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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Now as a side note, and I'm assuming you're capturing from footage since you're discussing a video editor, but is your raw footage lossy or lossless? Lossless may take up more space, but it'll mean fewer dips in quality as you process it into videos and/or screenshots.     85. Better? It still defaults to 70, which I need to stop. I guess I'll also need to find a way to crop out the blackness, either in avspmod or infranview.
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Aug 8, 2012 17:27
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The one time I used JPGs, I just saved the images as PNGs from AvsPmod and then converted them to JPGs in Irfanview. Not sure if there's a simpler way to do it in AvsPmod, but it couldn't hurt to sniff around the options menu. You can crop right in AvsPmod with Crop(x1,y1,-x2,-y2), representing the number of pixels you're chopping off each side. The right/bottom crops should be negative values. Experiment to see what looks best to you.
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Aug 8, 2012 18:15
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So, if you've wandered into the Steam gifting and contests thread in the last day or so, you might have seen the sudden surge in lovely games on display. You might have also seen that I made the mistake of posting my experience with one of the worst PC games in human history. Well, I've been challenged to LP the entire rancid thing, and since we have a subforum just for that purpose, I figure this is the place to do it right. To ensure that I won't poo poo anything up, I'm placing a test post here for your consideration, whoever you are. It's essentially the same as what I posted in the gifting thread, but with a few little tweaks and the TIMG tags flipped back to IMG. Should this be met with approval, I'll split it into a main post with a little more content (ending just before the opening screenshots) and a first post of Mission 1. I also have Mission 2 screeshotted and awaiting write-up. All comments, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome. Without further ado, I give you Stalin vs. Martians: Whoever Wins, We Lose
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Aug 8, 2012 19:31
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Xander77 posted:I captured directly from Fraps footage using avspmod. The default there is 70%, so that's what I used. Hang on a sec... You should probably make two jpgs to compare the quality drop rather than jpg vs png. png will always look better, but in games this detailed it's just not worth the file size.
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Aug 8, 2012 20:04
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Those screenshots are a little huge. Could you see about scaling them down to about 80% size? That should bring it down to a palatable 800x600. Also, you've got a few images with mismatched tags, like this: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/KsqoL.jpg[/tIMG]
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Aug 8, 2012 20:12
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Zombie Samurai posted:So, if you've wandered into the Steam gifting and contests thread in the last day or so, you might have seen the sudden surge in lovely games on display. You might have also seen that I made the mistake of posting my experience with one of the worst PC games in human history. Well, I've been challenged to LP the entire rancid thing, and since we have a subforum just for that purpose, I figure this is the place to do it right.
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Aug 8, 2012 20:44
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BrainWeasel posted:Sorry Syrg, but your thread was one I specifically didn't read because I didn't want to start over from the beginning. For what it's worth you didn't seem to be the only one: for a thread that was updating somewhere between "daily" and "2-3x a day" it barely had any posts. Ironically I think now that I'm severely slacking in showing off the extra content it gets a lot more discussion.
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Aug 8, 2012 20:51
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Thanks for the comments. I'll resize the pics when I get home tonight, and post with the fixed tags and reduced flag count. Along with any other helpful bits of advice I get.Niggurath posted:Also I don't know if it's just the game or what but the colors in those screen shots were seriously giving me a headache. Almost as if it was giving off a psuedo 3D effect. That's the game, sadly. It doesn't bother me too much, but the pallette they used for the game does seem to clash with itself a lot.
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Aug 8, 2012 21:09
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Syrg Sapphire posted:For what it's worth you didn't seem to be the only one: for a thread that was updating somewhere between "daily" and "2-3x a day" it barely had any posts. Ironically I think now that I'm severely slacking in showing off the extra content it gets a lot more discussion. Doing 2-3 updates a day on a non-interactive thread doesn't leave much time for the average person to say anything. If they aren't constantly on F5'ing every hour it is easy to get left behind and not want to say something about an update 5 updates ago.
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Aug 8, 2012 21:14
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Niggurath posted:In addition to what Lizard Wizard said I don't really think that having four images in a row of just the Soviet flag is worth doing. Yes, we understand through your description that it was on screen for way too long but just telling us is enough, there's no need to show it. Also I don't know if it's just the game or what but the colors in those screen shots were seriously giving me a headache. Almost as if it was giving off a psuedo 3D effect. If you do want to show the anthem, capture it on video. Make us sit through it.
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Aug 9, 2012 00:03
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I posted this in the TSF, but I found this today: http://jpegmini.com/ Given the size reductions, it probably makes sense to take screenshots as PNG, upload them to the service, which basically is a much more modern JPEG encoder than the IJG one.
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Aug 9, 2012 00:11
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On average, how long does a screenshot LP update take to make? I just want a round ballpark figure here for reference.
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Aug 9, 2012 00:39
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pandaK posted:On average, how long does a screenshot LP update take to make? I just want a round ballpark figure here for reference. Depends on your workflow, really. I have a fairly sloppy workflow, and it takes me around 3-5 hours with Aftermath. 1-3 hours playtime (this varies from game to game... Heroes VI, for instance, will have little of screenshotting interest in an hour's play on average, whereas something like Phoenix Wright will need many more screenshots for the same time of play, and can stretch you a few updates), 1 hour organising and uploading (sloppy workflow, as I said), and 1 hour to think up the update text itself (not necessarily in that order, but again, sloppy workflow). If you've got a good workflow, batch upload, and a solid idea of what you're going to write, you can probably cut it so that you can fit 2 hours of play, and 1 hour uploading/typing up... but, as noted, it varies from game to game, sometimes immensely.
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Aug 9, 2012 00:49
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It takes longer than you'd think! It all depends on how much work you put in, like JamieTheD said. If all you do is add captions to a series of screenshots, it'll probably take you about as long to make the update as it does to play that stretch of the game. My workflow involves pruning my selection of images down, converting some image sequences into animated gifs (level ups, typically), converting video clips into animated gifs, transcribing about 2/3s of the text, and writing up character banter. I probably spend about 3 hours on the LP for each hour I spend playing the game. And that's with Facecopy and RightloadUploadAutoReplace greatly speeding up the process. Someday I will learn how people like TheDarkId crank them out so fast. And then I will steal their power. (The secret is practice and not being so lazy all the time.)
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Aug 9, 2012 01:17
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Tendales posted:Someday I will learn how people like TheDarkId crank them out so fast. And then I will steal their power. (The secret is practice and not being so lazy all the time.) They also record lots of sections of the game with fraps and the like. If you have trouble transcribing, I think gamefaqs has lots of the things just lying about for a bit of Ctrl-C Ctrl-V action.
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Aug 9, 2012 01:20
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Thanks for the feedback everyone, you guys were all a great help. Threat is up at http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3500438 for those who are interested.
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Aug 9, 2012 01:24
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pandaK posted:On average, how long does a screenshot LP update take to make? I just want a round ballpark figure here for reference. As has been said, it depends a lot on how much you're doing and what game you're doing. When I was doing The After Years, all I was doing was screenshots, music links, and commentary, so an update didn't take very long, maybe an hour per thirty minutes of gameplay. Phoenix Wright, on the other hand, took a lot longer to transcribe, plus I made a ton of GIFs and videos to better show off the atmosphere of the game. Covering fifteen minutes of that game took me three to four hours, which was part of why I quit it. If you're just doing screenshots, then yeah, it won't take very long at all. GIFs take a bit longer as you have to get the specific video clip/images, adjust the timing, optimize, and fiddle around with stuff if the optimization doesn't get it under 2MB. Videos require setting up the section you want to show off, sticking your script in MeGUI, encoding it, and then uploading it wherever. Granted, some games don't really get much out of GIFs or videos, while others can really shine with them. Currently, I'm spending maybe 2-3 hours on average on an update covering 15-30 minutes, including GIFs and boss videos. My trick is that I spread out playing the game, taking screenshots, and writing the updates so I don't do everything at once. Basically, it's kinda up to you how long you take by how much effort you put into the LP, or rather how much effort you think the game you're playing needs to be shown off properly.
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Aug 9, 2012 01:38
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:You should probably make two jpgs to compare the quality drop rather than jpg vs png. png will always look better, but in games this detailed it's just not worth the file size.  70 85 100
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Aug 9, 2012 01:57
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Mega64 posted:As has been said, it depends a lot on how much you're doing and what game you're doing. When I was doing The After Years, all I was doing was screenshots, music links, and commentary, so an update didn't take very long, maybe an hour per thirty minutes of gameplay. Phoenix Wright, on the other hand, took a lot longer to transcribe, plus I made a ton of GIFs and videos to better show off the atmosphere of the game. Covering fifteen minutes of that game took me three to four hours, which was part of why I quit it. In my point of view, it's much easier for me to record big batches of lossless video, and then make all the .xml files that are needed for each individual updates (I transcribe all text and face portraits, too). For a SSLP of a gargantuan size that requires a lot to be done, it's faster to do a bunch of updates at once and then, using any program that captures PNG or GIF animations from lossless video, capture them all in one or two sitting. It saves your brain from thinking "Okay, now I got to switch programs for update #99... but wait, I still haven't finished update #88, I should open this program first... uhmm..." Just do it all in one fell swoop, and it causes you less stress from over thinking things. Don't delete your lossless videos until you proof read everything in case you've forgotten to capture an image. It can and will happen, I've had to redo the game many times because of it.  I would never calculate how long it takes me to make an update (I think I would cry myself to sleep if I had an exact number, each update varies greatly). From this past week's workflow, it went something like this. I write these all down in a notebook to keep track of my progress. This week hit me pretty hard due to no internet connection, so things like uploading images in a batch and proof-reading/adding commentary with the help of an internet browser preview was rendered impossible. Wednesday 1st, 3 hours: Made all Gif animations for Update #28, #29, #30. All optimized. Thursday 2nd, 3 hours: XML file, PNG's and Gif animations for #31. Recorded lossless video for #32 and #33. Cropped all Case 3 character portraits in PSD file. Friday 3rd, 2.5 hours: Saved all Character Portraits for Case 3 as individual png files. Uploaded individually on LPix. Uploaded onto Facecopy. Saturday 4th, 2.5 hours: XML file and PNG's for #32 and #33 (half done) Sunday 5th, 1.5 hours: Finished all PNG and Gif animations (optimized) for updates #32 and #33. Monday 6th, 3 hours: Recorded lossless video for #34 and #35... and then a heck of a lot more, for maybe 8-10 updates in total. Tuesday 7th, 3 hours: XML and PNG files for #34, #35 and #36. Wednesday 8th, 3 hours: Proof-read for updates #20, #22. Add in commentary for #23 and hopefully #24. Tomorrow (Thursday) hopefully 2.5 hours: More commentary for #24 and beyond. HelloWinter fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Aug 9, 2012 |
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Aug 9, 2012 02:38
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For FFT 1.3, it'd take me anywhere from 1-4 hours to complete/record a battle (depending on luck, of course) and from there, 1-2 hours to screenshot the thing, an hour to write up interesting stuff, half an hour of fact-checking (and even then I still got a few things wrong) and then proofreading the whole thing. Not having to do story portions probably cut down significantly on my workload, although there are plenty of scripts available that I could have consulted. So at worst, maybe 6 or 7 hours for an update (spread out over a few days, naturally) with the quicker updates coming at around 2-3 hours of work.
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Aug 9, 2012 05:34
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I actually grab the stills from my video a day or two beforehand, so I'm already kind of mentally writing a draft of the update when I do that. I upload my images as I write the text in the SSLP test poster, so...not counting the gameplay involved, I'd say organizing an update takes 4-5 hours total.
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Aug 9, 2012 07:29
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Oh yeah, and here's a png converted to jpg via infranview: I think the 100 quality is unreasonably large, but the others are approximately the same size, so it's just a question of which is best in terms of quality. I can't really see the differences there, so let me know?
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Aug 9, 2012 07:55
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Thanks again for the advice on my Stalin vs. Martians LP. It is now live for those interested in appalling games.
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Aug 9, 2012 08:20
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Xander77 posted:Oh yeah, and here's a png converted to jpg via infranview: At what quality level? drat. Since both png's and Fraps footage are lossless, creating a jpg from either source shouldn't matter. The only thing that does matter is the quality level the jpg is set to. Seeing how much is lost is a matter of examining the right areas. I'll use the characters' faces in this example. 100The 100% quality jpg is essentially a lossless jpg, hence the sudden jump in size. We'll use this for reference. 85Take a close look at the protagonist's nose, and also at the lock of hair in front of his opponent's face. See how the colors sort of go nuts in an aura around those areas? That's artifacting. It's not so bad here, and you probably wouldn't notice it unless you were looking closely as we are now. Some spots are worse than others where the algorithm doesn't expect you to look; see what's happened to the post between the center man and the opponent? Look in particular at the top fence log right where it intersects the post and compare that to how it looks on the lossless image above. 70This image is 35 KB smaller, but is it worth it? Look at the opponent's hair now, and the sash across the main character's chest. See how the blocks have moved up in size compared to the image above? The artifacting is the same around the posts in the middle ground, but the quality loss has more significantly affected the contrast between light and dark areas. Since this is happening more to the characters people are paying attention to, it's a bigger problem. 85 is a good compromise between detail and size. Of course, it's also harder to tell than usual what with all the bloody blurry bloom in this game. This is just a personal opinion you can ignore, but turn that poo poo off.
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Aug 9, 2012 08:46
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Of course, it's also harder to tell than usual what with all the bloody blurry bloom in this game. This is just a personal opinion you can ignore, but turn that poo poo off.   90% is nearly twice the size of 85%, so I guess 85 is a good compromise.
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Aug 9, 2012 09:52
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pandaK posted:On average, how long does a screenshot LP update take to make? I just want a round ballpark figure here for reference. Mine probably takes 3-5 hours, depending on how much I want to kill myself after I've sorted through my screenshots. I mean, depending on how long the update is. That includes probably 20-30 minutes an update spent on drawing awful pictures though.
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Aug 9, 2012 12:05
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It takes me like 3-5 hours but I do 2-4 updates at a time. The longest/hardest part is trying to write interesting captions and copy/pasting in the dialogue. Then I get a week or two of just taking a couple minutes to paste in an update from notepad and review it one last time for mistakes or unfunny. It's low-effort and boy howdy does it show.
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Aug 9, 2012 12:14
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My Magical Diary SSLPs usually take me around 3-5 hours as well, including the writing and stuff. It's okay in normal circumstances, but what with Ramadhan religious stuff, things have slowed down. Anyway, it shouldn't take too long, and if you stick to a 1-update-a-week schedule, it shouldn't be a problem at all.
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Aug 9, 2012 13:31
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A wolf, crane and tiger walk into a bar...: Let's Play Total War: Shogun 2 - Rise of the Samurai Test OP Post 1 Test Quick Reference Post 1 I have a battle video to upload, but my internet is being dodgy tonight and keeps dropping out, so I will get that up a little later. I'm interested in feedback about tone, formatting, ease to follow, image size, the usual stuff. I want to get a sample update posted as well, hopefully as a second pass when I take the criticism onboard. Thanks for your feedback!
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Aug 9, 2012 13:42
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Aaaaand... cropped: Click here for the full 1024x558 image I'm not sure if this is the right amount of blackness of crop out, and whether or not I should resize the image down a bit.
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Aug 9, 2012 13:49
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Our Rayman 2 thread is up. Thanks for the input guys.
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Aug 9, 2012 20:26
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shalcar posted:A wolf, crane and tiger walk into a bar...: Let's Play Total War: Shogun 2 - Rise of the Samurai Technically, and Stylewise I saw no problems. However, did you mean to gloss over the agent(s?) you start out with in the campaign? You did bring up the concept of agents in the game (vaguely) but never really gave them/Shogun 2's system of leveling up a proper introduction.
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Aug 10, 2012 00:01
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ChaosSamusX posted:Technically, and Stylewise I saw no problems. However, did you mean to gloss over the agent(s?) you start out with in the campaign? You did bring up the concept of agents in the game (vaguely) but never really gave them/Shogun 2's system of leveling up a proper introduction. Well spotted. In order to stop the first post being such an enormous info dump, I plan to cover our agent in the second post and the other agent types in the update where we meet them. The levelling up system will be explained when someone levels up for the first time. I guess I'm worried about it all being too much to take in at once.
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Aug 10, 2012 00:36
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shalcar posted:A wolf, crane and tiger walk into a bar...: Let's Play Total War: Shogun 2 - Rise of the Samurai Looks fine to me, but don't burn out. These tend to go on for quite a while.
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Aug 10, 2012 00:56
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Brainamp posted:Looks fine to me, but don't burn out. These tend to go on for quite a while. Thanks for that, I know it's a fairly large undertaking (as I would assume most LP's are!) and I'll certainly do my best not to burn out. I'm hoping the hybrid style will help with that as I really do love doing battle commentary and I'm pretty passionate about this game.
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Aug 10, 2012 01:57
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shalcar posted:Thanks for that, I know it's a fairly large undertaking (as I would assume most LP's are!) and I'll certainly do my best not to burn out. I'm hoping the hybrid style will help with that as I really do love doing battle commentary and I'm pretty passionate about this game. That's good, because I'm pretty sure the completion rate for Total War LPs here is somewhere south of 20% (Just in recent memory, there was an Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2 vanilla campaign that all burned out). It's not that we're saying don't do this; it's that we're saying be certain you can finish this.
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Aug 10, 2012 02:05
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ChaosSamusX posted:That's good, because I'm pretty sure the completion rate for Total War LPs here is somewhere south of 20% (Just in recent memory, there was an Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2 vanilla campaign that all burned out). It's not that we're saying don't do this; it's that we're saying be certain you can finish this. Yeah, that's part of why I'm doing this particular campaign. It's smaller and more focused than the others (I think you would be mad to try Empire or Napolean, personally) which should help with being able to get on with the game. In addition I have checked out the other Total War LP's and I noticed all the ones I read were SSLPs, I think it really increases the workload if you dont do the battles in video. If you want the battles to make any sense at all you need to write a lot of words and have a lot of screenshots, which is a huge amount of work. I personally find doing some screenshots and some video work easier to motivate than a single huge screenshot task. I guess I also feel that the series is really good and deserves a complete LP.
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Aug 10, 2012 02:26
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Bubblegum Tank Police in the Shell - Let's Play Oni! Developer: Bungie Publisher: Rockstar Games Platform:PS2, Windows PC US Release Date: January 28th, 2001 EU Release Date: January 26th, 2001 Genre: Action/Third Person Shooter What the hell is going on here? Everyone has a Japanese name and there's guns AND punching. I'm scared and confused. Oni is a weird game. They were pretty clearly aiming for a third person action game with strong melee tendencies, and then failed to balance gunplay what-so-ever. The guns are usually overpowered, so it's best to use them, but the melee is just so, so nice. As for the Japanese part? Jesus, I don't know. I don't think anyone Japanese even worked on this game. I guess anime was big back then, I kind of don't remember? So what's the storyline of this game? You play as Konoko, a newly comissioned Technology Crimes Task Force agent, sent out to combat the shadowy "Syndicate" and their various zany schemes. Anything beyond that is kind of a spoiler  Hey! This looks different than the Oni I played. This is the “Anniversary Edition” created by the good people at OniGalore( I think?). It fixes a few bugs, and most importantly, makes it so I can run the game on my computer. What kind of update schedule are you gonna have? I need all the Onis, all the time. I'm physically on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico right now, so I can't promise anything. Well, that's not true; I can promise it will get done post-haste in October/November when I get home, if I haven't finished it already. I remember you, didn't you and some crazy woman kill hundreds of Germans? I can't discuss the matters of an ongoing Nuremburg Trial investigation Videos: 
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Aug 10, 2012 05:51
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Stratafyre posted:Bubblegum Tank Police in the Shell - Let's Play Oni! I don't know anything about this game, but you have to use this thread title.
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Aug 10, 2012 06:14
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Lance Streetman posted:I don't know anything about this game, but you have to use this thread title. I know all about this game, and DEMAND you use this title.
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Aug 10, 2012 06:24
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