DarkeSword

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.

Sure, no worries. Like I said, if you're interested in doing some kind of ad-buy on OCR, we're open to that discussion. We recently nixed Google ads on the site in favor of using those banner placements to promote OCR related things, but Larry and I have been tossing around the idea of getting community-relevant ads for products and services we actually believe in. Still gotta run things by djpretzel but if you're interested send an email over to admin@ocremix.org.

Sure there is. Here's the excuse: OCR's catalog is primarily comprised of unlicensed fan arrangements. Spotify doesn't allow unlicensed fan arrangements. Our Submission Agreement is an agreement made with people who submit their music to us. It means that artists are okay with whatever distribution channels we decide and are able to pursue, like physical CDs, Soundcloud, or YouTube. The Submission Agreement doesn't protect us from a company like Square Enix or Konami looking at all of the unlicensed Final Fantasy and Castlevania remixes on Spotify and saying "shut it all down." In a perfect world we'd be able to distribute OCR's catalog on every streaming service under the sun, but that's not really the case. OCR is unlicensed fan work. The only way OCR gets on Spotify is if we're able to obtain a license for every track in the catalog. That's just not going to happen; that's literally years of work that is quite honestly not worth the return on investment. I guess we're just plain lazy.

Tara Strong is pretty great as Harley, but let's not forget that she's essentially just doing Arleen Sorkin's Harley.

Every recent Mario Kart game has instilled desperate desire in me to visit the Mushroom Kingdom. Some of those city/beach locations seem fantastic.

We've standardized how we use thread tags here because the way people have been using them aren't actually helpful. You can no longer add your own custom tags to threads. You'll be selecting from a list. Here are the tags and what they mean: album If your project is an album. remixer If you're looking for remixers. artist If you're looking for an artist to draw cover or insert art. video editor If you're looking for a video editor to work on a trailer or promotional video for you. composer If you're looking for a composer for some kind of non-album project, like a game. vocalist If you're looking for someone to sing for you. instrumentalist If you're looking for someone to play an instrument for you. engineer If you're looking for someone to handle the technical aspects of music production for you, like mixing and mastering. director If you're looking for someone to manage a project for you. This is a catch-all term for co-directors and assistant directors as well. web designer If you're looking for someone to build a website for your project. lyricist If you're looking for something to write lyrics for a song. voice actor If you're looking for someone to provide spoken word or acting for your project.

I remember who you are of course, I just don't remember if you've actually been to MAG. I decided to play it straight and answer the question in case anyone else was curious.

MAGFest is the best way to meet most of the community in person. It's the one event every year that lots of people in the scene make the effort to go out to. East coast, west coast, midwest, southwest, Europe, etc. Everyone comes out for the main MAGFest that happens in January. The event features gaming and music panels, concerts and raves, a vendor area to buy cool stuff, and a really big game room featuring consoles, arcade machines, and pinball machines. OC ReMix usually does one or two panels at MAG every year. There are also a lot of informal room-party type events where people just hang out, play games, and drink together. It's worth going.

If it's obvious that the deal is good (90% off, $1 VSTs, etc.), then explaining why it's good isn't necessary. Just want people to be a little bit more descriptive. Sometimes a deal isn't really a deal.

Rhino you can reply if someone else does. Just don't reply twice in a row.

Share deals on DAWs, VSTs, sample libraries, apps, instruments, MIDI controllers, etc. here. Some guidelines: Explain why you recommend the product and explain why it's a good deal; don't just drop a link with some ad-copy. No drive-bys. Indicate how long the deal will be available if you can; once the deal is over, edit your post and mark the deal as expired. This thread is not a feed for off-site content, i.e. don't just post a daily/weekly/monthly link to a deals website. Thanks.

This thread has turned into what essentially amounts to an off-site feed for vstbuzz.com. While deals are always appreciated, the forums aren't really the place to advertise your business if you aren't a posted remixer. @vstbuzz, if you're interested in discussing some kind of ad-buy with OC ReMix, we can look into that (send email to admin@ocremix.org); but simply updating the thread every week with the latest deal on your own website isn't what the forums are for. Remember, threads on the forums should not be feeds for off-site content. As far as I see it, this thread should house deals on music software that people from the community have experience with and believe in; it should be a thread where people can go and find deals that they can trust are really worth their money. There needs to be a recommendation component to the deals being posted. I'm not really seeing that from vstbuzz's weekly posts beyond salesmanship and ad-copy. I'm going to close this up and start a fresh thread. It'll essentially be the same thing with a couple of ground rules in the first post.

When you "bump" a thread, you reply to it to move it back up to the top of the list of topics in the forum. You went overboard yesterday and kept creating new replies instead of editing your last reply. You even did it again after I warned you and I had to merge your last two posts together. I really don't want to discourage you from posting on the forums and working on music with people; that's what this place is for. But you need to make sure you're using the forums properly.

To clarify, we host our album projects as follows: A ZIP file containing MP3s, album art, notes, etc., hosted on HTTP-based file servers. We host the ZIP file on a number of mirrors to spread around the bandwidth. A torrent package containing FLACs, MP3s, album art, notes, etc. that people can download using a BitTorrent client. OC ReMix hosts is own tracker. We also provide our albums for streaming (not download) on our Soundcloud page. If you're looking to host and distribute an album, you can buy some web space or you can upload the album to some kind of free service. A lot of people use Bandcamp for albums.

Rhino, please stop double-posting. If you have the post in the thread, don't reply; edit your last post.

Oh I didn't know that; I thought you were joking. I said "that's generous" because I actually like mobile games. What a travesty though. I'm glad Taxman and Stealth showed SEGA that people do still give a crap about quality, and I'm glad that certain folks at SEGA seem to be receptive to this kind of thing. When Taxman remade Sonic 1 for mobile, SEGA could have charged for it going for the double-dip, but instead they released it as a free update to their previously crappy port. Now if only we could get Sonic 3 & Knuckles remade in the new engine.

That's generous.

Folks, I need you to stop double- and triple-posting. If you need say something and nobody has replied to the thread since your last reply, just edit your last post. The forum isn't a live chatroom. Try to post when you have more substantial things to say. EDIT: Okay, guys seriously. One thread per project. If you need to recruit for something specific like a video editor or something, edit the title of the project's topic. Don't make another thread.

Guys, the you can't post threads in Community linking to this thread asking for help. Asking for help is what the Recruit and Collaborate forum is for.

Sonic 4 was not a good effort. Sonic 4 was a travesty.

Sega's revealed their 25th anniversary Sonic the Hedgehog game, coming this Spring 2017: Sonic Mania, a brand new Genesis/Mega Drive style Sonic game from Christian Whitehead, the fellow who rebuilt Sonic 1, 2, and CD for mobile. This looks amazing and I can't wait until I can play it.

Deep Dungeon is an awesome game mode. Very cool, very strategic.

He's not talking about the sound chip or the sound quality. He's talking about the arrangement and instrumentation decisions made in the "upgraded" soundtrack. I feel like you're missing the point of this discussion. Also, you say "it worked well enough for most of the players," but you can't actually know that without conducting a statistically significant survey of the game's playerbase. This forum is specifically for discussing VGM at an analytical level, and this topic specifically is trying to address arrangement choices made with the Zero Mission version of the Metroid soundtrack and how they affected and changed the tone and mood of the game, for better or for worse. I don't think it's helpful to dismiss the points Slimy is making by saying "the new soundtrack worked for the project they did." You're not really engaging in a discussion about the music either; you admit you don't really even remember the soundtrack. I think that if you want to participate in this discussion, you need to bring more to the table than an argument that amounts to "it's a different version of the game so of course it's different." Refamiliarizing yourself with the Zero Mission soundtrack would be a good first step.

Just wanna bump this. Lots of folks have joined the server and we've had some pretty active discussion for the past two days. It's very nice. Please consider joining in the fun.

Only thing that would make it perfect would be if you could legally load more games onto it.