The Cave Story OST Olympics!

EDIT: The Majority of Voting has been finished. Here are the results all neatly organized with cute medals and stuff.

Sup Forum,

If you are someone who for some lunatic reason reads every single post, you'll already know that a group of us in this thread are arguing over a tracklist for some custom vinyls that Andwhy has offered to buy in "bulk" (for the five-or-so of us willing to 'crowd'fund ).

I recently made a (private) google form for the group to vote in to help bring down the tracklist to something that will fit on the record, and I thought why not make one for the whole forum, just so we can do fun statistics and analysis stuff (Math is my favorite subject, don't judge). Every week or so (until this inevitably dies) I'll do a small report on the highest and lowest ranking tracks, comparing similar ones together, find out if I'm wrong about Tyrant being a terrible song outside of setting the mood, etc.

It also includes unused (but finished original) tracks like "Wind Fortress" and "Pier Walk". If you aren't familiar with them and don't want to listen to the whole playlist I have set up at the beginning of the form, just leave them "Neutral".

If you want to participate you can find the voting form here. All submission are public.
NOTE: If you are one of the small group of people who filled out the form for the vinyl selection, this list includes the unused tracks and the ones we removed at the beginning, If you don't want to fill it out again I'll copy and paste all of that data into this one when it's settled.

You can find the PUBLIC raw data here, but it will be more interesting to wait for my weekly reports where I'll tally all the votes. Feel free to post in the thread to discuss why you like/dislike certain tracks, defend your underappreciated favorite, or nicely declare the forum crazy for supporting an abominable track.

One more thing, please try to NOT vote "love" for every track. Most of us here really love the entire CS Soundtrack as a whole, but make sure you have songs there that are marked as NOT your favorite.

 

EDIT: I'm going to make a second vote for all the tracks you just added... (Just ignore my old one)

Oh wait, forgot about how the full list isn't with the vinyl thread, I guess that doesn't make much sense to move it over unless someone was really lazy.

 

More stats are best stats

 

thatnamelessguy is quite the critic. Harsh judgement upon them all.

 

mrw I started all of this

 

Just to clarify, is this just for the original Cave Story tracks, or the tracks as a whole (all renditions)?

For example, there are a few tracks in Cave Story that I find "okay" in the original, but really like in the New soundtrack.

 

i've listened to the cave story ost enough times to hate it but i tried to vote as if i didn't

 

I put a lot of thought into mine and it took a lot longer than I expected. I couldn't decide between Pier Walk and White for the special track but I ended up choosing White. I'm interested to see the statistics once everyone's done voting.

 

Just to clarify, is this just for the original Cave Story tracks, or the tracks as a whole (all renditions)?

For example, there are a few tracks in Cave Story that I find "okay" in the original, but really like in the New soundtrack.

It's meant for the original but if you want I guess you could have the remastered in mind or something (shouldn't be too different unless you talking the wiware "new").

I love remastered Jenka 2 for some odd reason but I used the original in mind when deciding "okay"

 

I voted, my favorite track is definitely Wind Fortress. Oddly enough though, whenever Track 6 (when looking at the original ORG) hits G5 my teeth get set on edge, that's never happened to me when listening to the song before today.

 

Dang not much love for Jenka or Toroko happening

 

Jenka1 and Balrog's Theme are memorable and a core part of cave story.
But, probably on purpose, they both sound foreign and goofy, leading to unfavorable reviews as a listening track. Listening to them outside the context of playing the game, it's merely a giddy jingle.

Later today or at the very least tomorrow I'll probably make the first analysis/statistical post.

 

*MEDAL CEREMONY TIME* So, let's look at how things stack up:

First things first (that's a weird phrase to write), the winning track with the highest positive rating is:

Spoiler: The Best

CHARGE (The Muscle Doctor Theme!)
I'm just kidding, here's the real post:

Spoiler: Let's look at numbers!

Alright, considering how fast things die on the forums, with the fact that there hasn't been any new ballots for the past 48 hours, I would think this would be the main statistical analysis, perhaps with an update with stragglers in the next month (or if there is a sudden surge of activity... yeah right.)

This post will refer to the first 20 rows of the table, with Hax4Ever being the last submission. For the sake of keeping things balanced I'm going to just ignore thatnamelessguy's ballot (while YES you could think nothing of the OST except for two tracks, one has to understand that giving a 4-vote advantage to only two tracks is a bit data-manipulating). The other joke submission technically doesn't actually alter anything as it was just a line of neutral zeros with no favorite track.

So, the main event, here's the overall rating of all the tracks:

Spoiler: Overall Score

27 Wind Fortress (Platinum Medal for highest score and getting all positive votes)
25 Last Battle (Gold Medal for receiving only positive votes)
22 Moonsong (Silver Medal for receiving only positive votes)
22 Geothermal
21 Running Hell
20 Last Cave (Bronze Medal for receiving only positive votes)
19 Oppression
19 Scorching Back (Obtained all positive votes, but not enough to earn a medal)
17 Labyrinth Fight (Silver Medal for track most likely to get me in a fight, as I was one of two people who voted negatively)
16 White
15 Cave Story
15 The Way Back Home
15 Eyes of Flame (Gold Medal for track most likely to get me in a fight, as I was the only one who voted negatively)
13 Mischievous Robot
12 Gestation
11 Meltdown 2
11 On to Grasstown
10 Pier Walk (Bronze medal for unused track saved by users grace (6 of the votes are from one person declaring it their favorite)
10 Jenka 2
9 Balcony
9 Hero's End
7 Living Waterway
7 Pulse
6 Meltdown (Silver medal for unused track saved by a user's grace (3 of the votes are from one person declaring it their favorite)
6 Gravity
6 Toroko's Theme
4 Safety (Tied Gold medal for most "Meh" track, with 10 people voting a neutral "0")
2 People of the Root (Gold medal for unused track saved by a user's grace (3 of the votes are from one person declaring it their favorite)
0 Mimiga Town (Tied Gold medal for most "Meh" track, with 10 people voting a neutral "0")
0 Balrog's Theme
0 Cemetery
-4 Jenka 1 (Gold Medal for most polarizing track, with 7 positive and 11 negative votes)
-5 Halloween 2 (Silver Medal for most polarizing track, with 7 positive and 12 negative votes)
-6 Break Down
-10 Quiet
-10 Run!
-13 Plant (Almost won a medal for refined taste/guilty pleasure track with only two positive supporters, but not enough negativity)
-14 Gameover (Bronze Medal for most refined taste/guilty pleasure track, as there was only one loving supporter)
-16 Tyrant (Silver Medal for most refined taste/guilty pleasure track, and for making me do a spit-take.
Let's not beat up the person who ranked this higher than Wind Fortress)
-17 Seal Chamber (Gold Medal for most refined taste/guilty pleasure track, as there were only two positive supporters in a SEA of disapproval)
-20 Zombie (Platinum Medal for most refined taste/guilty pleasure track, as there were only two positive supporters in a SEA of disapproval)
-21 Charge
-22 Snoopy Cake/Rockorg (Medal for "good thing it wasn't part of the game" track)
-25 Access (Gold Medal for being slaughtered by the crowd)

That took me OVER THREE HOURS to type!

Here's a graphical pie chart of all the tracks picked for "Favorite Track" or thought of to be underappreciated (includes "thatnamelessguy" and the most recent ballot from "GlitchMatthew"):

Spoiler: Piechart

And here's a bar-graph for every track, making it easier to see the actual voting ratio ("GlitchMatthew" is counted, "thatnamelessguy" is omitted, and this treats the favorite tracks as a "Love (+2)"):

Spoiler: Who needs a wall of text when you have a wall of images?

Yeah, with the sheer number of people voting "neutral" for some of the tracks, it's basically a giant middle finger (i.e. Safety and Toroko's Theme), even though the actual hated tracks like Access and Rockorg would be more fitting.

Alright, I think that's it for analysis (the medals were the main part of this all). I might make another update if the unthinkable happens, though you'll have to remind me.

Congrats to Wind Fortress! I thought the winning track would be Last Battle or Running Hell, or maybe even Moonsong. I should listen to that track more.

 

This is very interesting to see, thanks for compiling this info for us. I also find your different types of medals very amusing. I look forward to what stats are next to come.

 

Alright, the results post now has a piechart for favorite tracks and bar-graphs for everyone, and I've added a link to it in the OP. Feel free to "nicely" argue with each other or talk about the medals awarded and stuff.