DarkeSword

Hardcore dungeon crawling RPG with cartography elements. Quite difficult, but also quite good.

Not a big fan of either Ennis or Moore, tbh. To each his own I suppose.

It was really really good.

Comixology had an Artifacts sale last summer; it was a Top Cow book that unified all the different Top Cow properties like Witchblade, The Darkness, Lady Magdelena, etc. Give it a shot, it's pretty good. Speaking of Top Cow, check out Madame Mirage, by Paul Dini and Kenneth Rocafort. Awesome book.

"Where to start" is a bit like asking "what sort of music should I listen to?" What do you like? Under appreaciated but worth your time? American Vampire should, in my opinion, be much more popular than it already is. Actually let me just quote something I wrote for thewingless on Facebook; he recently asked about comic book recommendations as well. Please keep in mind that I am primarily a DC superheroes guy. If you ask me for Marvel recommendations I can only really tell you about the Ultimate Universe, not 616 (i.e. the main Marvel universe).

I see it like this: anything that isn't 12-bar blues in this piece is essentially just original writing. Rough estimate puts this mix at ~135 seconds of actual 12-bar blues material. The thing about a 12-bar blues jam is that it's characteristic of that kind of music to just play the "head" (the basic melody) once or twice and then launch into an extended solo section that could take up much more than simply playing the head once or twice at the start and once more at the end. If you and I got together and played C Jam Blues we could riff for like 8 minutes just going back and forth with solos, but that song that we're playing is still technically C Jam Blues if we play the head a couple of times at the start and the end. Brandon's woven the head of the piece throughout this song, carefully reminding us, despite all the soloing and riffing material, that this is a remix of Brothers Bear. There's enough material here that sticks to the original chord progression to keep the piece on target, and the main melody does show up a lot throughout the piece. It's a good point to consider, but I don't think the ubiquity of the chord progression is grounds for rejection. Soloing and riffing is a staple of the genre. I think it's alright here. All that said, I think it's a solid track. Good playing, good balance between elements. No complaints here. YES

Comixology, as Larry stated earlier, is essentially the Steam of comic books. Nearly every single publisher, with the notable exception of Dark Horse comics, makes their titles available on Comixology. When you buy a comic book on that site, it's tied to your account and viewable on any device, be it browser or iOS/Android app. Dark Horse comics runs their own digital distro service that works similarly. Practically every publisher also synchronizes their digital release with print releases, so there is no waiting for digital books to come out. Speaking of comics, we have a comic book chatroom on espernet: #comicshop. Come and join us. Also I don't mind if this turns into a "Ask Darke about comics" thread.

Should we be judging this version?

It's well produced enough, but I think there are still some problems. Your snare sound get really exposed when the main melody comes back in around 1:56-ish; all of the other elements are being filtered and faded away but the snare sound is still cutting through everything. The softer flute section is nice but soon the march percussion comes in very loudly and out of balance with everything else. I feel like the construction of this piece isn't so great either; the builds and drops are very fast and very sudden many times. Starting around 3:22, you build up and drop to piano and immediately return to high energy and then drop back to piano again and build back up quickly to high energy synths, all within the span of a minute. It's weird to say, but that's actually a bit too much variation for a trance piece. Even though you have all these quick changes going on, the piece still feels repetitive. It might be because the source itself doesn't have a lot of material to work with, but there's still the whole beginning part of the source tune before the piano melody that you haven't used. Sound design is also fairly basic; you might want to think about spicing things up with some more interesting synths and work on a more evolving texture of sound, rather than relying on quick and dirty building and releasing. Still needs work. NO, resub

The koto playing Splash Woman is the best part of this, but the rest of the piece sound really clunky and plodding. I feel like a lot of the samples (strings, winds) were really exposed here, and the balance between all the elements were really off, especially during the Wave Man sections. The sustained chords sort of just droned. I can't remember if I voted this one high during the competition but I'm not really feeling it here at all. NO

This is doin' it for me. Love all the pizzicato strings everywhere. Blend of orch and rock really works. Like other joojes have said, I love how you're building tension throughout the piece. Ending could've been better, but thems the breaks. I like it! YES

Should be DP. Great vocals and really good lyrics, something that vocal mixes don't always have. Acoustic + Chips = Love. ~YES~

I'm on board with OA in that the production is really good. Really tight sound. I'm going to disagree with the other judges and just say that, going by the source breakdown, this is an incredibly ambitious arrangement and I think it's really paid off very well. It really does push the limits on what we consider arrangement, but at the same time, after checking out the source breakdown, I really get what you're doing here. The original track has a very distinct harmonic sound to it and I think that that's also captured here, even when your melodic ideas get really out there. I'm going to go ahead and YES this. I think it's fascinating to see someone really digging deep into the guts of a source tune and putting something like this out.

Oh this is beautiful. A little conservative to start but the solo sections really bring out something special, especially the great flute work. I love it. YES

caaaaaaaake

Already threads for both 3DS and Wii U. Also it's preferred that if you want to discuss specific games, make a thread about that specific game.

We're gonna take PAX East to the MAX East.

It's not a SMRPG proejct, strictly speaking. Think of it more as a Mario series project with themes from Dr. Mario and SMRPG prevalent throughout the album. The motifs should be present in all the tracks.

Go go go!

Basically this. The whole piece sounds dynamically flat. Transitions are flimsy and the drums feel like they're on autopilot the whole time. This is a prime example of the kind of medley that I don't like. Each source treatment feels like a separate piece. Why not do 3 or 4 really well developed Turrican remixes, rather than a series of brief looks at the soundtrack? Developmentally this goes nowhere. A-B-C-D-done. Sorry but I need more a cohesive piece of music. NO

Moved this to Recruit & Collaborate. Good luck.

Thanks. I hope you guys find all the music you need.

Yeah, no anger or hostility at all. It's just that we have certain agreements with SE (as djpretzel said) and we have to be careful about involvement in this kind of thing. I'm going to close this up, as there's already a thread in R&C about this.

Saw an announcement on your Facebook page indicating that OverClocked ReMix is "on board" to create music for this. That's very misleading. Here's what I posted there: In addition, djpretzel has posted about this in this thread.We'd really appreciate it if you took that announcement down or adjusted the wording to not imply that OCR is involved in an official capacity.

Their announcement is worded really badly. We are not officially involved with the FF7 Web Series. Individual artists, maybe, but OC ReMix as an entity is not.