Artists, such as the geeks on OCReMix, need a good name. My lawyer suggested I change my name to something easier for a jury to symphathize with, and I got the idea for a name contest. I’m well aware that nobody reads my blog. Yet. When the OCR community does find it, it’ll be all the more interesting for them to read. This could be amusing for them, not just judgemental.

The first category I will judge in is long names. The two longest I found was Children of the Monkey Machine and Cuddly Battleship Kattywampus. In order to avoid looking evolution-friendly in front of potential biblical fundamentalists, I have to choose CBK. This is good practice if I ever run for president of America. I have yet to be born in America, but considering I might yet be born again, it shouldn’t be a problem.

The second category is two-letter names. With a number of those (AE, JV, MC, mp, mv, OA, and po! (listed only because the third symbol isn’t a letter)), it shouldn’t be hard. We’ll disqualify the transliterated umlaut, the cheesy MC, the one alluding to magic/mana points, and the one with more than two symbols, leaving us with JV, mv, and OA. Lowercase names seem a little lazy, and most good names contain vowels, so I’m gonna go with OA.

For the third category, I will decide the best use of non-letter symbols. Replacing letters with numbers are overused, although the existance of both a Beej and a B33J make the latter worth mentioning. Adding numbers to the end of the name is a bit 90’s. Actually, using numbers is lame. There, I said it. po! deserves an honorary mention here for not using numbers. Despite being a bit 90’s, J:/Drive has to win this one.

There are two kinds of funny artist names: the cheesy stupid ones, and the amusing ones. The aforementioned Cuddly Battleship Kattywampus deserves an honrary mention here, as does A Scholar & A Physician (a real abbreviation, too), the former for being cheesy stupid to the point that it’s funny again, the latter for being an unorthodox name and depth. The win, however, goes to Jupiter Crayons for the obvious reason.

Finally, there’s the coolest name on OCR. I have a hard time deciding what the coolest name is. Back in the days, it might have been something with a  double-X, something awesome just spelled out, something far off the beaten path, or some really cool ordinary name, but I think slightly longer names are the thing nowadays, and so are the two names I’m considering for this title, Another Soundscape and Symphonic Chronicles. DragonAvenger gets an honorary mention.

D’oh! They’re both losers. The winner is Sixto Sounds.

Perhaps I should recommend their music as well, but I have to admit there’s some whose remixes I wouldn’t. They’re worth exploring, to see how many were actually worth it, if not for actually listening. And that concludes the OCR artist name contest.

Let’s say, for a split second of fantasy, that we live in a fair world. How would OCReMix look during that split second? Fair has never… Okay, I’m not gonna try to make that funny. My lawyer suggested lack of humor might help my case.

60,574 posts, 2,124 threads. I’m talking about the Reviews forum. I’m gonna make a quick scientific experiment. I observed that McVaffe had an unhealthy amount of reviews in comparison with other recent remixes. Further observations should confirm that many OCR forum members are sycos (not to be confused with zyko).

I’m gonna list 10 recent remixes and estimate their value based on a formula. The remixes are: Harmony of Destruction, H2O, Nuclear Flash, Kirby’s Mystical Track, Celestial Winds Blah Blah Blah, Heatman (Just a Fuse mix), Livin’ la vida Stockholm, A Day in the Life of a Judge, and Yet Even More Final Fantasy VII. And yes, I’m using nonary for this post.

For the sake of fairness, I’m not gonna include the two Final Fantasy tracks just outside the range I just set my mind on using in this statistical experiment. That means that both emo-FF and FFVI tie with Mega Man 2, each with 2 remixes.

On average, there are 2 reviews a day on new remixes. The actual number of reviews per day is much higher, due to OA, DA and others, but the older reviews don’t count here. It should be mentioned that at least OA is often seen on the first page of recent review threads.

The top scoring tracks here were not FFVII tracks, surprisingly. Less surprising was the sycophancy, most reviews were of McVaffe’s Okami remix and the Sixto Sounds/zircon Mega Man 2 collab. The top scoring tracks had more than twice the average.

More surprises await in the low range, with judge JJT and newcomer Kidd Cabbage. Both tracks were from Final Fantasy games, and received less than half of the average number of reviews. While surprising, it doesn’t really break convention.

I’ll sum this up by saying that some remixers have a significant status, and I’d like to attribute the unfair review balance to subliminal messaging but there’s a simpler explanation, namely that a significant portion of remix fans are sycophants, and I’m coming after you with Occam’s Razor if you disagree.

I’ve been busy with court, but thanks to my lawyer, I have internet access at the detention center. 

Despite occasional posters’ preferences of music without lyrics, it seems as if the favourite tracks are those with lyrics. A quick research in the Reviews forum revealed the three most reviewed tracks being ones with lyrics. The bottom three? None with lyrics. Despite the reviewing campaign dominated by DA and OA, there are tracks that don’t get the number of reviews they deserve – and some that get an unfair percentage of the total reviews.

Naturally, not all posts in the review forum counts as reviews. Still, the average for the1549 posts at the time of writing is about 25 posts per thread. It’s a little unfair that some get almost 200 posts (one way over 200) while others have a measly 5. I downloaded the top three and bottom three remixes recently in order to analyse them. I didn’t have to. The top 6 tracks all have lyrics, all having over 150 replies to their review thread.

The top three are: Sonic & Knuckles “Lover Reef” by a horde of remixers at 266 replies; Asterix “Niggaz 4 Life” with 199 replies; Chrono Trigger “TheIncredibleSingingRobot” with 189 replies.

The reason for their popularity has to be that there’s so much more to say about the lyrics than the music. The reviews are mixed, there’s irrelevant little replies about offtopic remarks, there’s posts about zyko’s ethnicity… All in all, it’s not an indicator of the most downloaded or people’s favourite tracks, it’s just a list of tracks that due to the lyrics cause a lot of people to want to express themselves (and their ignorance).

The bottom three at the time of downloading were Shinobi “Ninja Strut”, Shenmue “Ryo’s Renshuu”, and the creatively named Tinhead “Level 1 Theme (Brain Bucket Mix)”. Okay, Ninja Strut and Ryo’s Renshuu are drum-based pieces and the Tinhead remix was synthy and a bit caught between enjoyable stuff I associate with trackers, and trance. Still, when the average number of replies, these tracks do deserve something at least half way to average.

Ultimately, this is the recipe for getting loads of reviews: remix any game but add lyrics, collab with as many singers as possible, make sure you’re using racial language, and make sure the remix contains stuff some people hate.

How to make a good remix is a different question, but it probably involves John Williams… and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Just for posterity, let’s list the remixers whose tracks are in the top or bottom three, in no particular order:

Rayza, pixietricks, zircon, mutagene, Joe Redifer, D-Lux, GeoffreyTaucer, shonensamurai, The Sheriff, Ubik, Star Salzman, zyko.