Pimp my PSG Challenge - Results

About a month ago the Pimp my PSG challenge on MRC closed, with a total of 9 entries participating for eternal fame and glory. But of course not all fame and glory is distributed equally. So we scouted around and managed to recruit Dutch MSX scene veterans Impact to weigh and judge each entry.

And so it happened. The Impact crew really enjoyed to do something MSX related again after so many years and took the opportunity to not only judge the challenge entries, but also to reunite and catch up after a long time and have a lot of in the process. Or, in their words "we also had a blast conducting our jury duties. We’re very grateful to the organizers and the contestants for providing us with this occasion.".

The amount of detail and work that went into judging was amazingly thorough, which each Impact member judging each song on these criteria:

• Delivery (description of hardware configuration, the creation process, used equipment, etc.)
• Originality
• Emotion (how much did the song stir you)
• Sound quality
• Artistic criteria like phrasing, tempo, dynamics, structure
• What are the song's strengths?
• What are the song's weaknesses?

Every criteria could be judged with a maximum of 5 points. For every entry, the original song was played first, followed by the submitted track. Despite the thorough judgement criteria, choosing a winner proved to be hard. Especially the top 3 was very close together, making an extra round of judging necessary for the final verdict:

1. Das Piratenboot by Meits with 219 points
2. Aekrus by Yzi with 212 points
3. Thexder by poke-1,170 with 202 points
4. Wicked Lounge by Jorito with 202 points
5. Kwik Fit Child by Hans with 199 points
6. Star Force by [WYZ] with 178 points
7. Titanic by FranSX with 176 points
8. StarDust by FranSX with 173 points
9. Ulises by FranSX with 156 points

Third place ended in a tie, but after a lot of discussion Impact unanimously decided to label Thexder as the third place because of the song's originality, the well chosen instruments and the special effects.

Congratulations to the prize winners and a big thank you to all contestants! Of course, the winners don't just go home with eternal fame and glory, there's also prizes to be had! The MRC prize pool consists out of a set of all original Impact releases signed by the Impact crew, a MIDI-PAC 2.0 (still to be released!), a MegaflashROM SCC, the game Be-Bop Bout or an MSX T-Shirt or girlie and the first prize winner has dibs on their prize of choice!

Impact was kind enough to also hand us a full report with more elaborate comments for every individual entry, which you can find in our forum. In closing, Impact highlights that they really enjoyed contributing to the MSX community in this way and would love to do it again. So who knows, until next time?

Relevant link: Pimp my PSG Challenge - Detailed Report