Liontamer

djp's too busy at work today (pwnt), so you're likely going to eat your beard, but the release is scheduled for tomorrow/ASAP and we're getting everything into place on my side. Sorry for the wait, y'all, real life is a B!

http://ocremix.org/info/Credits

Hopefully someone got some footage!

Well played.

Waltz time. http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01459/ The tempo here is too fast to dance to, unless you time your moves for every 6 beats rather than every 3.

No idea why this mix ended up being polarizing, when it's obvious it has so much creativity and emotion behind it. There are aspects that could be improved in the execution (as were pointed out in our votes), but those were minor in the big picture. The vocals definitely weren't one of those things. The Radiohead comparison made all the sense in the world. Whether a mix represents the mood or story of the game it's arranging makes no difference to how the judges vote. But that said, the backstory and imagery behind the mix completely justify the risky choices made here and add another unique layer of enjoyment. The super extended intro and build. The minimalism. The vocals. Everything Neil did here comes together with such a synergy. Very, very cool.

Beatdrop is here to PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE WITH SOUND! This is one of the most badass, hyper-compressed, head-exploding tracks to EVER grace OC ReMix. This track is AWESOME. And the way Dain fleshed out the theme made me completely forget how unbelievably barebones and spartan that source tune was until I revisited it. An absolutely amazing, transformative job on this.

Such an awesome take. And IIRC that's a Garageband loop that opens up the track. Wherever the loop was from, it fits well. Light jazz really suits Chun-Li's theme, though I would have never expected it. Along with the AWESOME synth writing, and fun comping, the ideas in this mix really shine and are such a great example of the creative interpretation that makes artists like Malcos & RTF and the community at large so great.

Uh oh, fellas, get your lady and turn the lights down LOOOOOOW! Again, awesome job on this to both Hemo and analoq. I'm feelin' the flow.

Yep, not a groundbreaking arrangement, but the bar for interpretation was a lot lower at the time with OCR being less than a year old. That said, Chris did a great job achieving a more personalized, unique sound for the theme, which is why it earned its place in ye olden days. A conservative, but still fun spin on a classic.

All this harping on fadeouts here. "OMG, U CAN"T DOO THAT!" That's such an overblown criticism. /shakes fist The pizz strings were definitely the money shot here (awesome writing, and I loved the delay effect on 'em), but this was another mix I ended up enjoying a lot back in 2002 as I went through the entire OCR collection from A to Z to not miss out on any cool mixes. I didn't know Super R-Type's soundtrack, but once I heard the original "Solo Sortie," I loved it. An amazingly catch source tune. The instrumental choices did kind of take some of the groove and emotion out of this compared to the original, but there's no rule against that when the aim is to present something interpretive and different. I thought Beatdrop pulled off a more desperate-sounding take that gave off the imagery of a chase scene in a futuristic space shooter game. The approach works just fine for me. Nice work!

(Arguably) a bit too long, but as I said in my vote, LOVE IT! This is how you do a lot with a little and go the expansive instrumentation route of adding more parts to supplement a short, simplistic source tune. Criminally under-appeciated.

Damn, how'd I not comment on this? Short and sweet, this is an excellent jazz interpretation of a great theme. I'm partial to the sax performance, as some of the synth attacks (if you will) during that solo sounded a bit too quantized and stiff, but the overall arrangement pieced together nicely and flowed well.

Forget these haters. What this track lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for in fun. Mattias understands that, unlike these other dum-dums. It's straightforward (and by now, dated), but it's also infectiously happy and groovy. Anyone saying otherwise has a cold, unfeeling heart. I also don't agree at all that this mix isn't "a promising sign of what OverClocked Remix would become." Along with several other earlier tracks, djp's posting of this set a precedent where we don't have bias against any game music being represented, no matter how obscure. That is what we call brilliant.

This was definitely one of my old gold mixes back in 2002. When I listened through each and every mix at the time, this was one of the ones I enjoyed that was from a soundtrack I wasn't familiar with. The mechanical piano that opened things up shows its age, but otherwise I thought this had the chill aspect represented well. The Pancake Chef is definitely a talent who I wish stuck around to realize his full potential. Hopefully, he's still making music out there somewhere.

I poop on these debbie downer reviews. There were no major flaws here, so all that "*YAWWWWWWN*" nonsense needs to GO. The structure's very purposeful, regardless of whether a lazy listener doesn't see the bigger picture of the arrangement. And as I noted in my vote way back, DAYUM what a finish. Great changeup to pick things up and end the piece strongly. A very under-appreciated mix.

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuper chillaxed. The dynamics are subtle, but I've always enjoyed the mood of this one.

I've always avoided those because they end up feeling dated in a few years, or even less than 1 year, but that's just my personal opinion.

http://soundcloud.com/ambient-tribe/forest-temple-ambient-tribe - Also sampled "Prayer" with 0 credit. Soundcloud has copyright infringement notification steps, but it has to be done directly by the artists since they are the copyright holders of the arrangements themselves.

Looks like the guy you were neck and neck with was just scamming his way to all those votes. I put his tactics on blast on the Toyota FB page, so hopefully they see it. I'm not mad at him, but it obviously was against the spirit of the contest.

Already covered.

That's all wrong and speculative. You're even allowed to use automated systems in a way that doesn't exceed what a human can do, and aren't used to otherwise violate other aspects of the Terms of Service. As far as who we send friend invites to, it's people who have commented on several years' worth OC ReMix videos not uploaded by us, VGM fans, and gamers, not random people. Some people don't care enough about OC ReMixes or game music, don't know us by name, or are extremely private about friend invites, even though they've liked OCR or VGM fan videos, so that's bound to happen. For example, with 25YEARLEGEND out, we're sending friend invites to Zelda music fans, because they're more likely to give the album a chance. I'd like to think that makes sense. That said, friend invites had nothing to do with the suspension, and we only send bulletins about music and community news. We only send private messages to individual users, and don't do video sharing. What we were told by people who were able to look a little more into it was that our account got suspended after a "false positive" report about our video content. That also explains why a couple of days after the account was restored, we had a single video taken down for the exact same spam/scam/deceptive commercial content reasoning ( ). We immediately appealed that and had it restored in a couple of days as well.My hunch (and it's only a hunch) is that someone on YouTube reported a ton of our videos at once and the sum total of that led to an immediate suspension by way of their automated system. Again, that's a guess, but that all I can infer based on the later video takedown right after the suspension. The Twitter campaign idea we got from @Problogger's own channel takedown also helped a lot in showing that we had a fanbase that could vouch for the videos being music and nothing spammy, scammy or commercially deceptive. We aren't advertising "making money from working at home," or anything remotely like that. There are also at least 3 people at Google who are OCR fans who helped us immensely with addressing the improper takedown, and making sure our appeals didn't fall on deaf ears at YouTube. THANK YOU, Googlers (AND MAGFest for the additional help)!

In-game dialogue and spoken material isn't musical, so really what's limited is sampling original game music, and thus extensively direct sampling music that you yourself didn't write and create. Dialogue sampling is fine. (Just keep it mind that it doesn't count as arrangement of source music.) djp extensively sampled in-game dialogue for his most recent mix from Crush: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02211/

Heavy sampling of the original game music, whether it be the instrumental or vocal lines, is discouraged. We look at it on a case by case basis, but the standards have been tightened since the days of http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00191/. I'm just one judge, but IMO if an arrangement leans on direct sampling as a crutch to provide connections to the source material, it's an easy NO. IMO, if you direct sample original game music, 1) it can't be for a long period of time, and 2) if you removed the sampling entirely, the arrangement still would have incorporated the source material more than enough to pass.

I'm listening to the revised version, FYI, yet all of this (emphasis added on the dealbreaker) is still right. I'm OK with the source usage, and the arrangement has potential. Small detail, but that little snap added to the core beat from :45-1:42 ends up too downplayed after more elements comes in, which is one reason why the beat ended up sounding too vanilla and flimsy. Vig is right that the dynamics work fine for the genre. The volume and the energy is implied by the composition, but the sound design was too bland and the soundscape was still too messy. For example, at 4:14, the EQ is screwed up so the source melody sounds like it's being swallowed by the padding instead of just being in the background. Clearly, it's meant to be a background player, since that melody purposefully fades in and out. But when it's loud, it's not supposed to be cluttered with the pads. You just have frequencies running into each other and it's muddying up the soundscape and making the parts difficult to distinguish. I don't have any big gripe if it passes, but this deserves (yet) another pass on the production to tweak some things, so everything properly sounds full and separated. NO (borderline)