ReMix: Eternal Champions 'Immortal Souls'

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Our (by necessity) Annual "First New ReMixer of the Year" award goes to Simon Sternis, alias Scaredsim, who joins the previously lonely zircon as the second mixer to cover Sega's would-be SF2 killer Eternal Champions. At the time, Sega put quite a bit of PR into boasting how Eternal Champions was going to devour all your other fighting games and insult their respective mothers as it masticated, but - as with the rather ephemeral James "Buster" Douglas Knockout Boxing - things didn't really pan out so well. It wasn't a bad game, though, and had some pleasing musics, which we're lucky to have yet more coverage of. Since Andy's been here himself, here's what he had to say:

"*Great concept, stylistically similar to doujin arrangers (e.g. S.S.H.)
* Creative instrumentation - loved the chip synths
* A little too much high end in the mix, and snare was a bit loud as well, but otherwise great production
* Well thought out structure and dynamic contour
* Excellent arrangement!

Kudos for remixing Eternal Champions, and good job overall."

The drums feel well-programmed but very clean and upfront to me - not a bad thing, but one which I as well equate with the doujin/Japanese scene. Actually, a lot of professionally arranged Japanese material has this quality, when I think about it. Well worth checking out S.S.H. if you haven't, btw: great stuff. At first this intros as if it's going to be a delicate new age flower, but guitar drops in and things get kickin' pretty promptly, with generous helpings of synth lead over shredding rhythm guitar underbelly. It's synth rock, basically, and doesn't have the types of meter changes or intonations that would push it over into the "progressive rock" territory, but things are very intricately sequenced, and there's a lot here to pay attention to that shows off the polish applied. Shariq adds:

"Nice integration of the percussion with what was going on in the song. Always nice to hear someone take the percussion out of that background timekeeper role effectively. Texture is great all around, I love the chip stuff with the guitars. Pads are appropriately quiet; any louder and it'd be messy."

Rock solid rock from newcomer Scaredsim, who definitely has both the arrangement and performance chops to come up with interesting ideas and execute them effectively. Judges focused on the volume of the snare, but I think a different snare sample entirely - specifically, a Bon Jovi-style arena rock variant - would have been a good switcheroo. However, as weed points out, any mix where the snare sample used is the salient criticism is doing far more things right than wrong. Great stuff from Simon, the first of hopefully many new artists to join us in '08!

― djpretzel