MindWanderer

I'm taking Brandon Strader's claim on Lament of Innocence off the list. I have no way of reaching him, no indication that he's started on anything, and no reason to believe he'll continue to contribute to OCR projects, especially ones this early on.

Nice to see some rap around here again! It's not my genre, but we've been pretty light on it for quite some time now. I'm hoping you can either pick up some arrangement and production skills to make full-fledged ReMixes, or collab with someone who already has those skills at some point. (Shameless plug: I could use some rap/hip-hop for the CastleMania project I'm working on, link in my sig. If you want to find someone to collab with on one of those tracks, or offer your services to someone who's already claimed a track, that would be pretty cool.)

AM2R 1.1 is now out, which apparently fixes the former of those two bugs. No mention of the latter. And fortunately you can import your old saves, and my current game just happens to be right before said suit upgrade, yay! Also there's a new endgame shortcut which should speed up 100% runs. I'm enjoying it immensely as well. It does have a few areas that are kind of large and empty, but the original Metroid 2 suffered from the same thing a bit. The difficulty is a bit spiky, and I've died to bosses way more than I'm used to in Metroid games (playing on the medium difficulty setting). A couple of them are also in large exploration sections, where if you run into them early in the section it'll be an incredibly difficult fight. There are also a couple of gimmicky sections that I didn't feel were particularly fun--I liked the ideas but the execution wasn't great. But overall, the only hints that this isn't a real Nintendo game, aside from the explanatory text, are the customization options, which are pretty extensive, and some of which wouldn't make sense on any Nintendo console. Absolutely professional quality, highly recommended.

Right, so if you're more a Shovel Knight fan (in general) than a Mega Man GB fan (in general), then your best bet might be to find one Mega Man source you really like, since you'll just be using that one, but several Shovel Knight sources which you don't get to choose at all.

Well... it shouldn't. But Square Enix has specifically objected to using their samples in the past, so OCR does not permit their use in accepted remixes. What individual game publishers might or might not find objectionable is entirely up to them.

djp actually did say that revenue is currently exceeding expenses, so technically OCR is profiting at the moment. I'm confident that this amount is small and is not being distributed to individuals, though, and will probably balance out before long. When OCR files for nonprofit status, it'll involve an extensive financial audit. If they pass, then all the fears about that should be allayed. My concern is that the game companies won't stand for this. If Square Enix wasn't happy about Balance and Ruin, I can't see how they'd be any happier about this. I do believe that from their perspective and a legal one, there's a difference between monetizing visits to a site that serves many functions and monetizing views of specific remixes.

Seeing as how the music is all downloadable for free in MP3 format, I don't see the big deal at all.

This isn't original music, but it's not a game remix either, so here it goes. I was asked to do a remix - an actual remix in the traditional sense, not a ReMix - of Shock! for a demo video. They wanted something shorter with some small tweaks, and that would possibly make it less likely to get a copyright flag if posted on YouTube. Remix: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19904158/OCR/Shock! EoW remix v1.mp3 Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXxGo1MvNls I've layered on some slightly different drums and some additional accompaniment and harmony, and a couple of effects, so I'm looking for production advice on that if you have any. If there's anything I can improve by way of EQ, compression, volume levels, anything like that. (I just noticed that the echo cuts off at the end, I'll definitely fix that.)

Thanks for letting me know, at least! Better than most have done. In other news, @FlameingDaethFearies has started work on Vampire Killer as the main theme of CastleMania, and I'm super stoked about that! They'll be perfect to get this thing kicked off right!

I've been a huge 2D Metroid fan all along. So many good memories. Getting horrendously lost in the original Metroid, and my friend getting so frustrated with it that he took out the cartridge and chucked it across the street. Going back later and mastering it, finally seeing what no-suit, no-Varia Samus looked like. That moment in Super Metroid when you descend through Old Tourian into Brinstar for the first time, and the whole epic descent into Lower Norfair. Finding secret areas in bizarre places in Super Metroid, and scouring it with my friends to find 100%. Finding out what the secret of the space station in Metroid Fusion was, and yeah, the terror of hiding from the SA-X, and then those two things combining in the final boss sequence. Wasn't that big a fan of Zero Mission--it was solid, but the way you couldn't explore the bulk of the map thoroughly until you reached the very end of the game took away a lot of the fun for me. And when I first tried Metroid Prime, I was complete rubbish at FPS's, so I found it horribly difficult and quit at the first miniboss, though now I have the Prime Trilogy downloaded and it's fairly high on my to-play list. AM2R looks amazing and I'm looking forward to it. Looks like it's already been DMCA'd, but it's not hard to find anyway.

I tried listening to several of these remixes, and what kills most of them for me is the kick. Spider Dance and Wario Land 2 were the worst offenders--that loud, high-pitched thwacking noise is actually painful to hear. The DKC2 one was pretty nice, I really liked the energy level and instrumentation, though I'm not familiar enough with the source to comment much on the arrangement. It seemed pretty repetitive to me, especially that repeating kettle drum line.

Also, Square Enix is the only company that demands a specific rule for OCR arrangements--that they include absolutely no audio sampled directly from their games--and they demanded the removal of all official Square Enix artwork from the site (which meant that when we had the random mascot thing, a whole bunch of them were Mega Man X but linked to a Square Enix character). You want a company that's cool with fan creations, look at Capcom (which has worked with many remix artists, including OCR, to directly sponsor and monetize their work, plus promoting fan projects like Street Fighter x Mega Man) or Sega (which promotes all kinds of fan creations, from games to art to music, including a remix podcast hosted by our own Rexy). But even those require a healthy amount of work of there's any money involved.

I don't have time to participate these days, but I'm excited to get some Game Boy Mega Man mixes out there. Criminally neglected.

Since I only got one snippet of music by the first check-in date, I'll leave this open for a while. I can only assume folks have other obligations, even though only Chernabogue is telling me anything. Once I get some more music or at least some feedback or updates from folks, I'll set another check-in date.

Hm, I haven't played anything more recent than Ruby, so didn't know about that. But... Team Rocket is basically the Pokemon Mafia. If Pokemon are essentially incapable of hurting humans, how does that even work? No one has any guns, but plain old fists (there are martial artists) would be perfectly adequate defense against that. Makes me wonder what Lt. Surge actually did in the war, other than just fly around.

Yeah, most game worlds are absolutely filled with violent death looming around every corner. Even gorgeous worlds like Wind Waker have monsters just everywhere. And most of them are either a medieval setting, which means no plumbing, no basic hygiene, not much entertainment (although healthcare would vary widely based on potions and whatnot) or dystopian sci-fi (with its own forms of scarcity). Pokemon would be a pretty decent choice. It's based on the modern day, with internet and all, just with pokemon. On the other hand, while there don't appear to be any conventional weapons, so no fear of mass shootings or bombings per se, some pokemon have some awfully destructive attacks. Unleash a Hyper Beam or even a Surf in a crowded area and you'd have a lot of deaths on your hands, and there doesn't appear to be any kind of regulation. It must be very Wild West behind the scenes, with the "good guy with a gun" mentality being the default. Splatoon seems like it would be pretty good. There's some conflict, but not many individuals are involved in it, and no one actually dies. On the other hand, it's basically like the real world, so not much incentive to visit it.

I've only gotten one early draft, and the first check-in date is in just a few days....

This is magnificent! Clever and interesting. Very reminiscent of Lindsey Stirling's vocal work, although without the violins. More!

"Why it exists": It's a statue, and the Ingress folks were pretty generous about letting random public works of art become portals, even if they were silly. I guess whoever submitted it thought the bear statue looked like Chumlee and felt that was an adequate description, and the folks at Niantic thought it was fine. I have one near me that's not only inside a restaurant (which isn't supposed to be allowed), but the name is in Chinese, with no description at all.

All valid points, but FYI, those are two of the hardest consoles to emulate. The XBox emulators never really left infancy. Dolphin is only recently getting good, but hardware is a huge problem, ripping disks is a pain and a half, and pirating disk images is tough because they're huge and Nintendo actively cracks down on them. I've done NES, SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy (Super|Color) completely painlessly, Playstation 1 with some issues but that was ~15 years ago, and MAME with a little bit of effort and a handful of game-specific compatibility and performance issues. I understand PS2 and Game Boy Advance are really solid right now, but I can't vouch for them personally. PS1 and PS2 can even just read your game disks in a CD/DVD-ROM drive, no need for ROMs or rips. At least these are coming to the Wii U Virtual Console now.

The accessibility is the only plus, and in my experience, the folks who are most interested in games over 20 years old are willing to put in a little bit of effort to get set up. It's a mush worse deal if you consider that the games loaded into it are a fixed list, and with a Pi, at only a slightly greater total cost, you can put anything you want on it, including games from a dozen different systems. There's the legality issue, of course--I'm not sure how many people this would appeal to who already have legal copies of the games in question on a cartridge, e-shop purchase, etc. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for some people, I just think the overall excitement level is overblown considering what else is already out there, and has been for years. Also, the controllers aren't "fully" compatible with Wii and Wii U. They play Virtual Console games only. And of course, they're only 4 buttons, so effectively only NES virtual console games. I do wonder if you can use a Wii Classic Controller on the Classic Edition NES.

Meh. 3rd-party things like this have existed for a long time. I'd rather have a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie or PiPlay and a custom case. A similar price point and much more useful. Granted, the "Classic Edition" NES does have a pretty good selection of its best games, so it'd be a good entry-level gift for someone who missed the actual NES era, or who's played basically nothing since then and just has some nostalgia for the greatest hits.

You can get an idea of where Pokemon Go stuff is by looking at the Ingress map, although they're expected to diverge over time, and you can't tell which portals are gyms and which are pokecenters. But there's nothing at Auschwitz; closest portal is a church a few blocks away. Hm, there are two portals right outside where I work... maybe I'll start playing this game after all.

One of my favorite remixers, and probably my favorite VGM song of all time. I found this on zircon's YouTube and have been hoping for it to show up on OCR for ages. Awesome stuff.