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Equinox 2021 VGM Guessing Contest

Non-SMW



To those in the Northern Hemisphere, happy spring equinox! To those in the Southern Hemisphere, happy autumn equinox! And happy Norooz to those who celebrate it! Wikipedia says it's World Sparrow Day today as well, so Happy Sparrow Day as well!

With all of these reasons to celebrate, it's time for another VGM guessing contest! This time around, it's a five-way collaboration between myself ( bebn legg),  Doctor No,  K.T.B.,  Valentine, and  idol! Once again, there's a grand total of 100 + 6 songs from all across the world of video games.

So, let's jump right into how it works! It's simple, just guess the name of the game that each song is from. If you don't know which game specifically, you can also guess the series. Getting the game wrong, but the series right (e.g. guessing Super Mario Bros. 3 instead of Super Mario Bros. 2) still counts as a correct series guess. If a game has multiple versions or soundtracks, be sure to specify which one the song is from!

As per tradition, there are also three songs that are not from video games! Two of them are impostors, which means that they're pre-existing, non-video game songs, while one of them is a composter, which is a song composed by one of us specifically for the contest! Correctly guessing these will net you extra points. For the impostors, you can list where the song is originally from, including track name, album, composer, or any other relevant information, should you know it, for that to count as correctly guessing the game. You can also guess a song as being the impostor without knowing its origin; if you're correct, you'll still receive the bonus points.
For the composter, since there's no origin, simply label it as the composter to get a total of 3 points.
There are no penalties for incorrectly guessing the impostors, so guess away!

Finally, after the set of regular songs, there are also the EXTREME songs, which are very obscure songs. Correctly guessing these songs is worth some additional points.

DO NOT REVEAL YOUR GUESSES OR TALK ABOUT YOUR PROGRESS WITH OTHER USERS This is discouraging to other users at best, and ruins the spirit of the contest at worst. Penalties for doing this may include disqualification, and could go all the way up to a temporary ban.

Scoring
For each guess you submit, you will get the following:
  • 2 points - Guess the game correctly.
  • 1 point - Guess the series/franchise that a song comes from, but not the game (e.g. "Mario" for Super Mario Odyssey would get 1 point).
  • 3 points - Identify which song is the COMPOSTER. (Note that there is no actual source for this one, so simply labelling it "composter" is enough.)
  • Additional 2 points - Guess an extreme song correctly.
  • Additional 1 point - Identify the IMPOSTOR. You do not necessarily have to guess the actual song to get this bonus point.
  • Additional 2 points - Be the only person to identify a particular song.
  • Additional 1 point - Be the only person to identify which series/franchise a song comes from.

Game points and series points are mutually exclusive. This means that getting the game points overrides getting the series points (i.e. correctly guessing a game gives 2 points, not 2+1.)

The top 3 scorers will receive a wonderful trophy, and a code from the SMWC list of game codes.

Submitting your guesses
Compile all your guesses in a neat, organized format, and send them via site PM or Discord DM to either  bebn legg (@bebn legg#0086) or  K.T.B. (@K.T.B.#4659) by April 3rd 2021, 23:59 EDT. You've got two whole weeks to submit your guesses. If you're not submitting a guess for a particular song, there's no need to include it in the list you're sending us. If you remember a song after you've already submitted your guesses, no worries, just send us another PM or DM, we'll compile everything together in the end.

You can find all the songs here.

Happy listening~

Hi my guess is the super Mario series
#smw{:peace:}
Interesting idea, don't know if I'll participate, but cool nonetheless.
Хуй войне!

桐生会FOREVER #ThankYouCoco / Rest in peace, Near, thank you for everything
Thanks for setting this up!

Quick thing: I think song number 100 only plays in the left headphone. The other songs work fine so it's definitely the song. Just thought I'd let you know that.
ok has passed a 10 day after the time up and no results yet.

so the contest was too few participants or the organizators forggot this event exits/put the results here or ¿wat happend?
ESPACIO EN RENTA
It almost feels like that, but it may just be that these types of contests have kind of run their course. Personally I would love to see a return back to more mainstream classic game song selections, so that more of the SMWC demographic can name more than 10% of the songs. Once upon a time I liked trying to sleuth out any leads on familiar songs, but those days are gone, there are simply too many new and obscure games in the mix. These were definitely more enjoyable when a large number of participants could feel competitive.

Maybe next time around, if we are going to stick with the long list of obscure songs, why not make it a collaborative effort? Everyone would be allowed to publicly share which songs they know, and narrow down the list of unknowns? I think that could be a lot more fun, as long as one single person can't just name the entire list, which can be dealt with using a few extra rules or changes to the format.
Originally posted by Gartore
ok has passed a 10 day after the time up and no results yet.

so the contest was too few participants or the organizators forggot this event exits/put the results here or ¿wat happend?

compiling the results for these contests takes a not insignificant amount of time, especially if there are a lot of entrants. please be patient.
soundcloud / bandcamp / twitter / buy/stream my EP / buy my touhou music / buy my NEW album!!!
The results have been mostly compiled for a few days, barring a small concern that would be best left unsaid publicly for the time being. Beyond that, we're just waiting on a few people to finish writing their "post-results" comments on each song (where the people who chose the songs write their thoughts on the music we picked, as is tradition for these events).

Believe me, we haven't forgotten about this or anything - In fact, I finished setting up the styling for the majority of the results post just this morning.


Originally posted by Vic Rattlehead
Personally I would love to see a return back to more mainstream classic game song selections, so that more of the SMWC demographic can name more than 10% of the songs. Once upon a time I liked trying to sleuth out any leads on familiar songs, but those days are gone, there are simply too many new and obscure games in the mix. These were definitely more enjoyable when a large number of participants could feel competitive.

To be completely honest here, I do kind of agree with this. Out of all the VGM contests we've had on SMWC so far, I think my favorite song selection for sure was SNN's song choices in the first contest, simply because all of the songs he chose were from fairly popular games, especially on SMWC (aside from MAYBE one or two exceptions, and even then I would still argue that nothing on that list was too obscure to the point of being unreasonable). I could argue the same thing of AxemJinx's list, to a lesser extent. But every other contest has always included a hefty quantity of songs and games so obscure that I don't think anyone could have been reasonably expected to find them.

I think in some people's minds, however, that's kind of the point. Some people use these contests as a way to show off hidden gems that they'd like others to find out about, and some people look at these contests as ways to pick up some new soundtracks to add to their music libraries. Despite this, however, SNN's and AxemJinx's contest had way more participants than any other contest we've done by far, so maybe this is the wrong angle after all. I think AxemJinx himself said that he would just host one of those VGM-A-Day threads if he wanted to show other people the obscure side of his music tastes, since that way he gets to show off some cool songs without putting pressure on people to try and figure out what it is, even when he knows that it's unfair to try and get people to identify them beforehand. I'm inclined to agree with his perspective.

For this reason, I try to strike a balance. I did my best with my song selection this time around to focus on choosing songs that may introduce people to some not-super-mainstream games, while at the same time also being careful to only choose songs that I could reasonably expect a decent number of people on the site to get. I also tried to choose a handful of songs that are in some way well-known around here, in the SMW Central community specifically - in fact, I would say that my "hardest" non-extreme song choice was still something very findable, since (without giving anything away just yet) it was prominently featured on a popular YouTube channel that I've seen many people on SMWC talk about.

Out of all the users who submitted songs for this context, I would say the one with the "easiest" selection overall was probably me. In fact, ignoring songs in the "Extreme" category, I was also the one with the smallest number of song choices that went completely unguessed by anybody. Of course, this is not to say that my selection was "better" than anyone else's, just that we all clearly had very different philosophies in mind when deciding how to choose songs.



Originally posted by Vic Rattlehead
Maybe next time around, if we are going to stick with the long list of obscure songs, why not make it a collaborative effort? Everyone would be allowed to publicly share which songs they know, and narrow down the list of unknowns? I think that could be a lot more fun, as long as one single person can't just name the entire list, which can be dealt with using a few extra rules or changes to the format.

Not gonna like, I honestly really like this idea. It could be a nice team-building effort, though it might be harder to give out prizes for something like that since it will be harder to determine who the "winner" was. Maybe the winner would be whoever "discovered" (that is, the first one to find) the highest number of songs? That way, it may encourage even more people to participate in total?

Only problem with that idea is that, if there still are some stupidly obscure songs in that case, then the contest may never end (assuming the idea is that the game goes on until every song has been successfully identified).
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I'd be interested in discussing the idea further with you if it's something that you think could happen one day. There would be a number of edge cases and lumps that would need smoothing out. I think as far as rewards go, just a simple badge would be good enough of a hook to give a little incentive, just look at how many people participated in the Yoshi egg hunt.
Originally posted by K.T.B.
Originally posted by Vic Rattlehead
Maybe next time around, if we are going to stick with the long list of obscure songs, why not make it a collaborative effort? Everyone would be allowed to publicly share which songs they know, and narrow down the list of unknowns? I think that could be a lot more fun, as long as one single person can't just name the entire list, which can be dealt with using a few extra rules or changes to the format.

Not gonna like, I honestly really like this idea. It could be a nice team-building effort, though it might be harder to give out prizes for something like that since it will be harder to determine who the "winner" was. Maybe the winner would be whoever "discovered" (that is, the first one to find) the highest number of songs? That way, it may encourage even more people to participate in total?

Except then there's this:

Originally posted by Vic Rattlehead
I think that could be a lot more fun, as long as one single person can't just name the entire list, which can be dealt with using a few extra rules or changes to the format.

The fun would be over rather quick if someone were to instantly snipe off half the list. Unless "publicly sharing which songs they know" means publicly listing entry numbers, instead of the associated guesses. Either way, I'm not sure how these ideas could be combined into something that works.


Originally posted by K.T.B.
I think in some people's minds, however, that's kind of the point. Some people use these contests as a way to show off hidden gems that they'd like others to find out about, and some people look at these contests as ways to pick up some new soundtracks to add to their music libraries. Despite this, however, SNN's and AxemJinx's contest had way more participants than any other contest we've done by far, so maybe this is the wrong angle after all. I think AxemJinx himself said that he would just host one of those VGM-A-Day threads if he wanted to show other people the obscure side of his music tastes, since that way he gets to show off some cool songs without putting pressure on people to try and figure out what it is, even when he knows that it's unfair to try and get people to identify them beforehand. I'm inclined to agree with his perspective.

Real quick, I can imagine that the forum was more bustling back then, i.e. there'd be more people around to potentially participate? I don't know, I wasn't around, but I can imagine it's the case.

I would be very disappointed if the VGM guessing contest became a list of music from mostly well-known games. Of course my experience is my experience, but for me the best part of this contest is the obscurity: either I get to pop off for knowing the obscure music, or I get to learn where it's from so I can listen to the full thing. There are so many tracks in this year's list that I'm dying to find out what they're from, extreme tracks included.

Besides, "well-known" has nothing to do with the individuals selecting the music for the contest, nor with the individuals guessing the music; there's so much less of a personal touch, and that interests me none.

Non-SMW