*NO* Sims 2 'Lord of the Rats'

[djpretzel]

Hello there and Merry Christmas!

It's been a while since my last remix around here, fortunately I found time and inspiriation to finally complete a new one - this time of an uncovered system and game: The Sims 2 for Nintendo DS. The overall music of this game is pretty neat although not outstanding except for the rat-cave music - I've only listened to it once and started sequencing it to a MIDI :) The mix also is my first serious work I made with Reason - I luv it!

Again, the overall music on Sims 2 is not outstanding and there are some parts in the Rat-Man track that aren't either: It's theme is a bit random, but I decided to use it in my remix (starting around 0'56) to keep the overall mood of the original. I also wanted it to sound more like Danny Elfman's Batman theme - the "hero"-appeal was desperately missing in the original. I added stings and french horns to make it feel like a theme of a sinister and strange rat-man character; tremolo celli with very wet reverb and fast electronic percussion right in the beginning symbolizing the rats.

There's a part with spoken lyrics taken from a very old movie - the one who finds out which one it was gets a pat and a peanut and may consider herself/himself a hero ;) the lyrics are in the unsyced lyrics id3-tag, btw.

If you find the time to update my artist picture with this one http://www.culita.org/philipp/misc/texx.jpg
I would be very grateful, too!

The link to the ReMix:

4.82 MB

regards
Phil Strahl aka. texx sound



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[Liontamer]

Can't snag a source on such a recent game, but the main issue I had was how very minimal this sounded. Not that writing or instrumental complexity is a strict requirement, but the texture here was very thin and the instrumentation, try as it might, doesn't have the body or carry the weight needed to make things sound strong. The percussion in particular was very tepid and basic.

At 2:21 when you bring in the 1931 Dracula movie (http://imdb.com/title/tt0021814/) sample, I can just hear others complaining that the track relied too strongly on the sampling and not enough on the music for those areas, which go even more minimalistic with the instrumentation for a time.

Just listening to the amount of compositional ideas here, there just isn't enough variation or depth here to justify 4:45-worth of music. I'm sure you'll do bigger and better things with Reason in time given more experience, but this would need a lot more ideas and a lot of fleshing out of the sounds to have a chance. The substance isn't there.

NO

[The Orichalcon]

I'm having trouble discering a source for this. I've listened through all the sims 2 music and can't figure out what it is. So I'm guessing the DS version of the game must have different music to the PC version.

Anyway, it's redundant what the source is, because the arrangement and quality of this is below the standards of the site anyway. You have some good ideas, the tone of the mix is nice, but it's just very repetative, doesn't really shapeshift into anything substantial, keeps this ambient tone throughout the mix. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the sound quality is also a problem. The kick seems overpowering to me, and I'm getting constant clicking sounds through the track. The brass samples sounded all right, but the vocal clips sound very out of place, it's like the mix was arranged to accomodate around the vocal samples, the focus is on them when it should be on the actual music.

Assuming the piece is rearranging the source substantially, the mix does have some good ideas and I could see it turning out well, but it needs a lot more work from this form.

NO

[Vig]

I agree with larry, it relies too much on the sample, which has very little to do with the sims.

the music that is here is cool, but it's underdeveloped. you could get away with the sample if you put a little more work into the music.


NO