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Introduction Past and future collide as two factions clash in the greatest musical battle the world has ever seen. Armored heroes meet metal warriors on the battlefield of wailing guitars, dirty drops, and soaring strings. Get ready, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for Robots vs. Knights! Current News MUSIC FOR THE FINAL BATTLE IS UP! Round 9: One vs. One Final Battle Team Robot Team Knight Squad Artist Source vs Source Artist Squad Rush Squad Gario Ballade vs Wandering Travelers JohnStacy Armor Squad Rush Squad Starpheonix Enker vs Shield Knight GCJ Armor Squad Rush Squad Thirdkoopa Mercury vs Shovel Knight Jorito Relic Squad Tango Squad Chiwalker Uranus vs Polar Knight theshaggyfreak Shovel Squad Tango Squad Yami Pluto vs Plague Knight akalink Armor Squad Tango Squad Ronald Poe Mars vs Propeller Knight Anorax Shovel Squad Beat Squad Trism Saturn vs Spectre Knight PlanarianHugger Shovel Squad Beat Squad Xenonetix Punk vs King Knight Dewey Newt Relic Squad Beat Squad MegaDrive Venus vs Mole Knight Arrow Relic Squad Remixes are due Sunday, June 18th at 9 PM EDT. All competitors will compose and produce remixes that combine both sources into one, cohesive piece of music. Collaboration with teammates is allowed, but the primary artists should be the competitors listed in the table above. All competitors are encouraged (but not required) to share WIPs with teammates in order to get constructive feedback. Good luck and happy mixing. A lot of team discussion is happening on the OC ReMix Discord, be sure to make yourselves available. As always, all participants (competitors and voters) are expected to adhere to the Competitions Code of Conduct. Scoreboard Battle Team Knight Team Robot Ballade vs Shovel Knight 2 0 Uranus vs Propeller Knight 0 2 Saturn vs Plague Knight 2 0 Enker vs Polar Knight 0 2 Pluto vs King Knight 0 2 Punk vs Shield Knight 2 0 Mercury vs Spectre Knight 0 2 Mars vs Mole Knight 0 0 Venus vs Wandering Travelers 0 2 Boss Battle vs Tinker Knight 0 9 Total 6 19 Teams Team Knight Artist Source Squad Anorax Propeller Knight Shovel Squad theshaggyfreak Polar Knight Shovel Squad PlanarianHugger Spectre Knight Shovel Squad akalink Plague Knight Armor Squad GCJ Shield Knight Armor Squad JohnStacy Wandering Travelers Armor Squad Jorito Shovel Knight Relic Squad Dewey Newt King Knight Relic Squad Arrow Mole Knight Relic Squad Team Robot Artist Source Squad Gario Ballade Rush Squad Starpheonix Enker Rush Squad Thirdkoopa Mercury Rush Squad Chiwalker Uranus Tango Squad Yami Pluto Tango Squad Ronald Poe Mars Tango Squad Trism Saturn Beat Squad Xenonetix Punk Beat Squad MegaDrive Venus Beat Squad Releases Round 1: Squad vs. Squad Block 1 Round 2: Squad vs. Squad Block 1 Round 3: Squad vs. Squad Block 1 Round 4: Boss Battle 1 Rounds 5-8: Block 2 Round 9: One vs. One Final Battle About Robots vs. Knights (RvK) is a Team vs. Team competition. It’s a new format that I’ve been developing for a couple of months now, combining elements of the head-to-head battles of the Remix Battle tournaments (GRMRB, etc.) with the teamwork aspect of Gauntlet tournaments (WCRG, etc.). Here’s the full breakdown of how it’s going to work. Sign-ups 18 people sign up. I’ll divide everyone into 2 teams of 9. I’ll be assigning people to their respective teams in order to ensure a balanced competition. Each team will be given a pool of sources to select from. Team members will decide how to assign sources themselves. I won’t be running a draft. Team Robots will be given a selection of sources from the Mega Man Game Boy games. Team Knights will be given a selection of sources from Shovel Knight. Each team will form 3 squads of 3 members each. The squad will be your group that you’ll rotate with throughout the competition, similar to the teams from gauntlet competitions. Squad-vs-Squad Battle 1 The first 3 rounds are squad-vs-squad battles. Each squad will decide their remixing order for the first three rounds and provide that to me. Each round, I’ll post 3 match-ups between squads on opposing teams. Each squad’s artist will submit a remix that uses their selected source and the opposing squad’s selected source. At the end of each round, artists send their remixes to me, I’ll put the tracks up, and people will vote. Each victory will earn points for the team. Boss Battle 1 The 4th round is a boss battle. I’ll post a boss theme source. All 6 squads will submit a remix that combines the boss theme with one of the squad’s sources. Any member of the squad can be the primary artist. The primary artist is not required to use their own personal source; they can use any of their squad’s 3 sources. At the end of the round, voters will select their 3 favorite remixes, unranked. The team that has the most selections at the end of the voting period will choose between two rewards: a chunk of points, or the right to counterpick in the next block of squad-vs-squad battles. Break 1 While votes are being collected for Boss Battle 1, we will take a week-long break, using the time to review remixes from past rounds. Squad-vs-Squad Battle 2 The next 3 rounds are squad-vs-squad battles. If a team has the right to counterpick, they’ll be provided the opposing team’s remixing orders first before determining their remixing orders. I will still determine the actual match-ups based on the updated remixing orders. The 3 rounds of squad-vs-squad battles are conducted as before. Boss Battle 2 The 8th round is another boss battle, conducted in the same way as the previous boss battle round. Break 2 While votes are being collected for Boss Battle 2, we will take a week-long break, using the time to review remixes from past rounds. One-vs-One Battle The 9th and final round is comprised of 9 one-on-one battles. If a team has earned the right to counterpick from the previous round, they’ll be allowed to determine the 9 match-ups; rematches of previous battles from the squad-vs-squad blocks are not allowed. If no team has counterpick, I’ll determine the match-ups. Each artist will be responsible for writing a remix that uses their selected source and their opponent’s source. At the end of the round, remixes will be submitted and voted on. The team with the most victories will earn a large chunk of points. The team with the most points at the end of the competition wins. Submissions and File Name Rules Submission All entries must be sent to me (DarkeSword) via PM on the forums. Please include your team name, squad name, and the round number in the subject line of your PM. I encode all MP3s myself, so please send me your submissions in 16bit, 44.1KHz WAV format. Don’t send MP3s. Please do not use MediaFire, RapidShare, or any other ad-ridden public sharing site as a host for your entry. There are many better options you can and should be using to host your music. I recommend Dropbox or SoundCloud. Make sure your files are downloadable. File Names If you worked on the remix without the help of your teammates: Team Robots - DarkeSword - Be Cool, Man (Ice Man vs. Polar Knight).wav If one team member helps you with your entry in a significant way and you want to give them credit, add their name as follows: Team Robots - DarkeSword feat. Neblix - Be Cool, Man (Ice Man vs. Polar Knight).wav If more than one team members help you with your entry in a significant way and you want to give them credit, add their names as follows: Team Robots - DarkeSword feat. Neblix, Liontamer - Be Cool, Man (Ice Man vs. Polar Knight).wav Notes Make sure you’re using proper capitalization for team names and character names. Put spaces on both sides of the hyphens between Team Name, Artist, and Title. If your remix’s title has special punctuation that you can’t include in the file name (e.g. \ / : \* ? " < > |), please let me know in your submission PM so I can include the correct title in the tags. Please follow the file name format exactly; I use the file names to make sure that all the metadata is correct when I tag the MP3s. It’s a massive pain sitting there renaming, re-spacing, and reformatting so that everything works properly with mp3tag’s file-name-to-tag tools, and ultimately it means that when you all do it right, I can get the music up for voting way faster. Voting Rules and Guidelines Voting is conducted publicly in the Public Voting forum. Every week, a thread will be created for the most recently completed round of remixing. Because RvK has two different types of rounds (squad-vs-squad and boss battle), please make sure you read and follow the instructions in the voting thread. Things to keep in mind when voting: The most important thing to consider when voting is how well the remix incorporates and arranges both themes. Production and enjoyability should also be considered, but this is primarily an arrangement competition. Everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to vote, including competitors. Everyone must adhere to the Competitions Code of Conduct. FAQ This is pretty interesting, but why are you doing this instead of just another Tournament or Gauntlet? The philosophy behind RvK is to create an environment where more artists will be working together to help and learn from each other. I want to tap into the spirit of teamwork and collaboration in a bigger way this tournament. Rather than just having two friends working on tracks with you week to week, you’ll have eight other teammates that you can use as resources. What do you mean by resources? In the past, I’ve tried to limit the amount of collaboration allowed in competitions because I wanted to make sure that people were putting forth a concerted effort to grow as artists on their own. While we’ll still be adhering to the idea of a Primary Artist for each remix in RvK, some of the limitations will be relaxed. Artists will be able to get help from all 8 of their teammates. This includes production help, session instruments, and arrangement feedback. The Primary Artist will still be responsible for the bulk of the work that goes into a remix, but they’ll have a lot more help in getting that remix polished up. How many remixes do I have to write? You will be responsible for at least 3 remixes: 2 remixes from the squad-vs-squad battles, and 1 remix in the final battle. You may also be responsible for any of the boss battle remixes, but that will be up to your team. Why can’t we choose our own teams? I’m going to determine the teams based on skill level in order to ensure fairness across the board. I want both teams to have a healthy balance between novices and veterans. Do we get to pick team names or squad names? No. The two teams will be known as Team Robots and Team Knights. I will also be setting the squad names which will be revealed once we get the competition started. I really want to be on Team Robots/Team Knights! Can you put me on that team? I’ll consider your preference but I can’t guarantee anything. Notes Stardroid sprites used in Team Robot sigs were colorized by onyx801.

Who is going to MAGLabs next month? http://magfest.org/maglabs It is the newly-named MAGFest Classic at the old location! Besides the elevators, the hotel was super sweet, and the smaller crowd it holds is a lot better for general chilling. Nothing can take the place of the legit main MAGFest, but the theme this year is sort of like Portal, and features a lot of experimentation. OverClocked ReMix is going to be there as well, experimenting with some new and cool panel ideas. Also, OverClocked community people performing there: DJ FLEXSTYLE OVERCLOCKED UNIVERSITY STARGATE Confirmed OverClocked community attendees: Arrow Bahamut DarkeSword Detective Tuesday djpretzel DragonAvenger Flexstyle Geoffrey Taucer Level 99 Neblix OA theshaggyfreak Tom the Drummer If you are coming to but aren't on the list, let me know so I can add you!

Oh cool, that's a good ideaaaaaaaaWAITAMINUTE

Hear hear!

I remember hearing some of this before. I really like the atmosphere.

I think Trism should vote for mine, and I'll vote for his a few minutes after the deadline

it was fun last night playing league - i'd definitely do some more of that.

Looking at the accepted mixes list, there's like two or three FF9 floods, Castlevania flood, Jorito flood, FPS flood, obscure/under-ReMixed RPG flood, unReMixed games flood, Advance Wars miniflood, Vampire Killer/Jorito/pun title miniflood...

I did play a lot of Donkey Kong Country, Mario Kart and Street Fighter II with my mom as a 7 year old...

If some people want to get an Overwatch competitive team going, I'd be all for it. Season 2 is coming up and I always had fun the few times I played with full teams. Would be nice to have a regular list of people to queue up with.

I hope this is the right place to post this. I know that the songs are not remixes, but i think the remastering made some songs sound a bit different and in my opinion, better (i also made some songs to end in a nice way). That is, if you have a 5.1 setup of course (use VLC and set the audio device in 5.1 if it doesn't change automatically. KMP mixes the channels wrong on my setup). Don't try these on a 2 channel setup. More info and links here: The video is just a stereo LQ preview. Read the description for the proper, remastered files.

Well, going in a dungeon... sometimes you just don't have a choice. Tho in LoZ, you can totally decide to fill up your hearts and go fully rested... But I again, I wanted to drive the impression that you're on that last sliver of heart and that any hits could be your last! (I think your suggestion is pretty neat, I'll have to work on something and see if it's got that bite I'm looking for.) --- The guitar is the one variant that doesn't change in the whole track but I tend to agree with you, it just doesn't feel optimal. @ 1:35 The guitar does need some love... but again, the may all be due to the Triangle not being EQ'd at all (it's raw and it could have a huge impact on the guitar's range... I'll have to work on that. Thx for the heads up.) The 8bit stuff is louder indeed... but there's not supposed to be a huge disparity between the two. I'll work on that, thanks! The intro is actually related to what's next. Overworld, the sense of... we're actually playing this game, the steps going down the stairs and the Dungeon theme as in... stuff happens here. Thanks! I'm glad you like my homebrew! Metal Tendo, soon you can buy it at the corner store! The mix is one of the issues I must fix but like I said up above, it's hard to mix stuff with a pair of G35s alone. But I'll keep on trying until I actually have the perfect recipe! The guitar EQ sounds good on my end but I'll try to patch this up. I don't see anything wrong with the drums on the first part... but it might be because I have huge bias (I wrote the drums from scratch so... yeah, I'm biased.) Can you explain "Very stale" please ? Thank you, took me a while to write that solo, as simple as it may sound... it was a tough job! About expanding the track, it used to be longer but I decided to make cuts over the years... the extended version also had the GameOver theme at the end which I'm tempted to bring back but the first attempt just didn't sound so good... hence why I decided to cut it. Anyway, thanks for your output and suggestions! It's all highly appreciated!

Not a bad remake at all, IMO. With this sound and style, you could very easily turn this into a remix. The drums could be a more exciting, the bass it too quiet, and it's almost too slow in some parts (some bits sustained too long IMO), but I rather like the synth and guitar sounds you chose for this and the slower tempo gives it an almost laid-back feel when compared to the original, which to me is an interesting choice.

Making new friends as an adult after high school/college is actually really difficult. You're not put into situations where you're forced to interact with peers on a regular basis. For gaming friends though, I would suggest meetup.com. There always seems to be some kind of local board game group set up where you can go hang out with people and play board games. This can translate pretty easily into video games. You can also try to create your own gaming group. Maybe contact a local library and see if you can reserve a room with some TVs and set up a weekly gaming thing where folks can drop by and play some Halo. Also, and this is kind of obvious, but there's OC ReMix too. We're a pretty solid community of gamers. Lots of people are real-life friends because of OC ReMix. Not necessarily local, but I know I see my OCR friends almost monthly nowadays due to get-togethers and conventions. Plenty of folks in the community are playing games online like Overwatch, Hearthstone, Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, etc. We had a pretty active Team Fortress 2 community a few years ago, though I'm not sure how much people play that anymore. Your location says "nomadic." Where are you actually located? Maybe there's some OCR folks out near you.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before. Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

Alright, but if you want to indulge in the sound design, some of us wouldn't go into a dungeon with low health - that would happen after taking a bunch of hits in the first room. What I'm getting at here is a suggestion of adding a bunch of 'Link getting hit' sound effects to get to 'low health' (maybe 1:13ish?) then making that dreaded, awful beep lead into the solo. Just a thought. Yeah, I see I wrote 1:15 when I meant 1:35. I think it's actually a bit of muddiness in the low tone of the distortion. Now that I hear it again, I'm not sure volume would really fix this. I will say that the 8-bit stuff does seem louder than instrumentation, but this is likely design. Love this response.

Maybe listen to Banjo Tooie's version of the same source for some ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAw-ZXwUUTA

The intro could totally be removed but that would take away the context. Also, the misleading is totally intended, it's meant to be like that so... if you felt it was misleading it means I've done my job right! But why not ? Again, it sets the tone for something Epic... You're low on <3 and you're getting into the last dungeon of this forsaken game! Nothing more epic than to beat the heck out of a boss with a sliver of life left! And thank you, the solo was a pain in the ass but it's entirely worth it! There are a lot of mixing issues, I've had mixing issues since 2006 lol. I don't have access to quality speakers and I have no means to test it all... I'm stuck with an aging pair of G35s and so far, that's the best I managed to achieve. About the guitar... it sounds "OK" on my end but I'll increase the levels to see if I couldn't make it slightly more present without breaking the whole mix. Well, that can't be helped, I actually like using samples to express different moods and emotions, it's also a really cheap way to fill some voids and bridge riffs together. It's like duct tape, without it... the universe would crumble out! (or something like that!) You can always check my soundcloud... I don't post a lot on forums. Also... thank you for the feed-back, it's highly appreciated! I'm glad you liked the track, I'll have more soon!

No responses in almost a month? Guess I'll take a stab... This has got a really good drive to it, and I like the progression 'deeper and deeper into the rock' as the track goes on. A couple of things: Not sure the intro is needed. I get that you are building from 8-bit to heavy metal and the sample sets the mood of Link going into the dungeon from the world map, for sure, but I think it's distracting, if not misleading. IMO, the 'steps' should be all you need to start. The beeping, oh god, the beeping between 0:20-0:38. Please ... let's not put Link low on life at the beginning of this track. Like what you did with the tone at 1:32 though - cool little solo. There are some mixing issues; some instruments seem out of proportion with others. For example, I can't hear the intricacy of the guitar-work at 1:15 as well as I think I should. The various sound effects are irritating to me. Once again, I get the sound design, but they are a distraction from the piece IMO. These are all suggestions that are my opinion only. I really enjoyed this track, hope there is more to come.

The teams do matter a bit, of course, if you have one source that you'd like to try multiple approaches with. If you're Team Robots, for example, you'll get your one Mega Man source three times, and three Shovel Knight sources one time each.

Keep in mind, because of the way this competition is set up, nearly all of the remixes you write with include a Mega Man source and a Shovel Knight source. Being on the Robots team won't mean you'll only be remixing Mega Man tunes, and the same goes for the Knights team with Shovel Knight tunes.

I'm being stupid. Sign me up. My personal preference team wise is the shovel knight team, simply because i've done so much bloody mega man - aware and accept it is your decision tho

Hey guys; posted a callout for help with visual identity and branding for RvK over on my tumblr. Quoting here: As many of you know, I have pretty high standards for artwork on my projects (albums and competitions). I'm looking for someone with a very strong sense of good design. This is more than just a "draw some pictures" gig.

I'm excited

TBD