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VGM Contest - Upstanding Singles and Dizzying Series

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VGM Guessing Contest - Solo Games and Spin-Offs
Brought to you by Galactaknight

It's that time again, time for another VGM Guessing Contest, hosted by me. This one has a different theme songs coming from stand alone games and spin-offs. This might be a little bit more difficult as the games themselves are a bit rarer than most.

Rules:
1. The contest's deadline is July 2nd, 2015 at approximately 8:00PM EST.
2. There are 32 music clips, each one containing about 30 seconds of a song that plays in a video game. Now this time every clip is almost the first 30 seconds (taking a song from somewhere in the middle is rather idiotic to me). The clips are divided into four categories based on how difficult it is for most people to guess them: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Special. Each category has 8 songs organized by difficulty to guess.
3. Each player must send me a PM before the deadline containing their guesses for as many of the clips as possible. In order to get points for a clip, the player must only correctly identify the song and game title that that clip comes from.
4. For each correct guess, the player receives 1 point, regardless of the clip's difficulty. If somebody guesses the correct game but not the song they will receive a half point.
5. If a player is the only one to correctly guess the game that a specific clip comes from, they will receive one bonus point for that clip.
6. There are no penalties for incorrect responses, so guess away! PM me if you wish to change any guesses. There is no limit to how many times you resubmit answers.
7. If you are found to have revealed any answers to others before the deadline, either publicly or privately, you will be disqualified.
8. If you are found to have requested answers from others, you will also be disqualified.


Anyway, without further ado, here are the clips:
Easy:
Easy 1
Easy 2
Easy 3
Easy 4
Easy 5
Easy 6
Easy 7
Easy 8

Medium:
Medium 1
Medium 2
Medium 3
Medium 4
Medium 5
Medium 6
Medium 7
Medium 8

Hard:
Hard 1
Hard 2
Hard 3
Hard 4
Hard 5
Hard 6
Hard 7
Hard 8

Special:
Special 1
Special 2
Special 3
Special 4
Special 5
Special 6
Special 7
Special 8



Zip of all clips: Link

Feel free to use this thread to discuss the contest and voice any concerns/suggestions/questions you may have, but do not post any answers here!
I'm curious how others feel about the difficulty this time. A handful of the tracks sound vaguely familiar to me, but only one was immediately identifiable, so at the moment I doubt I'll enter. Do I just need to do a bit of extra sleuthing, or is this contest as obscure and VGM enthusiast as the others?
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Actually I thought the difficulty might be a bit lower than the others in all honesty. Mostly due to all the tracks being from the beginning of the song rather than some strange place in the center. I tried to pick out some fairly recognizable tracks from the games as well. Any guesses are appreciated, there's always the chance of being right afterall. The only VGM there that might be obscure is the Special ones.

0/32 guessed. Wow. I'm impressed^^
I agree with Axemjinx. A lot of these contests are too difficult for the average user. In this contest, I only recognised 4 songs. I'm not a VGM enthusiast at all; but I'm very surprised by how few songs I and others recognise in these types of contests. I think people will feel less motivated to enter if they can only recognise a very low percentage of songs.


Perhaps I'm wrong and someone knows all 32... but I think I'll pass from entering this contest sadly. My two cents are these contests are meant to be fun, and it's less fun if it's too difficult or obscure for most people.
keep in mind that it shouldn't be easy enough for someone to get all 32. despite the possible difficulty of this and the previous ones, there are people who manage to get above half of the songs on the list (the enthusiasts). If it was easy enough for the random person to get at least half, then the enthusiasts will more likely manage to get them all, in which case could end with multiple first place winners. It's more reasonable to have some difficulty with these contests rather than to make them too easy.


for the record, during the VGM2 contest, which is generally considered the hardest contest among them all; SNN managed to get all of them...

...he even got Super Widget and Civilization V, fucking Super Widget; that flat out amazed me!
Originally posted by Richard Nixon
keep in mind that it shouldn't be easy enough for someone to get all 32. despite the possible difficulty of this and the previous ones, there are people who manage to get above half of the songs on the list (the enthusiasts). If it was easy enough for the random person to get at least half, then the enthusiasts will more likely manage to get them all, in which case could end with multiple first place winners. It's more reasonable to have some difficulty with these contests rather than to make them too easy.


Of course not easy enough for everyone to get 100%, but not hard enough that even the enthusiasts are only getting half right. There should be a reasonable balance (e.g. the median user should be getting 40-55% correct). Additional songs can be brought out as tiebreakers if multiple people get all songs, or if there are ties for first place. Though such situation is unlikely.
Originally posted by SpicySeafood
Of course not easy enough for everyone to get 100%, but not hard enough that even the enthusiasts are only getting half right. There should be a reasonable balance (e.g. the median user should be getting 40-55% correct). Additional songs can be brought out as tiebreakers if multiple people get all songs, or if there are ties for first place. Though such situation is unlikely.
You need to keep in mind that these are Spin-Offs and Solo Games, they're unique games in their own right. Additionally 40-55% is near unbelievable if you're talking about the site as a whole unless it was all mario games. Taste in VGM and games themselves varies so differently from person to person it'd be hard to have somebody share the exact same taste as another on the site.

I really fail to see why submitting with half right is a bad thing. It's effortless to submit a pm with your answers too. You can still guess the other half and you might be correct. Of the half you have right you never know if you're the only person to get it for an additional point.

I'm pleased with Medium 7 being in, the game it's from being one of my favorite games of all time and definitely a gem most people don't know about. Really hard not to spoil it and tell people "Hey, go play this!".

Easy 3 and 4 are also games I've played and quite liked, so I definitely recognized them the moment I heard them.

There's a ton of songs in this that are really cool, but I have no idea as to where they're from, like Hard 2. I definitely look forward to finding out what they are when the contest is over.



Originally posted by SpicySeafood

Of course not easy enough for everyone to get 100%, but not hard enough that even the enthusiasts are only getting half right. There should be a reasonable balance (e.g. the median user should be getting 40-55% correct). Additional songs can be brought out as tiebreakers if multiple people get all songs, or if there are ties for first place. Though such situation is unlikely.


It is highly likely that multiple people will get everything if it's easy enough that the average person gets half of it right. the thing is not everybody knows the same things, so you need to have some diversity for the average to be half. It shouldn't be that half the songs are being guessed by nearly everybody who enters. Why even include those songs if everybody is getting them? If we wanted to, we could pad out the contests with easy filler songs so people can feel accomplished but I don't think anybody would find that to be much fun.

By the way in this one so far I only know one song for sure, I'm not complaining.

the way I look at it, i don't mind the difficulty as long as the person hosting is picking songs they actually like and aren't opening up a random OST and picking a song at random. That's how I hosted mine, that's how ex and derpy and erga hosted theirs, and I'm pretty confidant that Galactaknight did this as well. When the song choices are good and difficult, it builds up anticipation for the people guessing to find out what the songs are even more.

also Nice work with Medium 6 and Hard 7

(pointing this out to Axem and anyone unaware, a good amount of the VGM guessing contest discussions do happen over IRC more often than the threads themselves and does spark up frequently during the guessing period of each contests. Mainly on #smwc)
Well, considering the fact that I only play a few games, some of which are very obvious and the others very obscure, I wouldn't be able to tell the difficulty on this no matter what.

I feel weird though, I'm certainly not going to win this contest because I couldn't even guess a very big part of the songs, but I feel like trying either way.

...also, I was able to immediatelly recognize Special 8. I certainly didn't expect that game in here.

EDIT: I just realized: There's no Rule 3.
Well, I only got medium 6 and recognize special 5 but I just can't remember what special 5 is from (and it's killing me).
I don't know any of them, and last time, I only knew what two of them were so I probably won't enter, but I thought it would be interesting to do a Video Game Music Guessing contest.
I know one of the mediums but I can't place the game currently and it's killing me. Couple other mediums sound vaguely familiar and that's about it. Seems I don't know stand alone games very well.

Having been thrown off by every easy entry for the moment, it makes me wonder how people decide what are considered easy (and so on) games.
Originally posted by Milk
I know one of the mediums but I can't place the game currently and it's killing me. Couple other mediums sound vaguely familiar and that's about it. Seems I don't know stand alone games very well.

Having been thrown off by every easy entry for the moment, it makes me wonder how people decide what are considered easy (and so on) games.
I can't speak for the other hosts but I decided the ranking of each entry by how mundane and mainstream they are. I also tried to make sure the ones in the easier categories were more recognizable for the type or genre of the game so people might have an easier time.

Personally I think we're way too concerned about multiple people identifying all the songs, and despite all the speculation I'm not seeing a lot of proof. The fact that S.N.N. managed to guess everything in the second contest doesn't bother me, as there will always be cases of taste overlap- for example, all the Special songs Maruhai solely identified last month. The more we try to prevent this, the more people we drive away. I mean, just look at how turnout has plummeted since the first contest: 49 -> 14 -> 7 -> 12. You still want to tell me these contests are easy enough?

Sure, songs that have an ID rate of 100% are a waste of space, but I rarely see them, and when I do, I feel like the numbers are inflated anyway because so few people enter. Even Corridors of Time from Chrono Trigger, in the first contest, was only 70%.

In contrast, songs with an ID rate of 0% are equally a waste of space, and I've seen those in every contest except the first, even though these contests seemingly cater to VGM enthusiasts. Even the first contest came very close, with roughly a third of the songs at 10% or less, and that was with 49 entrants total. It probably would have had plenty at 0% if turnout were more like recent contests.

I mean, I could put together a list of songs I genuinely enjoy that would stump even S.N.N., but to me, that's not the point. I think these contests have become too much about the hosts' esoteric tastes and not about what we expect a reasonable number of SMWCentral users to know. If the list Milk and I have prepared for August is still too hard, I apologize profusely, but at least we've genuinely striven to give our contest a broader appeal.

Anyway, good luck to everyone that enters this month. I'll look forward to the end statistics.
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I thought the contests were about introducing people interested in vgm to soundtracks that the host likes that they may not have heard of and not about making sure everybody wins.
I believe the VGM guessing contest was an opportunity to introduce others to the VGM I myself enjoy. Though not entirely composed of esoteric music, that'd be mean spirited and disheartening as few would know.

Originally posted by AxemJinx
You still want to tell me these contests are easy enough?
Nobody is saying it's absolutely easy. In fact the contest is itself supposed to be difficult. You're guessing music based on knowledge. Various knowledge based contests or identification contests can be difficult based on how large the subject matter is. VGM happens to be incredibly diverse and subjective.

Originally posted by AxemJinx
In contrast, songs with an ID rate of 0% are equally a waste of space...
You're making it seem like there's over half the songs that are unidentified. It's really more like 1-2 possibly. Even then this is applicable if you chose random numbers and asked people to guess them. There's always a chance one particular one isn't identified because of the sheer volume of entries. Usually lack of knowledge of vgm that the judge prefers doesn't help people narrow down selections.

Originally posted by AxemJinx
I think these contests have become too much about the hosts' esoteric tastes...
You saw the first contest right? Several of them were fairly unknown as well. The contest is a host selecting VGM they enjoy that they believe others would know. We don't choose some weird track that doesn't fit with the rest of the game, it's one that's instantly recognizable to them. Just because you yourself are having a bit of an issue with ever really guessing things then don't complain about it. You don't know how many others do or don't know it. Also if you aren't entering then why do you care, you haven't seemed to have entered many of the contests yourself. Additionally as I've stated none of these are esoteric other than the special ones. They're all fairly reasonable to know if you know the judge or at least are relatively up to date.

Originally posted by AxemJinx
If the list Milk and I have prepared for August is still too hard, I apologize profusely, but at least we've genuinely striven to give our contest a broader appeal.
Honestly I don't know if that's completely possible, you'd need to put in a bunch of 100% know rate songs to encourage people. It seems like people get discouraged from submitting anything at all, i'm guilty of such but it's an ongoing issue. Again there's always the possibility of songs being unidentified, VGM music is diverse and the taste in it is subjective. Common VGM to you may not be common to everyone.

I will say though that personally this is the hardest contest yet; only one that sound really familiar was medium 7 and otherwise there were a handful of ones that sounded vaguely familiar. Really interested in seeing what the results are.
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