MindWanderer

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.

Listening to it now. The vox synth that's used in almost every track is what makes the big difference. I agree that it's unnecessary and changes the feel from "exploration" to "space opera." Title screen: The starkness of the original was one of its most striking features, and the remake's effort to make a fuller soundscape at all times, and speed it up, definitely hurt it. Brinstar seems fine to me. Agreed about the item room. Same deal as the title screen. Norfair starts off generally fine, but the lengthy additional section only hurts it. I agree with you, and I know exactly what you mean by the "exploring deeper" feel of the original. Of course, that may be because I played Metroid as a kid and the association got formed that way. Kraid's lair actually works well with that crappy choir. It probably helps that something similar was in Super Metroid. This section should be epic. Ridley's lair always felt odd to me--you go deeper, but the music becomes more "space-y". Creepy as hell, and the remake covers that just fine. Tourian lacks that choir, which might be why it seems better than the others. It's adequate. I was generally disappointed with the game as well. The worldbuilding was a big part of it; it was also annoying that you didn't get the most critical exploration tools until the endgame, so you had to not only backtrack to get 100%, but go into the main area of the game from the endgame area, which was weird and players might not even realize they could do that. It took away a lot of what made Super Metroid special, and even Fusion was much better in this regard despite being deliberately railroaded.

If you don't monetize, you're usually safe. Valve generally has a good working relationship with the fan creation community (e.g. Black Mesa becoming an actual for-profit mod). OCR has several Portal remixes and a few Half-Life ones, and there are a bunch of other fan remixes of Valve stuff on YouTube already. They could take action, of course, but there's no reason to think they will unless you try to monetize.

Reminder: The first check-in is at the end of this month! if that's going to be a problem for anyone, best to let me know sooner rather than later.

OK, then, here are some of the VGM Remix YouTube channels I follow. Jonny Atma actually does have one ReMix posted here (as GaMetal), but he's a prolific YouTuber. Fantastic guitar work; while his arrangements are a little cover-ish, he really milks what it means to play the electric guitar and makes the music his own. He takes requests from a fairly eclectic fan base, so he frequently has some odd choices in there (such as this one from McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure). Ferdk takes a little more liberty with his metal arrangements. The creative tweaks are subtle, but enough to add personality. He also has great taste in VGM, and takes requests from his Patreon, covering a lot of fantastic songs that aren't necessarily the ones people remix over and over again. Here's the Squirrel Battle from To the Moon. Speaking of To the Moon, I'm sure most people here know Laura Shigihara from that game and Plants vs. Zombies, and one OCR entry back in 2011, but you may not know that she does tons of piano and vocal VGM remixes on her YouTube Channel. Listen to this Skyward Sword cover and tell me she's not amazing. Aivi Tran also has one posted ReMix (as waltzforluma) and collaborates with some other pianists and violinists for more. Sometimes she even collaborates with herself! But her straightforward piano work is beautifully expressive. She and her husband also do the music for Steven Universe! I also follow FamilyJules7X, Smooth McGroove, and Taylor Davis, but they hardly need any more press, and also a few other folks who have multiple OCR posts. Also Lindsey Stirling, who mostly does original music, but does have VGM stuff as well, with fun videos: her Skyrim one is particularly fun because it shows off what you can do with a whole lot of layering.

More physics engine wackiness. I hadn't heard of the Stasis Rune before, but it's brilliant. Apparently it locks an object down so that physics temporarily do not apply to it, which is common enough in video games, but when the effect wears off, all energy applied to the object takes effect at once. It's fantastic. I could tell from the level design up to that point that it was coming. BotW may be the first Zelda game where giving you true flight wouldn't actually break anything, so maybe.

Can we share whole YouTube channels here? I have a few of those saved, and I'd like to see what others have found.