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I liked the mixfloods. I'm biased. There wasn't enough Kirby material in the submission's box to do a 5-mix flood, but at the least, we posted a Kirby arrangement by Jorito shortly after Iwata-san's passing. I generally pick the floods to fit what's already approved and available, but if we had enough in the hopper, I'd enjoy a modern game flood (basically Xbox 360/PS3 and newer). The most important thing is keeping the categories reasonably broad, e.g. high-level genre, obscure games (NOT just from 1 platform), a generation, indie games, a popular company. Keep in mind, a lot of the theme suggestions in the thread are just way too restrictive. We generally do 5-mix groups, though you saw we had a couple of 2-mix pairs also. Always a fun, albeit challenging month.

First of all, welcome to the game music studies forum! This is a short sticky to help differentiate the purpose of this forum from other places on the site where we all discuss music. First, this is not a replacement for talking about game music in the Community forum. If you think the music to game X is awesome/horrible/hilarious, that's great! Taking that element out of the Community forum isn't anyone's goal, nor should it be. Instead, this subforum exists for us to help describe why and how we have certain reactions to music, and to ask questions when we don't yet have that understanding. Sometimes it might be what the music is doing in the context of something else -- gameplay, art direction, etc. Sometimes it might be something neat about how the music is constructed or orchestrated. Sometimes it might be how the music relates to other pieces of game, film, or art music. Occasionally, answering these open-ended questions to your satisfaction requires the use of some specific terminology. Feel free to throw around whatever jargon you see fit, but do keep in mind that not everyone is going to have the same background that you do -- this is especially true of game music, where some crowd of folks will know game terms and won't know music terminology and vice versa. Language helps us be precise, but it also isolates us into niche communities that are all part of the same larger world of games, so keep that in mind when you post. In short, be accepting and respectful of those who don't share the same body of knowledge that you do -- you likely have a lot to learn from them.

only 9 rounds truth I've had very well with you, for this is the best 2 months of my life, since I became the account in OCReMix Forums first I felt a little shy because many people are not in my country (Chilean) and I used translator because my English is bad but moderately and acostubre me .... I want to congratulate them for their enormous effort and people who suffered were there but never gave up it makes me happy, as Mr. Shariq "DarkeSword" Ansari says "In this competition there are only winners," this has been comment will thank me for reading I want to mourn but my tears dried

I think maybe instrumentation plays into it too. You generally don't hear a lot of brass in town themes unless the town is very specifically a regal kind of castle town. I think that what you've got in Prontera and a lot of Final Fantasy and Tales of town themes is a focus on woodwinds as leads. Maybe oboes, flutes, and clarinets evoke a kind of idyllic feeling?

Round 9 music is up. Voting thread tomorrow. Sleepy now. http://darkesword.com/compos/sfrg/Sigma%20Fortress%20Remix%20Gauntlet%20-%20Round%209%20(Sigma%20Stage%202%20%5BX3%5D).zip

I've used this as an example of game music studies often as a speaker and organizer of panels, and I want to kick off this forum's discussion by putting this question to everyone. First, listen to what in my opinion is the most "towny" theme of any piece of game music: Ragnarok Online's "Theme to Prontera." I have suggested to music scholars and friends alike that I could play this piece of music for just about anyone with any amount of gaming experience and they'd know it's a town theme from some kind of Japanese RPG. My questions to you all: Why is this the case? Is there something quintessential about this particular piece of music, or would it work with, say, the Lufia II town theme just as easily? There's a lot of tonic going on, but imo there's more to it than that, and I'd love to pin some specific characteristics onto various jRPG town themes to help connect them. You could replace "town" with "battle," "field," etc. and it still mostly works -- the rest of the Ragnarok Online soundtrack continues to conform to this notion of musical location quite nicely. Other related questions to consider: Can we identify a piece of game music as "from a jRPG" more generally, and if so, what elements do those tracks share? Is it important to consider that first word in the jRPG acronym -- Japanese -- more strongly than the rest of this post has done? I'd love to hear some thoughts!

Yeah, I'm not getting "town theme" from this. To me it seems like it could function as a theme of reminiscence, being fairly sad, or a love theme, suggestive of remembrance. When I think "town theme", I imagine something that evokes the idea that it's supposed to be memorable---chimes, flutes, guitar(?), a catchy melody (I know, catchiness might be subjective), etc.---because you'll be coming back to or going through the town pretty often. Another way to say it is that perhaps, you would want to keep coming back to the town in-game just to listen to it. Some of the people above have said that it "makes you feel at home," which, yeah, it should IMO, if it's specifically a "home town" theme. If it feels too "lovey-dovey" though, like what I think this is, it almost but doesn't quite register for me as a town theme, but rather, as a piece about someone missing a loved one or something like that.

My take on this is that it doesn't sound like town music. To me, these kind of songs evoke the feeling of "home". They evoke a calm, welcoming feeling of coziness which make people think of a homely place. Since there aren't many games which have themes exclusively for indoor homes or houses, and rather have the town theme playing whether you are inside or outside, then people respond with "town" instead of "house" or "home" when asked where this theme belongs. To me, this same type of arrangement is used a lot in old sitcoms that were family-friendly. You could easily put this at the start of a "Growing Pains"-style of sitcom and it would fit right in. These sitcoms also revolve around being in a house, which most of the time have a welcoming and cozy appearance for the audience. In trying to identify the musical characteristics that evoke this kind of image in people's mind from this themes we could also analyze the themes used by this kind of sitcoms as well.

Well aren't we all glad that I ended up with Crystal Snail? I'm happy with the amount of vocal love that this compo got. However, if this compo has taught me anything it's that I am becoming a busy man. I had barely any time for anything through its duration. University is kicking me in the balls and I still have one more year (hopefully honours).

It's an older thread from a few years ago that fits the new forum we've created. BardicKnowledge is the moderator for this new forum which will be focusing on ludomusicology, and Gario's theoretical analysis of certain VGM pieces fits the goal of this forum. Ryan (Bardic) will be updating this forum tomorrow with a goals/guidelines post about what types of threads belong in here, but the gist of it is that this forum is dedicated to a more academic discussion of existing VGM, be it historical, analytical, etc.

That is, indeed, a great soundtrack. Really digging the ASGORE theme, myself.

The most important thing I learned in this compo is how to get ideas down fast and that I should never spend a ton of time tweaking minor things before writing the entire song structure.

Great work you two! And nice to see streifig posted here finally Btw, if anyone wants more Marshall Art awesomeness, their shows at last two Magfests were pretty damn great.

That's hard to believe, since I saw your initial Maverick selection: 1) Crystal Snail 2) Crystal Snail 3) Crystal Snail 4) Crystal Snail 5) Crystal Snail In my case, I never played any MMX game (nor Megaman for that matter), so I didn't have any real connection with these Mavericks. I started out with Gravity Beetle as 'okay, I can work with this' and that hasn't changed that much I guess, since I still find the first half of the track a bit weird and still like the second part Anyway, good stuff, looking forward to the tracks for the final round!

"Metroid Prime" coming to a theater near you, Summer 2016.

Amazing album! My absolute favorite are (in no particular order) You and I A rose in the storm fixations vamo alla django in the hall of the gangster king save the queen to be forgotten freyas theme doomed lovers zero world ambitious whispers

Episode 4 is up, dedicated to Sega. Features interviews with Hiroshi Kawaguchi (early arcade works) and Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage).