Liontamer

Studio, by far. I'm not much of a fan of live performances/concerts in general. For VGM, that's not the case, but when it's a question of whether I'd rather hear a mainstream act live or with post-production, post wins easily. I'd rather hear everything polished.

Happy Birfday!

Yeah, I'll chime in way after the fact and co-sign with this. I'm REALLY surprised this got so many YESs when this was extremely repetitive, and not dynamic or evolving significantly at all. The 1:34 cut-and-paste structure of the arrangement (with a quiet synth line being the only major addition) was really boring & disappointing, only to be retread AGAIN at 3:32. The drum loop got tired and should have been changed up within the course of the track. What's here was a decently fleshed out WIP with a good starting take on the source, but it's not nearly developed enough. NO (resubmit)

The shaker was too loud and mechanical, the tambourine performance sounded too rigid and fake, the piano also sounded too rigid. The timing just sounded sloppy when the beats coincided with the melody. The way the vox came in at 4:09, it doesn't get more n00b than that with the timing, it's just embarrasing. The atmosphere's not the worst thing I've ever heard, but that was the only thing that wasn't a complete mess. This was not polished or cohesive at all. NONE of the textures formed sounded entirely purposeful, they all just sounded careless and sloppy. Besides the issues with the samples, sequencing & textures, :36-2:36 & 3:38-4:09 had nothing to do with the source, as far as I could tell. That would be more than half the track with no direct connection to the source material, which is too much. OA/DA/DS, what were y'all smoking? I don't want whatever you guys had, because it's clearly bad shit. Sorry Alex, but I'm hearing nothing positive that didn't seem a result of dumb luck, and what little DID click didn't click for long. There's a way to effectively pull off a haphazard structure, and this is not it. Take the advice of the NOs to polish this up so that this actually locks together and half the sounds don't sound cheap, mechanical, mistimed and out of place. NO (resubmit)

Except, that would be wrong. Awful reasoning. "It sounds Final Fantasy-esque." Well, congratulations, now any similar sounding track deserves to be considered a viable ReMix with that kind of slippery slope. When nearly 2/3rds of the track has little-to-nothing to do with the source, the source material is not dominant. It felt like it was being paid lip service and that's was it. Deia's breakdown was pretty much mine. I had :02-:26, :37-:40, 1:35-2:00, 3:11-3:43 as areas of source usage. That was 84 seconds out of a 3:43-long track, so about 36.7% source usage. The source tune's not even close to being the focus here. The track, of course, sounds great in a vacuum. However, YESing this would be arbitrary and completely inconsistent with the guidelines. NO

It is the first ReMix for a game where the platform as specified by the ReMixer was PS3. We typically go by the ReMixer's preference when it comes to cross-platform games.

I remember all the thread-fighting like, "It was good, but it wasn't THAT good". Except it's Hiroki Kikuta's favorite Secret of Mana OC ReMix. He told djp and I first, then when Harmony showed up 10 minutes later, he sang some of the guitar parts and told him the track was "fantastic." http://twitter.com/Hiroki_Kikuta/status/20039622078 Winner winner, chicken dinner!

Don't do it! He'll take you up on it!

EDIT: U.S. Residents only. Apologies for anyone from abroad wanting to enter. Though if you send it, it wouldn't be used for the contest, you never know who'd listen to it, so it may not be a lost cause to send in something anyway. - Larry FYI guys, Capcom asked us to let you know about this contest, which has an August 11th deadline. Sorry for the short notice, but we want to make sure you still know about it and get your entry in! http://www.bioniccommando.com/rearmed2/

Trenches Original Soundtrack [OCRO-0002] Trenches developed by Thunder Game Works (http://thundergameworks.com) for the iPhone Track 1 composed and produced by Troy Keyn, additional orchestration by Kenneth Keyn (a.k.a. Abadoss) Tracks 2-9 composed and produced by Kenneth Keyn, additional instrumentation and performance by Troy Keyn Contact: abadoss@yahoo.com Composer's comments: Trenches brings together music reminiscent of the European nationalist composers - prevalent in the years leading up to World War I - with electric guitars and modern percussion. My brother, Troy Keyn, was initially approached about composing the soundtrack on Trenches on his own. Troy decided to bring me into the project because of my experience with orchestration and because it would be an incredible opportunity for me in my career pursuits. Michael Taylor, CEO of Thunder Game Works, charged us with the task of creating a soundtrack that would enhance the game, without sacrificing substantial and meaningful composition. I am responsible for the primary composition and orchestration on all tracks, except "Awaiting Orders" - which Troy composed - and "Promotion" - which is just a drumroll. Troy recorded the percussion and guitars and is responsible for the final sound production. I used Finale 2009 to compose each track and Garritan Personal Orchestra and Finale's built-in MIDI SoftSynth for the orchestral samples. Troy used Sonar for recording and final production. "Awaiting Orders" -- Troy wanted to compose at least one piece on the soundtrack and chose to do the menu/title music. There are a couple versions of this track that Troy tried out - one sounding very much like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. In the end, this version won out. I made a few orchestration changes to give it fuller sound, but this is ultimately Troy's track. "Have at Thee!" -- This little intro plays every time you start a new game. The difficulty in writing this fanfare was avoiding anything cheesy or cliché. In addition, it's a fanfare of war, so I had to consider what might be heard on a battlefield and embellish it a bit. I decided to get in as much dissonance as I could to represent the cacophony of war. On the technical side, I had to process the track with Finale's MIDI SoftSynth, as Garritan was unable to adequately perform the quick articulations I had written. "The Engine of War" -- This track took the longest time to develop out of all the tracks. I started out by first figuring out the main theme - roughly at 0:43. After that, I simply composed a ton of different sections that could be dropped or picked up and developed into the final track. The main trick was finding a balance between the repetitive nature of looping a track and wanting to have a recognizable theme. "Dead of Night" -- Michael wanted the losing music to clearly let the player know they were in trouble. Troy and I decided that something dark and more frantic would be the best choice. I borrowed a section from the second movement of my first symphony as the basis for this piece. While I was reluctant to use it, the section worked too well to ignore it. "Der Scharfschütze" -- I wanted this track to be as dark and heavy as I could get it to reflect utter defeat. I felt an organ would be best suited for the task. Just for fun, I wrote the organ part in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach to represent the Germans winning. "Battle at Dawn" and "Victory at Dawn" -- Both pieces are based on the first and last sections - respectively - from a piece I wrote in October 2005, also called "Victory at Dawn", for the Thematic Original Music Competition. I played this piece for Michael, as a possibility for the winning and victorious music, uncertain if it would be a good idea since I wrote it with cavalry in mind at the time. He thought it was a perfect fit, so it's in the game. "Iron Crosses" -- The credits proved challenging for me, as I only had 0:50 to work with - which I found out after I'd worked on a full version. Michael liked what I'd written, but it needed to be cut down significantly. After a number of edits, I was still barely too long. Troy had to find a spot where it wasn't jarring to cross-fade between two sections and make the cut before it came down below 0:50. "Achievement" -- This track was surprisingly difficult for something so short. Michael wanted this fanfare to be simple and to avoid cluttering up the soundscape. I tried various number of horns, different chords, all sorts of different articulations, and rhythms before landing on the current version through a lot of trial and error. As with "Have at Thee!", this track was processed in Finale's MIDI SoftSynth. In this case, the trumpet samples just sounded better for some reason. "Promotion" -- Yup. It's a drumroll. My thanks to: My brother, Troy Keyn, for giving me this opportunity and working with me on this project. Michael Taylor, for putting together a fantastic game and believing in us. Jennifer Cameron and Jim Day, for helping me find the tools and confidence that made this possible. Larry "Liontamer" Oji, for encouraging me to release this as an EP and for putting up with my delays. David "djpretzel" Lloyd, for creating and maintaining a community that I am proud to belong to. zircon, bLiNd, DarkeSword, Mazedude, OA, Level 99, audio fidelity, and Josh Whelchel for even considering the crazy request that I made of you, let alone actually attempting to pull it off. You guys are awesome, fantastic people. And everyone at OverClocked ReMix, for being damn cool... P.S. - I do accept commissions. Kenneth Edward Keyn abadoss@yahoo.com http://abadoss.net Thunder Game Works: http://thundergameworks.com http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thunder-Game-Works/100686873319234 http://twitter.com/thundergamewrks

Yeah, it's happened before, a game rip not existing. The few cases of it that have happened, the submitter ripped the track themselves and just hosted or attached it without having to be prompted. If they didn't already do that, we just email them as ask. As zircon just mentioned to me in #judges, "If we don't have access to the source, we can't judge it, so, it then becomes remixer's responsibility to provide the source". djp also added, "The policy is also case-by-case for rejecting games due to extreme obscurity/"indie"-ness." So if the game is just someone's Newgrounds game with original music, but the game isn't mega-popular, then we'd pass on it. I supposed we can add a sentence to the guidelines on that, but I honestly can't say I've seen the need in 6 years of being a panel member. The worst case scenario is just that the submitter can't find the original audio and we have to do the legwork. We've yet to have something submitted from something that absolutely can't be tracked down.

Already planned. It'll be between the "previous" and "next" links on the writeup pages. Perhaps we need to have it in more places than that.

Birthday mix! I wonder who did dat?

When are you going to learn how to spell sephfire? Please be More Ashamed of Self for a few moments. Congrats to Dan on the excellent news, which I'll be plugging in full force tomorrow after I get some sleep!

Never heard of 'em!

This one's now flagged for Mod Review.

Which thread?

Nah, no it's not.

The hate. It's coming.

Ha! I was about to say...

YouTube no longer uses a 5-star rating system, they use Like/Dislike. That said, we originally disallowed ratings on all videos. In hindsight, it was a complete mistake and ignorant of how YouTube works. I re-enabled them because YouTube's sharing and searchability is primarily based on people "Liking" videos. Disabling the ability to do that drastically decreased the ability of the songs to spread around and reach more people. Also, anyone could go to our YT channel and sort by most viewed or top rated, which can't be disabled, otherwise we would. Whatever's most viewed or top rated on our YouTube channel is more a result of nostalgia bias & our subscriber base at the time the vid was uploaded rather than anything objective, so ultimately we chose to live with it, realizing those sorting methods don't actually reflect what's "best".

That's not objective, that's still very subjective. There's always bias toward game, genre, composer, how recent or old the mix is, just a bunch of things that wouldn't make any top 10/100/1000 list worth anything. The only real benefit is a discussion starter and something that would be shared & debated, but and that's at the expense of other ReMixers & ReMixes that wouldn't be on such a list.

I didn't remember it was from DoD, but it's a revision from the DoD version regardless, and not the same one.

Yeah, you're weird. That's not accurate at all. Oh wait, you're right. It's totally depressing hearing "HEY, it's the party song. Party's over here. C'MON!"

I can only answer the first part, but, no, that source tune would be outside what we could accept. It has to be music created for the medium of a game.