BleepCast / Phil´s Blog » Nintendo

Street Fighter 2 & Not So Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:29:15 +0000

So I did it again, but this time with a different game: After ripping the music-instrument samples from F-Zero and creating a soundfont out of it, I attempted just the same with Street Fighter 2 for the Super Nintendo. If you’re looking for some technical insights in Capcom’s SNES music, wanna listen to some music or just the frickin’ download for the soundfont, you’ve come to the right place!

Same ol’, same ol’

This time ripping the sounds from the SPC files wasn’t new to me, and I won’t go into all the details like last time (if you’re interested, just visit the previous posting).

The New Shit

What was different, however, were the samples present in the files: In F-Zero sound files, basically every sample was loaded with every song, whether used or not. In F-Zero’s case this wasn’t a major problem since the samples were really small, but with Street Fighter 2 this habit began to change a bit: The majority of samples was present in all SPC-files as well, but in the sample-registers 46 and 47, and occasionally 45, were different samples in different arenas, like wood-block and shamisen in the E. Honda’s bathhouse; or sitar in Dhalsim’s temple. In practice this meant listening closely to each song and surveying the sample-number for new samples in familiar places in the register.

Shoryou-! …

Additionally I could also find out which fighters had been in the stage when the SPC file had been dumped from the game, because the sound-samples of the fighters were in them as well — heavily chopped up and four times the speed than they were played in the game; probably another means to save memory. For example, Ryu’s “Hadouken!” cry consists of two separate samples, “Hadou!” and “Ken!”, so that the latter can also be used after the “Shoryou!”-sample for the Shoryouken-move. Seems like it really pays off having played (and listened) to this game 18 years ago or so.

Soundfonting

I did just like I did a few days back, converting the samples to 44.1 kHz, recreating the loops and ASDR-envelopes and putting the new instruments in a soundbank with the Viena soundfont editor.

But the most annoying part in Viena is to construct a GM-compatible drumset, where all the right drum samples are in the right pitch mapped onto the right key. The thing is, that there’s a lot of recycling going on in the SNES-tunes and this over-complicates things in the editor. So for example for the toms you have to add the same sample like six times to the “Drums”-instrument. And in Viena such tasks become a tedious click-orgy.

Progression

Compared to F-Zero there are a lot more real-world instrument samples to find, especially for the drums. The Street Fighter 2 percussion includes:

A snare drum,
finally a decent bass (kick) drum,
a tom-tom,
a crash cymbal, although with an audible looping point,
a ride cymbal, used as hi-hats solely in the Sagat stage.
claves,
a bongo (used in Blanka’s stage)
a synth clapping sound for Zangief’s stage (the other analog-sounding drums are just pitched snare and bass drum samples)
a wood-block sound, also in Honda’s stage.

Yet still: FM synthesized samples are plenty also with this score, but slowly there was a trend emerging of refraining from familiar FM-syth-sounds and towards more realistic, albeit memory-intense, real-instrument samples. It is 1992 we’re talking about, after all.

All things considered, the more samples make the drums much more versatile than those from F-Zero, although I just adore that hearty snare drum there.

Fill ‘em up

Another major difference to the F-Zero is the sheer density in sound-layers. Nintendo’s racing title just used four of the Super Nintendo’s eight simultaneous playback-channels solely for music playback, Street Fighter 2 seven, sometimes all eight! But I guess that’s okay, since the only other sound-samples are punches, groans and special-move shouts and if there’s a very subtle channel pausing for the second Ryu gets punched in the face or Chun-Li yells “Spinning Bird Kick!” so be it.

And the channels are packed! There hardly is any silence in either of them when the music is busy. Even solo-ing only three channels sound like four or five: Capcom’s sound team really packed the tracks with so much stuff that it’s almost a bit too much, in my opinion…

Some Music, eh?

But enough with the the chewing of technical facts and limitations, let’s hear some music! And instead of trying to recreate the tracks we all know by heart, I played a bit with my SNES sound-fonts so far and came up with two new original songs in the style of real old-school SNES music.

This one is my F-Zero tribute, take a listen:

Black Gulch (F-Zero Tribute) by sephcarissa

And the track below is the music to my fictitious stage, also a humble attempt at trying to catch the flair of Street Fighter 2′s score.

Seph’s Stage (Street Fighter 2 Tribute) by sephcarissa

Donwload and Donation

And there are a few of you who are just here for getting their hands on my soundfont, so I thought I give it away for a donation. Have fun! And thanks for listening and reading, y’all!

	Click the Image to download my SNES Street Fighter 2 Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PS: If you love the meticulously hand-pixeled arenas as much as I do, you might wanna visit this site!

F-Zero & Too Much Free Time

Phil Strahl — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:55:52 +0000

Today was National Day in Austria and I had some free time on my hands. That’s why I tried hard not to get some work done today. “I’ll be messing around with my Super Nintendo,” I told Conny. And she said “Alright. Have fun with it.” And I did. But in a totally unexpected way. Read on if you want to learn about F-Zero and a little about the making of its music…

Today I really wanted to indulge my mind in some mindless gaming after having watched a couple of Street Fighter 2 Ending scenes, but there was a tiny little thing I wanted to try first: I had an inspiration of it a couple of days ago and now I finally had the time to try it out.

The Backstory

Recently I had the opportunity to create some SNES-styled music for a game of my friend Jot, the Game Designer. I already had some Super-Nintendo-game-soundfonts but all of them were more than ten years old and had lots and lots of missing samples or just bad samples in it. So gathering all the sweet SNES instruments I wanted to use in my composition was rather exhausting and the result sounded a bit patchy as well to me.

The Idea

So what did I think of? Well, I wanted to create a soundfont myself from a couple of SNES music files I had lying around in my extensive chipmusic archive. “How hard can it be?” I thought with a smirk to myself, “Maybe I’ll do three or four games in the next hour or so,” I thought. “Because this can’t take long; an hour tops,” I thought. This was eight hours ago.

The Realization

Part One: Research

Ages ago I ripped some sound samples from Jurassic Park for a remix I did back then, but ended up never using them. I remember using a command-line program that would harvest the samples from the game-ROM. That I was looking for.

But, alas, software from ten years ago is hard to find and I gave it up when I learned that I was helplessly living in the past, because today everything comes with a user interfaces and features: The SPCTool v0.7 (download) from 2004 was a bit buggy but otherwise just marvelously up to today’s task: It highlights used samples in a song, lets you preview the samples (with loop-points!) and batch-export selected samples either as compressed SNES-wave files or — yay! — standard Windows PCM WAV files. I loaded up my favorite F-Zero SPC file, Big Blue and hit play. It was great, I could see which sample was used in which channel while listening to the song. So I selected all the samples and hit Export.

I only needed an editor to create my soundfont with. Ten years ago I was busy with the Vienna Soundfont Studio but couldn’t find a working version for my operating system anymore. Time flies by… Yet again I stumbled across a superior alternative, namely Viena. What the program was lacking in n-letters in its name, it made up for with an incredibly feature-rich and easy to navigate interface. I was delighted once again!

Troubles?

Importing the WAVs I had exported from the SPCTool was a little troublesome. Either that or I had no clue what I was doing. In any case I figured that it might be a problem that the exported files had an odd sample-rate, something just below 22,050 Hz. So I now was in need of something that would help me batch-convert my ancient Japanese sample-files to 44,100 Hz.

Since I am a proficient Googler I found what I was looking for in no-time, the r8brain Sample Converter, free of charge and despite the fugly UI quite useful.

Getting to grips with it

The estimated hour I thought I would be spending with it was almost over and I didn’t even have a single sample ready. I looked at the clock again and it wasn’t that late. I had plenty of time to play around and get a closer look at how the folks at Nintendo set up their compositions. Yes, I felt like Indiana Jones, digging up some treasure from the past…

Learning from the Japanese Masters

Memory was tight back in the days and F-Zero was a launch title of the Super Nintendo, so it had to look and sound good without breaking the mold of the memory. I guess nobody would have thought back in 1990 how much data you could stuff into a SNES game-pak. So what did Yumiko Kameya and Naoto Ishida, F-Zero‘s sound-designers and composers do — apart from an incredibly good job? They tried to use as little memory for music samples as possible. In fact, all the samples in their original SNES data-format where just a bit over 100 kb. In today’s world that’s almost nothing. Even back in the days all the music-samples of the game would fit onto a 3.25″ floppy disk no less than thirteen times!

Interestingly they tried to use as little “real-world” recordings from instruments as possible: Only

trumpet,
french horn,
alto saxophone,
Hammond organ,
Slap Bass

and five drum samples — that’s all. The rest are synth-sounds (yes, even the warm E-bass), and some of them sound awfully much like FM-synthesized sounds. Around 1990 FM-Synthesis was state of the art: Soundcards for personal computers (if they had any) would synthesize MIDI-instruments that way, the SEGA Genesis (released in 1988) was keen with it and even Konami developed at the time their VRC-7 chip for NES games. The chip would provide the composer (and gamer) with six additional FM-synth-channels to the standard NES sound. So the SNES was something totally cutting edge with its eight sample-fed channels when it launched. But back to the game. Have a listen to the samples and how frickin’ short they are:

F-Zero Sound Samples by sephcarissa

And yes, there were only five drum samples in the whole game:

A snare,
a rimshot (I have absolutely no idea where it was used, to be honest),
a closed hi-hat,
a semi-closed hi-hat,
and a medium tom.

If you’re into making music yourself, you might have noticed that one basic drum is missing — the bass drum. So how the hell did they get away with that in the game? As it turned out, they pitched the tom-sound down a couple of semi-tones and used the result as a feasible bass drum sound. Oh boy, sample-memory must have seemed really small 21 years ago!

But the most interesting sound was the noise of the wind in the track Death Wind. It is very creative: First they used a noise-sample that’s so short, it sounds more like a castanet-clap than anything else. At first I didn’t even rip that sample because I thought it was junk. I mean, listen to it above (it’s the one on the bottom of the play-list).
So they took that sample and pitched it down, down and even further down to the core of Earth itself so it transformed from almost nothing into an eerie, three-second long humm. But they didn’t stop there: On top of it loops an equally down-pitched and stretched sample; the semi-closed hi-hat sample.
Oh how do I bow before thee, Kameya-san and Ishida-san! And needless to say that I had my fun recreating this for my soundfont.

When I was trying to recreate the loop-points in Viena from the samples, I realized how tight they were, some even shorter than a the tenth of a second! And this meant trouble:
I don’t know how much you have worked with sound-samples yourself so let me tell you: If you loop a very short sound sample, it begins to change its pitch. The more so, the shorter your loop is. This becomes a problem when you only have a single sample for one note (usually C’) that you want the hardware to pitch up and down so that you can use it for all notes. This really was a problem and is also the reason why I didn’t quite get some slight off-key sounds out of my soundfont. Of course, I only realized this when I was testing my soundfont out after hours of key-mapping and creating ADSR envelopes off the top of my head.

Yes, this was another problem: To keep the file-size small, many samples were so short that it was hard to figure out where they belonged, i.e. for what instrument they were used for. And since they all were synthesized, it was even harder: It’s easy to distinguish a piano-tone from an organ, for example, even if your sample is just a quarter of a second long. But if you have a synthesized sound you’re lost. More so, if there is a number of them, all sounding very similar. Whew!

The only thing you can do is listen to the songs then in SPCTool, muting and solo-ing different channels during playback and keeping a close eye on the entry that tells you what sample-number is currently playing. So with that approach I figured out most instruments and ADSR-envelopes over the course of two or three hours or so.

The Field-Testing

From VGmusic.com, my favorite game-MIDI archive for over a decade now, I downloaded some artfully recreated music-tracks from the game as MIDI-sheet music and imported them into Reason. There I created some NN-XT sample players and fed them with my soundfont’s instruments to test them out. Holy cow, that was awful at first! No instrument was in proper key, some I had forgotten entirely and with others I messed up the envelopes because I took them for a different instrument than they actually were. It sounded like the devil himself took an AVGN-like diarrhea-dump onto those sacred compositions and was mocking me. So back to Viena for some envelope-tweaking, back to Audacity for some hand-tuning of the samples (Viena‘s correctional settings didn’t quite work with Reason) and back to SPCTool to listen to the originals over and over again.

Engaged and analytic listening of your favorite music for hours really separates the wheat from the chaff: If you still can listen to the tracks the next day without your eardrums vomiting, then you truly are listening to outstanding music.

During that back and forth between three applications (which don’t quite enjoy each others presence and demand of sole reign over the soundcard) really was exhausting and quite often I spotted errors in the MIDI files I used as framework. Since I am a merciless perfectionist I spent also quite some time ironing out those inconsistencies as good as I could.

The Presentation

“So what does it sound like?!” I hear you asking. Fear not: Below is the playlist just for you. All the tracks in it are recreations from my bitterly crafted soundfont and the rigorously corrected MIDI files from VGmusic.com.

My F-Zero Soundfont by sephcarissa

If you want to compare these to the originals (provided those aren’t etched into your mind), I suggest you get started with this playlist where you will find it all.

The Acquirement

And if you want to play around with the soundfont on your own, I am happy to release it on this very blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License:

	Click the Image to download my SNES F-Zero Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 5

Phil Strahl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:00:20 +0000

The BleepCast inspects covers, remixes and de-makes of our favorite tunes in the last 30 years in this level and asks how everything started, how it evolved and where it all went. This is a broad topic and so there’s no screwing around: This BleepCast hits you massively with 50 minutes of pure nerdsound, spoken and played alike. And the best of all: You’ll love it! I’m happy, Bob!

Level Information:

This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a ~~fuckin~~ habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 2

Phil Strahl — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:01:55 +0000

This new episode of the BleepCast is all about ninjas, the sneaky Japanese spies that overran games & movies in the 80′s and have either gradually disappeared or gradually perfected their stealth since their first appearance in 1983 on the CoCo. A shinobi may be silent but their quests have always been accompanied by some epic exotic scores. Let’s follow the ninja and listen to his melodies.

Level Information:

This level occupies 36 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 40:00 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth once again.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

BleepCast – Level 1

Phil Strahl — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:01:44 +0000

There it is, what you haven’t been waiting for ever since: The BleepCast podcast is all about chip-music, retro gaming and memories from the good old times when we all were young and begun having no life, instead indulging in shitty games with shitty music, or as we call it: “Classics with epic soundtracks”. So if you want me to take you back to the past ~~to play the shitty games that suck ass~~, then you just discovered your favorite podcast!

Level Information:

This level occupies a good 42 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 46:24 min.
This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. Sorry!

The first appearance of the term BleepCast at SongByToad.com. Still: I stick with the name and hope that nobody’s gonna be a dick about it.
Jon Dunn’s short bio on GiantBomb so you can read it yourself.
David Whittaker’s awesome Total Recall theme from the Amiga.
A list of Jon Dunn’s games which he made music for.
“Now you’re playing with power — SUPER POWER!“. Sigh.
The terrible, terrible ending of Jurassic Park on the SNES. Watching this puts me back in the rage I first had as a 11-year old.

Level Suffixes:

@C64Takeaway pointed out that Jon Dunn’s “Forever Autumn” subtune #1 *is* Comic Bakery by Martin Galway (!) according to the HVSC, which I shamefully didn’t check for the ‘cast. So stealing from your own work would be “reinterpretation” (Dunn from Dunn), stealing from some other’s work (Dunn from Galway for Jurassic Park on the NES) is, well, stealing.

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site, follow the BleepCast on Twitter and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

Oh, and would you like to see the playlist of the played tunes on this page?

BleepCast by Phil Strahl is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Homo Ludens

Phil Strahl — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:48:32 +0000

Max, a former fellow student, asked me a few weeks ago whether I was interested in buying some old gaming consoles with a bunch of games from him. Since I started collecting and maintaining old computers and gaming consoles a couple of years ago, starting with the few I had since I was a kid, I was interested in Max’ offer, expecting not more than a few dusty plastic boxes with missing cables and scratched game discs with broken jewel cases to add to my museum. Man, was I wrong!

So yesterday I finally had the cash together and some time to pick up the heavy packing case with tons of 1990′s state of the art consoles. There was a a black Game Boy pocket, a painted PlayStation (“it glows under a UV-lamp”), a SNES with 50/60 Hz switch (“So you could play Japanese titles as well”), Nintendo 64 with memory extension, a Sega Dreamcast with modem and keyboard and a Sega Genesis with 32x extension and SEGA-CD drive, something so bulky that you just gotta love it. Everything in good to very good condition, complete with many controllers and memory cards (such as the Dreamcast’s VMU).

Holy frick!

And that was not all, there was a bunch of Sega 32 games, some dream cast CDs, excellent N64 cartridges (such as Golden Eye 007, Ocarina of Time or Perfect Dark) and many PS1 games. I don’t know when I have the time to hook all these consoles up or rather implement them into my museum’s grand hall of ludology (i.e. my dorm room), nor do I know where to put all the stuff! I guess for now I put them back into the big torn box they came in hoping that Ikea might sell some day a Billy-shelf that fits my nerdy needs.

In case you are interested in a complete list of the games I own, you can check out my have-list at MobyGames.

Eat my shorts!

Phil Strahl — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:39:46 +0000

My somewhat World Record(s)

Phil Strahl — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:18:58 +0000

Actually I set up these records back in August but since late October they are verified by the referees and are now official: I am the world’s best Dr. Mario player (Super Nintendo version) and world’s number 4 in Tetris (GameBoy) as can be inspected here at Twin Galaxies.

Twin Galaxies are pretty rigid in terms of verification of your record. In the good old days of neon-colored 1980′s you just had to phone Walter Day himself and he would note down your score. Nowadays not even photographs as means of validation are accepted. To record a session one has to set up a camera (or hook a VCR between console and TV) which records everything from begin to end, including booting sequence of the handheld/console/whatever ¹ to rule out any manipulation. In my case it took the referees quite a while to verify my record because I was one of those bastards who likes to send his VHS-tapes in PAL-standard; and only a few of them have converters.

Since that glorious day in August I never came close again to my Tetris record. That’s lame because I set up the record without sleeping that night — at the 52nd attempt, though. Still I am really happy with it and hope that I won’t get outperformed all too soon (by you, perhaps?).

The Dr. Mario world record wasn’t actually tough to achieve since I was the only one to attempt one in that particular game on the SNES with the High speed setting. Compared to what I already pulled off in that game my submitted score is subtle embarrassing. Why won’t your try your best too?

Astonish me! Challenge me! Surprise me!

And now for something completely different. I must get to the bottom of that terrible smell around here…

What? Emulators? Damn, no! Emulators are not allowed. Sheesh! Seriousy, what were you thinking? ↩

Girls and Games. And Mega Man.

Phil Strahl — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:12:03 +0000

A few days ago I received the Metroid: Zero Mission GBA game. I play lots of GBA games on my DS because they’re much cheaper and the same fun. But I must confess: I’ve never played any game of the Metroid series before.

I didn’t know much about the great Metroid Saga before last week until I decided to spend my remaining 500 Wii-points on some NES game at the Wii Shopping Channel. But which one? Firing up Google helped me finding a good site on the best NES games. Of course, Mario Bros is on the top ranks, but I’ve been in the Mushroom Kingdom so often that I feel quite saturated. So it was rather a draw between Metroid and Mega Man. I know, Mega Man 3 is the best one but that’s not for sale yet. And thanks to my self-inflicted urge to conduct a purchase now rather than anytime from now, I transferred my points to Nintendo and after seconds Mega Man arrived at my Wii.

But… I was talking about Metroid, right? While browsing through the Shopping Channel I looked up some stuff on YouTube and found a long video of the actual gameplay of the Alien inspired game. Or why is one of the bosses called Ridley if not after Ridley Scott? After a few minutes I knew that the game was well designed: Jumping passages, shooting passages, loads of secrets, good music and great atmosphere have been cramped into that 128 kB cartridge.

But it’s a little old now, don’t you think? And a graphics fetishist like me hates it. And loves it. Because I am not only a lover of retro, I even subscribed to it! So after downloading Mega Man and cursing it I surfed to Amazon.de for the GBA version of Metroid instead. But it was too expensive for a 21 year old ROM I could download myself into NESticle. There I learned from the reviewers awarding only a single star to the article that the GBA game called Metroid: Zero Mission was the best of the 2D Metroid games. Plus it’s bundled with the original NES version that becomes accessible after beating the remixed game. A big yay!

When I finally got it I played it for hours because it got so very addicting and I nearly pissed my pants the first time I encountered the first mini-boss. I’m such a girl…

Speaking of which: Even Lisa likes it. And Lisa doesn’t really like computer or video games. And, hell, she hates boardgames for sure! Below is a complete list of the few games she actually enjoys playing:

Super Mario Bros I ¹. She has beaten it so often that I stopped counting.
Super Mario Bros III. Same here
Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers for the NES. Beaten by her also on the emulator. Thank you, beloved quick save!
Garfield for the original 1989′s gray GameBoy. Nice pixeled cat, interchangeable gameplay. But we adore Garfield so much that I don’t dare writing anything bad about this game just because of the license. Actually there aren’t even any rumors about it on the internets because the game is so ancient.
Super Mario World. I was dusting my old SNES at the time Lisa discovered it and instantly fell in love with the formerly unknown Mario game. Also played by her on the emulator. Excessively.
The Sims and Second Life because you can dress up people.
New Super Mario Bros for the DS. She finished the game within a week or so. I still haven’t yet…
Metroid Zero Mission for the GBA because you can run through it without worrying much about the ruleset. I guess that’s the reason she likes it: Samus’ gameplay is kinda like Mario’s.

The First Woman in Space

Okay, Samus Aran wasn’t the first woman in space but definitely the first female protagonist in a big video game. And nobody knew it at first. Not even Justin Bailey! It was 1986 back then, where Indiana Jones and Marty McFly were the given protagonists who a common boy would aspire to become. And then came Samus. I really wish that I could be an eight-year-old in 1986 right now, just having finished Metroid in less than 3 hours, marks of the unergonomic and sweaty NES controller in my palms. And then Samus takes off his suit. And… it’s a girl! In a pink leotard. How would a pre-teen boy who considers girls as his number one enemies react to that?

Unfortunately I will never know. I always knew that Samus was a girl like I always knew that Darth Vader was Luke’s Father ². I guess I stumbled across Samus’ gender definition in some very old Club Nintendo magazine I begged my mom to subscribe to, which was in fact paying for Nintendo’s self-advertisement.

I guess the girl-in-a-bikini-wearing-boots-sprite ³ was more a gimmick than a clever storyline decision by the guys at Nintendo. Nevertheless it set ground for great female protagonists to come as well as for epic story lines in Japanese tradition that are carried on sequel by sequel for decades now. Just take a look at Metal Gear, Final Fantasy or even Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

What’s the name again?

Do you know how to pronounce Samus Aran? I pronounced it the way it was written until I recently discovered that the Irish boy’s name that’s also written Samus is pronounced like [shamus]. So I adjusted to that and pronounced her name like it … despite the fact that I didn’t grew comfortable with it. Lisa also didn’t and looked it up on Wikipedia where the name is also written in Katakana: サムス・アラン: Samusu Aran. No [sh]. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Something funny before I go to bed: Lisa ~~has~~ had troubles remembering the name Samus Aran. And lately when she was talking about Samus she just called her “Sandra”. Now is that cute or what?

Why am I adding a link here? You all know it for sure! Cause if you don’t….! ↩
I am sorry for this major spoiler on my otherwise spoiler free blog. But refer to footnote 1 ↩
If you’re truly interested in those pay a visit to this site. ↩

♫ Lord of the Rats

Phil Strahl — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 03:57:30 +0000

My recent submission Lord of the Rats (listen below) for OverClocked Remix was rejected, I’ve worked on it for about five weeks. But I just sensed the rejection coming on the horizon but didn’t dare to look.

texx sound – Lord of the Rats. 2006
Download audio file (texx_sound_-_lord_of_the_rats.mp3)

But I did look and the judges’ decision came over me like the hellfire of the apocalypse. Actually this was in my opinion my best mix I’ve ever made. Since my first submission on OCRemix, which was about four years ago, I’ve learned so much in terms of arrangement, pace, sampling, mastering, composition and last but not least engineering since these days of clumsy guitar picking. This rejection really hurt my feelings.

The first two tunes I sent them in 2002 were nearly instantly put up (the Jurassic Park thingie and the MegaMan thingie). The following mix called I Love The Airport (below), a remix of the Airport music from the “Die Hard Trilogy” for PSX, they put up but deleted it after a couple of months.

texx sound – I Love the Airport. 2003
Download audio file (texx_sound_-_i_love_the_airport.mp3)

WTF? And the following 4 or 5 mixes the judges didn’t like either. Last year’s Moon Dust for Duck Tales had the luck of being judged in the Christmas time and everybody likes a little cheesy tune made in 6 hours (!).

But now I’ve got the message — this time for real. But who can blame them? I won’t submit any mix to OC ReMix again. Ever. If it’s not their style it’s not their style – period. I don’t like Madonna‘s style by the way.