

The benefits of exercise extend beyond building bones, preventing stress injuries, and avoiding illnesses that can interfere with esports participation. It can also aid in falling asleep faster.

The research results indicate that moderate aerobic activity leads to better sleep, resulting in a refreshed body for the next round of scrims.

Besides making it easier to play, exercise also helps avoid insomnia, which many gamers have experienced. It is also important to consider the time of day.

Exercise, such as jogging, early in the morning improves later quality sleep. Furthermore, most competitive games are played in the afternoon and evening, which well fits the pro gamer lifestyle.

·      Use DreamBig

You can also use supplements like DreamBig to help you achieve better sleep. There is much more to DreamBig than a supplement.

Via DreamBig supplement, gamers, digital natives, and all people keen on healthy habits and a lifestyle of digital nomadism can achieve high performance, healthy habits, and a better way of life. There is nothing artificial about DreamBig.

In this blend, there are ingredients such as melatonin, ashwagandha, etc., to help you sleep better at night. It also contains melatonin which initiates sleep and keeps it going, while the presence of L-Theanine helps reduce anxiety symptoms. Apart from healthy sleep, the following are the additional benefits of using the DreamBig supplement.

• Regeneration of cells in the body
• Allows you to become more aware
• Increases your mental well-being
• It helps you to wake up feeling refreshed
• Makes your mind work more efficiently

·      Gaming Machine Relocation

It is not practicable to have the gaming machine in a sleeping area, but it is ideal. By placing the PC, PlayStation, or Xbox in a separate room, not only can you monitor screen time, but you can get away from the competitive nature of gaming.

Furthermore, this will aid overall health, reducing any difficulty falling asleep by creating a relaxed, stress-free environment. It is also possible to set the router to restrict Internet access during the designated sleep period.

It is not always possible to remove video games from your bedroom, but blocking Internet access to the device is a practical solution. Similarly, this makes the game unplayable in the bedroom while bedtime is prioritized.

·      Avoid Caffeine Energy Drinks

For years, Esports competitions have relied on energy drinks, such as Monster, but they should consume them moderately. Coffee, tea, and other caffeinated drinks can all negatively impact sleep.

These drinks can give users an energy boost and help them stay awake, but not many people know why. In the brain, adenosine binds to receptors, which is why.

Sleepiness is experienced when the brain binds to these molecules at a critical level. As caffeine inhibits adenosine molecule binding, sleepiness is delayed.

Energy drinks and coffee are great options for gamers who need to stay alert. Caffeinated drinks, however, pose a problem when they become part of a user’s routine when they consume them every day.

The best time to consume caffeine is in the morning, except when you need an extra lift due to its long-lasting effects, it can disrupt sleep.

Elemind, a 5-year-old startup based in Cambridge, Mass., today unveiled a US $349 wearable for neuromodulation, the company’s first product. According to cofounder and CEO Meredith Perry, the technology tracks the oscillation of brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that detect the electrical activity of the brain and then influence those oscillations using bursts of sound delivered via bone conduction.

Elemind’s first application for this wearable aims to suppress alpha waves to help induce sleep. There are other wearables on the market that monitor brain waves and, through biofeedback, encourage users to actively modify their alpha patterns. Elemind’s headband appears to be the first device to use sound to directly influence the brain waves of a passive user.

In a clinical trial, says Perry [no relation to author], 76 percent of subjects fell asleep more quickly. Those who did see a difference averaged 48 percent less time to progress from awake to asleep. The results were similar to those of comparable trials of pharmaceutical sleep aids, Perry indicated.

“For me,” Perry said, “it cuts through my rumination, quiets my thinking. It’s like noise cancellation for the brain.”

I briefly tested Elemind’s headband in May. I found it comfortable, with a thick cushioned band that sits across the forehead connected to a stretchy elastic loop to keep it in place. In the band are multiple EEG electrodes, a processor, a three-axis accelerometer, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, and custom electronics that gather the brain’s electrical signals, estimate their phase, and generate pink noise through a bone-conduction speaker. The whole thing weighs about 60 grams—about as much as a small kiwi fruit.

My test conditions were far from optimal for sleep: early afternoon, a fairly bright conference room, a beanbag chair as bed, and a vent blowing. And my test lasted just 4 minutes. I can say that I didn’t find the little bursts of pink noise (white noise without the higher frequencies) unpleasant. And since I often wear an eye mask, feeling fabric on my face wasn’t disturbing. It wasn’t the time or place to try for sound sleep, but I—and the others in the room—noted that after 2 minutes I was yawning like crazy.

How Elemind tweaks brain waves

What was going on in my brain? Briefly, different brain states are associated with different frequencies of waves. Someone who is relaxed with eyes closed but not asleep produces alpha waves at around 10 hertz. As they drift off to sleep, the alpha waves are supplanted by theta waves, at around 5 Hz. Eventually, the delta waves of deep sleep show up at around 1 Hz.

Ryan Neely, Elemind’s vice president of science and research, explains: “As soon as you put the headband on,” he says, “the EEG system starts running. It uses straightforward signal processing with bandpass filtering to isolate the activity in the 8- to 12-Hz frequency range—the alpha band.”

“Then,” Neely continues, “our algorithm looks at the filtered signal to identify the phase of each oscillation and determines when to generate bursts of pink noise.”

To help a user fall asleep more quickly [top], bursts of pink noise are timed to generate a brain response that is out of phase with alpha waves and so suppresses them. To enhance deep sleep [bottom], the pink noise is timed to generate a brain response that is in phase with delta waves.Source: Elemind

These auditory stimuli, he explains, create ripples in the waves coming from the brain. Elemind’s system tries to align these ripples with a particular phase in the wave. Because there is a gap between the stimulus and the evoked response, Elemind tested its system on 21 people and calculated the average delay, taking that into account when determining when to trigger a sound.

To induce sleep, Elemind’s headband targets the trough in the alpha wave, the point at which the brain is most excitable, Neely says.

“You can think of the alpha rhythm as a gate for communication between different areas of the brain,” he says. “By interfering with that communication, that coordination between different brain areas, you can disrupt patterns, like the ruminations that keep you awake.”

With these alpha waves suppressed, Neely says, the slower oscillations, like the theta waves of light sleep, take over.

Elemind doesn’t plan to stop there. The company plans to add an algorithm that addresses delta waves, the low-frequency 0.5- to 2-Hz waves characteristic of deep sleep. Here, Elemind’s technology will attempt to amplify this pattern with the intent of improving sleep quality.

Is this safe? Yes, Neely says, because auditory stimulation is self-limiting. “Your brain waves have a natural space they can occupy,” he explains, “and this stimulation just moved it within that natural space, unlike deep-brain stimulation, which can move the brain activity outside natural parameters.”

Going beyond sleep to sedation, memory, and mental health

Applications may eventually go beyond inducing and enhancing sleep. Researchers at the University of Washington and McGill University have completed a clinical study to determine if Elemind’s technology can be used to increase the pain threshold of subjects undergoing sedation. The results are being prepared for peer review.

Elemind is also working with a team involving researchers at McGill and the Leuven Brain Institute to determine if the technology can enhance memory consolidation in deep sleep and perhaps have some usefulness for people with mild cognitive impairment and other memory disorders.

Neely would love to see more applications investigated in the future.

“Inverse alpha stimulation [enhancing instead of suppressing the signal] could increase arousal,” he says. “That’s something I’d love to look into. And looking into mental-health treatment would be interesting, because phase coupling between the different brain regions appears to be an important factor in depression and anxiety disorders.”

Perry, who previously founded the wireless power startup UBeam, cofounded Elemind with four university professors with expertise in neuroscience, optogenetics, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence. The company has $12 million in funding to date and currently has 13 employees.

Preorders at $349 start today for beta units, and Elemind expects to start general sales later this year. The company will offer customers an optional membership at $7 to $13 monthly that will allow cloud storage of sleep data and access to new apps as they are released.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Of course, regular readers will know that 'book' was actually the name of the doctor, but that's beside the point. This week, it's Syphilisation and The Quiet Sleep developer and RPS contributor, Nikhil Murthy! Cheers Nikhil! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Happy Pokémon Day 2024! This year's celebrations have been capped off with a relatively short Pokémon Presents livestream, showcasing what's in store for the franchise this year and beyond - including Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

Though there was no mention of a main game releasing this year, there's a couple of substantial projects to look forward to. Here's a roundup of everything announced during Pokémon Presents for Pokémon Day 2024.

First up, those of you still enjoying Pokémon Scarlet and Violet can challenge a mighty Venusaur, Blastoise, and Charizard in upcoming Tera Raid battles. Mighty Venusaur will be available from tomorrow, 28th March, for a week, after which mighty Blastoise and mighty Charizard will follow.

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