VGmix is back!
Nov. 8, 2003
VGMix, a video game music arrangement site, is now back in action. The site went down about a year and half ago because the main proprietor, virt, couldn't afford to pay the bandwidth costs until he found a new job. Now he's got one, and the site is back, better than ever before.
The other main video game arrangement site, Overclocked Remix, is still up as well, so now there is twice the game music goodness to choose from. The two sites complement each other very well. OC Remix posts about one song every day or so, carefully chosen by a small panel of insiders. Unfortunately, it can take 3-4 months from the submission of a new track until it is posted on the site, but the quality is generally very high.
The original VGMix took the opposite stance. Anyone could post their own songs, or review a song. Of course, this lead to a crapflood of garbage and half-completed tracks. But there was still some great stuff on there. And even some of the bad stuff was good for comedic value. Also, the web design was great. You can see it in my own site. I just stole the graphics and re-interpreted them for my own theme.
The new VGMix tries to fix a lot of the problems the old one had. It ranks the songs in tiers based on the reviews it receives. Users who continually provide thoughtful, constructive reviews are rewarded with XP which allows them to go up levels. There's a whole RPG theme involved, complete with secret items to find. In addition, it only allows musicians to upload one song per week, on the assumption that no one can be more prolific than that. This keeps people from flooding the system with joke tracks.
This is a good time for video game music fans. I'm looking forward to finding some great new tunes to download, especially since a recent hard drive failure erased my old collection.