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I sort of fell rear end backwards into LP. In '08 and early '09, I think, I was trying to get capture devices that I could use to record Smash Bros. matches I had with friends, and nothing super super cheap was available at the time (or I was bad at looking). I guess I also did a three hour-long recording with a friend where he was trying to beat Kaizo Mario World and I was trying to beat IWBTG that might still be on Viddler somewhere. I don't remember there being much at all in the way of screaming the way YouTube LPs of those two usually go, either. Anyway, after getting an EasyCap, I did Smash Bros. videos and some other stuff for awhile and then started a terrible LP of Twilight Princess that got about halfway and then died for many reasons. Around that time as well, I learned that people actually did make money from LPs because they counted it as fair use, when I'd always naïvely thought that the game footage wasn't property of the LPer, so it didn't count. That put dollar signs in my eyes for a couple of months and I decided that I wanted to take a stab at being rich from YouTube money. After stumbling upon pokcapn's Mario Party LP I was led to SA and decided "this is a place with good Let's Plays, I can join this and learn how to make my Let's Plays good and popular so I can make money from them". Thank god I got over that quickly. I don't know when I first learned about the concept; I just realised now that at some point I was aware of them, and it feels like that was always the case. I had an awareness of LP in general, but I never really knew of or watched any of the popular LPers (or, come to think of it, any at all). I remember being told/shown Retsupurae in 2011, but I didn't really watch it regularly at the time, I think because it seemed kind of unnecessarily dickish and a weird thing to base a series around; and I didn't realise that it was done by people on SA until a couple of months after joining SA. That's basically how it went for everything; there were names of people and channels and sites and series that had somehow existed for months and years and I was only just finding out about them. Kinda weird. I don't know, it's like I just woke up one day and Let's Play just was, I guess.
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Mar 12, 2014 20:21
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Someone linked me Chewbot's Animal Crossing LP and things just sort of spiraled from there.
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Mar 12, 2014 20:33
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Attestant posted:Retsupurae. This. An american friend gave me a link to one of the Electrical Beast videos because she couldn't believe it was a real Brit and not an American pretending to be a Brit for some reason and wanted my (expert, will English) opinion on the accent. I'd never even heard of LPs, but when I mentioned it to my brother, he was ready to enlighten me. I think I lurked on SA for about a year and then caved and got an account to post in the Dead to Rights thread. That thread was a work of LP beauty! I now have a toddler who likes watching longplays of Scribblenauts and other "kid friendly" games because he's too young to play them himself and a husband with a bit of a man crush on General Ironicus...
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Mar 12, 2014 21:03
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My introduction to Let's Play was through Youtube Poop, oddly enough. When that fad was at its "peak" I found a video by some guy on Youtube called Bpblu. (Whom I just found out committed suicide in 2009. That sucks.  ) When I went to the guy's channel to see if there was more YTP I saw he also had lots of video walkthroughs, the one of which that caught my eye was a playthrough of Dynamite Headdy. A couple videos in he started adding humorous subtitle commentary to his walkthroughs. I absolutely loved it and pretty much watched his channel exclusively for quite a while. I think my favorite of his videos was the series where he played Sonic stages with challenges like "Don't pick up any rings" and whatnot. This lasted until he started an (annoyingly) voiced camcorder LP of Paper Mario and even back then I had better taste than that.At that point I branched out considerably, finding and following a random assortment of LPers like Cloud8745, Deceasedcrab, Protonjon, Ssskinner, and a bunch of other names I don't remember. I think I finally stumbled across Retsupurae sometime during the Schildkrote debacle (I never really understood what exactly that was) and not too long after that close association brought me to Chip and Ironicus and finally the LP subforum of Something Awful. 
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Mar 12, 2014 21:09
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Box got opened, 0/10.
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Mar 12, 2014 21:11
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Oh god it's like I'm the only person who lurked here before LPs were a thing, that's hilarious.
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Mar 12, 2014 21:12
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I think the first few things I remember getting me into was a thing about Resident Evil. A couple of guys called Nougie and Nathan they did the Resident Evil Challenge and it was basically the two of them beating all the games in 24 hours, early videos weren't streamed they were just recorded and then one of them spliced it together. They did this for a couple of years before they live streamed it. It got better as it went along though, they did harder challenges like knife only, no sprays. Or some with limited saves they were good. Admittedly it was recorded with a camera. But back in 2005 it was good for me. I think the next thing I found was a guy on Youtube called Overthegun or OTG, he did HTSF. How to successfully fail. He was pretty okay at the games I mainly watched his Resident Evil and Silent Hill videos, I didn't really know about like Let's Play the name at the time. As I was still into the survival horror stuff I remember looking at Alone in the Dark and I eventually found Malories LP and sometime after that I remember getting MW2 for Christmas and I started watching youtube people and the one I found and liked was WingsofRedemption and still do after all this time. I think it was sometime after I remember playing Batman Arkham Asylum and I was awful at it, I eventually found Man With a Hats LP of it and I came here and managed to watch a few episodes before the site kicked me off and I managed to watch it after a long time. Then I eventually spent some money so I could watch stuff here. I also remember watching Oatmeal Raisins Dead Rising LP, it was pretty good I think at the time I was only a Wii owner. But since about 2011 I started uploading some LP's which I didn't post here until I made a thread here in December. The main thing is I liked watching people who were good at games, or at least took the time to show off the entire game in some form or another. I also think it's why I have such a difficult time watching blind LPs.
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Mar 12, 2014 21:26
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Kytrarewn posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing a discussion of what made people get into watching LPs. I can't remember when exactly I started but I know that Super Smash Brawl and the Wii didn't exist by then. Maybe I was about 11 or so. So I was playing Melee and going through my trophies and I hit Ness. And I said "Huh, I've never played Earthbound. I wonder what that's like. So I googled or whatever search engine it was and ended up on Youtube. Youtube led me to chuggaconroy and I was thinking "Oh cool, someone's playing through it." So then I started watching ProtonJon and everything's just a blur. I do remember finding Criken2 as well. So I watched the let's play and I never recovered and ended up paying money to come onto an internet forum because of my addiction. RareAcumen fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 21:31
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I use to watch my dad play adventure games when I was little so it probably has something to do with that for me. The video that made me realize that I could watch people play was actually this one from raocow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzcKU6L-88s It was post in a random video thread on a different forum I use to be on but watching that made me go watch his other work which lead me to learn about SA and eventually join.
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Mar 12, 2014 21:53
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...I joined SA because I liked the cricket thread in SAS...
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Mar 12, 2014 21:56
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dijon du jour posted:the Schildkrote debacle (I never really understood what exactly that was) Lotsa people didn't, which was the problem. Schildkrote decided to extend the trolling from the original Retsupurae thread and see if he could create "an Internet cult" just by telling people to. So he created the Schildkrote foundation and told people to "worship" (not really) him and follow him just because he told them to. It was kind of avant garde and odd, and people - including UltraJMan - did go along with it. Over here, I think people were very weirded out by someone doing a "social experiment" whose endgoal seemed to be "worship me", tongue-in-cheek or not. I never really understood where he was going with it. I think it was genuinely a troll thing, mind, I don't think Schildkrote genuinely wanted people to worship/follow him but he didn't sell it very well, so...
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Mar 12, 2014 22:00
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I got into LP in a strange way. At some point, I stumbled on Retsupurae, but really cannot remember how I did that, just remember finding it one day and then watching the poo poo out of everything I could thinking that LPs were so bad because I never saw a good one. Then, a site I followed started to do playthroughs of games like a group playthrough of a Minecraft mod. (Mind you, this was before everyone was doing that) and then they started a series 2 player, where two of them would play through games and mostly just joke about them. That was urealms.com, by the way. They kind of dropped off when the creator, Rob Moran, decided to start designing a game which eventually became a Kickstarter that was supposed to be done this month. After they stopped making videos, I watched lots of streamers who played League of Legends, but eventually found Chip and Ironicus' site and just watched some of the SA LPers and lurked until I decided to do an LP of Splinter Cell: Conviction because I needed work to do that was not studying as I was getting a bit ragged but did not have time to relax and that seemed like a good choice, since then I have been here mostly in the LP subforum, but occassionally branching out to the SAS if the Giants or Mets do well.
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Mar 12, 2014 22:09
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A weird family thing we used to do was record the endings/final battles of games on our VHS tapes, although that may have been because my dad was really bored for most of my childhood. Anyways, after doing a lovely camcorder thing of Star Fox 64 with a friend then promptly losing the tape, I stumbled onto Retsupurae! After that I ended up finding the Tipping Forties doing FFX before they were really the Tipping Forties and it all spiraled away from there. Come to think of it, where the hell is that tape...
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Mar 12, 2014 22:22
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DWK posted:I now have a toddler who likes watching longplays of Scribblenauts and other "kid friendly" games because he's too young to play them himself and a husband with a bit of a man crush on General Ironicus... Tell me everything.
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Mar 12, 2014 22:23
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TARDISman posted:A weird family thing we used to do was record the endings/final battles of games on our VHS tapes, although that may have been because my dad was really bored for most of my childhood. Anyways, after doing a lovely camcorder thing of Star Fox 64 with a friend then promptly losing the tape, I stumbled onto Retsupurae! After that I ended up finding the Tipping Forties doing FFX before they were really the Tipping Forties and it all spiraled away from there. Come to think of it, where the hell is that tape... That Star Fox tape was eventually found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibaPEq9qCKg
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Mar 12, 2014 22:31
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I'm here because someone linked Scorchy's Kotor 2 lp in the team gizka forums. Team gizka were making a kotor 2 restoration mod at the time.
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Mar 12, 2014 22:32
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General Ironicus posted:Tell me everything. Don't be a home-wrecker.
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Mar 12, 2014 22:38
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:That Star Fox tape was eventually found Actually mine was slightly better than that. I mean it was still poo poo because it was a camcorder LP and part way through the first Star Wolf fight my mom came down and yelled for me to take out the garbage but I made sure the camera was centered at least.
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Mar 12, 2014 22:39
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The first time I saw Retsupurae, I thought the commentators were making fun of slowbeef's voice/commentary. Took me some time to recognize who they(slowbeef, diabetus and the angry guy) were making fun of, since everyone had lovely mics and everyone talked over each other.
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Mar 12, 2014 23:10
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My "how I got into LP" story is actually really boring. I was poor as poo poo when I was a kid and didn't have any consoles when I was growing up. We had an Amiga and an Atari and I remember being a tiny little Fae playing Frontier Elite 2 and not understanding any of the UI. But I never owned a "real" gaming console until my parents finally saved up for a PS2 a few years after they'd first come out. Ours came with a copy of Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. I played the poo poo out of that game. Anyway as a consequence of that I never really got into games. I didn't grow up with the definitive games of the early 90s-2000s and so I missed out on a lot of them. I also didn't really develop the skills to be any good at games so I just kinda stuck to sandboxy stuff like the Sims and emulating the old Dungeon Master games. When I was in secondary school a friend of mine would come over to my house and we'd play Final Fantasy VIII together. By "together" I mean he would sit and play and I would watch because I am terrible at games. We played through IX and X together and it was really fun for me. I got all the experience of playing through a game without having to be frustrated at my own lack of skill by playing through it myself. I watched people play all kinds of games, like my Dad and I playing through Link to the Past together on an old SNES we found in a charity shop. I got more into gaming as I got older and I started playing multiplayer stuff like Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor and whatnot and that was fun but E/N stuff happened that led me to being unable to play games that involved guns. That didn't leave me with a lot considering my library at the time was pretty much multiplayer shooty games. So a friend recommended I "catch up" on the games I never got a chance to play and linked me to the LP archives. I'd been an SA member for years but never looked into (or heard of) LP before but I was hooked. I think the first LP I watched was Psychonauts, a game I'd heard lots about but didn't want to play because while I suck at games, I suck even more at platformers - I just don't have the hand/eye coordination. So it was nice to get the story and the humour and the environments of the game without having to actually play it and end up throwing my controller in frustration! Ever since, I've loved LPs, especially of older games that I never got to play. I also started watching Niggurath's horror LPs sometime in 2012 and they (specifically his Silent Hill LPs) actually helped me be okay with guns in games again which means I can play with my friends again. Anyway, this has gotten long and boring but that's my LP story. I've actually been inspired by the whole "catch up on games I've missed" to start up my stream, where I play "classic" games that I missed out on, completely blind and for the first time. I never would've gotten the idea (or the knowledge on how to do it in the first place) without LP, so thanks guys! EDIT: Oh, and I've never watched a single Retsuprae video. Maybe I should fix that.
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Mar 12, 2014 23:17
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I read the Dwarf Fortress LPs, then a friend linked me to the animal crossing one. My first video LP was Slowbeef and Diabeetus playing Metroid Prime.
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Mar 12, 2014 23:24
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I ended up watching a japanese video remix and one of the clips featured a weird videogame, which I searched for and stumbled into an LP of that game. Then I decided to browse Naka's channel and thought that LPs are fun, which only lasted until I found people screeching at max volume with close-up scare cams.
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Mar 12, 2014 23:44
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I stumbled into the LPArchive from Chorocojo's TVTropes page, back when I used to go there. That ended up leading me to SA.
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Mar 13, 2014 00:35
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General Ironicus posted:Tell me everything. He's 6'2", light brown hair and eyes. Quite handsome I suppose. Jewish. Huge Big Boss/Naked Snake fan. Plumber for the Royal Navy, but currently also doing an Open University degree in Combined Social Sciences on the side. And apart from the odd sociology tangent in a few videos, really likes your voice. During the "vernacular" reading in Blood on the Sand, he turned to me and said, "This man could read me anything. In fact do you think I could get him to read all my text books so I'd have them in audiobook format to listen to at work." I just shrugged at him. If you could do a 24 podcast marathon with Research Indicates, I think he might die of sexy voice induced happiness. Also married with a 3rd kid on the way, so don't get too sexy voiced or I'll hunt you down 
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Mar 13, 2014 00:44
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DWK posted:He's 6'2", light brown hair and eyes. Quite handsome I suppose. Jewish. Huge Big Boss/Naked Snake fan. Actually, tell me less. Un-tell me that.
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Mar 13, 2014 02:20
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How do you feel about people who try to sell their LP concept based on how bad they're gonna be at the game, and how they're gonna show you all of it? I've noticed this a lot in LPs I look up on YouTube. The Megaman Network Transmission video I posted in the thread had this description. The last part of it is what I'm concerned about :  More parts and failures don't necessarily mean a great LP, dude. At least, I wouldn't think so, but there are many LPs out there that have this same theme. I Wanna Be The Guy, hard video games in general, blind LPs: These tend to take pride in the fact that they're: A-Not gonna edit a drat thing, and B-Going to be really bad at the game they're playing. Most of the LPs I see that are like this contain, at some point, the phrase: "Why am I doing a Let's Play of this?" I tend to ask the same question. Is it a gimmick? Are they trying to act helpless and adorable for views? Do people think being bad at things is that hilarious? I really don't get it, and certainly don't get why it's so commonplace. Also, I remember that Schildkrote thing way back then. I didn't know what was happening at the time in the slightest.
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Mar 13, 2014 02:22
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RSCNyx posted:How do you feel about people who try to sell their LP concept based on how bad they're gonna be at the game, and how they're gonna show you all of it? I've noticed this a lot in LPs I look up on YouTube. It's mostly the latter, at some point people got in their heads that being completely awful at something would instantly make them funny. I think it stems from that Super Mario Frustration video where some guy with a Brooklyn accent spends about 20 minutes screaming and flipping out about how freakishly hard the stage in the romhack is.
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Mar 13, 2014 02:31
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RSCNyx posted:How do you feel about people who try to sell their LP concept based on how bad they're gonna be at the game, and how they're gonna show you all of it? I've noticed this a lot in LPs I look up on YouTube. Incompetence can be amusing for a while, depending on your tastes. Some people really like it. Others think they like it then get tired of it really quickly, which is why a lot of LP Superstars that take this approach slowly have their views dwindle away despite still having a ton of subscribers. Not like you're missing much if you decide not to watch every video in the series, anyway. It's how they got all their views and how other people got tons of views, so why break the mold? I'm pretty sure Slowbeef and Diabetus have discussed it at length in a few of their podcasts, including with some YouTube LPers.
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Mar 13, 2014 02:43
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I agree with that. I mean, you see some person getting flustered on a hard part of a video game, it looks really obnoxious, yeah, that can be funny for a while. When you extend that to every single part of your LP, though? Even the uploader has to be aware that it's kinda growing stale when you have nothing else. Thinking about it, you're right, Lumberjack. I think it was brought up in a Retsutalk at some point. Still, I find it baffling that people are still milking that same stone in 2014.
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Mar 13, 2014 02:56
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dijon du jour posted:When that fad was at its "peak" I found a video by some guy on Youtube called Bpblu. (Whom I just found out committed suicide in 2009. That sucks. Oh dear. Was it this guy?
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Mar 13, 2014 05:14
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Slowbeef's LP of Dead to Rights is probably the first LP I remember watching (That prison level was the best), lurked the archives to pieces and then finally pony'ed up some cash to join. Nowadays I'm just angry at myself for not signing up sooner, I love this place.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:22
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TARDISman posted:It's mostly the latter, at some point people got in their heads that being completely awful at something would instantly make them funny. I think it stems from that Super Mario Frustration video where some guy with a Brooklyn accent spends about 20 minutes screaming and flipping out about how freakishly hard the stage in the romhack is. This is kinda dumb, but what gets me about that video is that it's fake. The original SMB Frustration video had no commentary. The player would jump rapidly in place to express "frustration" and all that. Someone else came along and added the audio. The guy speaking is not actually playing.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:27
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I actually managed to read SA for years without noticing that there was a forum. Then someone linked Leovinus' FFVIII lp on gamefaqs, and that lead me to the forums, where I went "man, gently caress gamefaqs, this has people older the age of 14, I'm staying here". I lurked for a bit but eventually joined a few months later because Nakar's (I think?) Shining Force CD lp fell into the archives so I needed an account to finish reading it. And it's funny sometimes. I always considered myself having gotten into lps late due to not being there before it had it's own subforum and everything, so the fact that 2008 is now, relatively speaking, thought of as 'early days' for Let's Play feels kinda weird.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:35
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Falaflame posted:Oh dear. Was it this guy? Yup! That's... unfortunate. Though what a coincidence, I actually found out about his suicide when I went to his channel to see if any of his videos were Retsupurae-able, with the Paper Mario LP that drove me away in mind, but figured that would be in bad taste when I saw the news.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:37
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General Ironicus posted:Actually, tell me less. Un-tell me that. To be fair, you did literally ask for it. Have fun on your mandate.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:44
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General Ironicus posted:Actually, tell me less. Un-tell me that. I hope you learned a valuable lesson today.
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Mar 13, 2014 06:27
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I actually first started reading LP's when I stumbled over Boatmurdered during a break between classes at Uni. This would have been about 2008 or 2009. Still, I had no idea that SA was a thing until a couple of years ago.
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Mar 13, 2014 06:28
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I always liked watching people play games for some weird reason. I used to watch my cousin play Genesis and PSX games when I was little, and since I didn't have either console at home, it was the only way for me to absorb those games. It helped that I was terrible at videogames as a wee child, but also REALLY wanted to see the end of them. As for LPs, I lurked SA for the longest time, even if I only registered in 2012. Like, I read the forums before LP was a thing, circa 2005 or so. If I'm not mistaken, I got here because someone made a fuckin' flamethrower and that someone was from SA. Anyway, since I had poo poo Internet, the first LP I read was a SSLP: The Dark Id's RE4 Let's Play. Actually, now I'm not sure if it was that or Darkseed. One of the two. Regardless, I guess I got into them because I was a bored teenager looking for anything moderately entertaining online that I could save and read offline later (hi dialup I don't miss you). It explains why I tend to care more about personality-based, narrative and MST3K-ish LPs than the super-informative ones, I suppose. It's kinda funny too, around that time no one had any idea what the gently caress LPs were around these parts. I think I got my younger brother and a friend into them, and those two were the only other people that knew what a Let's Play was, even in my online circles. In fact, only reason I shared it with them was because they are as nerdy as I am (also, they could read English. That helped too). So it was kind of a "guilty pleasure" of sorts, this extremely geeky and obscure thing I wouldn't be caught dead watching in public. Now I see friends that aren't even big gamers watching Youtube LPs and laughing their asses off, so it's hard to argue that LP hasn't blown up considerably.
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Mar 13, 2014 06:29
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I can't remember how i got linked to it, but the first LP i ever saw was Pokecapn's Sonic 2006 LP, from there i found the forums and lurked for a very long time, cursing whenever the paywall went up (i was one of the many angry anime manchildren upset whenever the paywall went up back in Dangan Ronpa 1's heyday  )
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Mar 13, 2014 09:24
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My first LP experience was thanks to Protonjon's videos where he played Brawl matches online with friends. Being Australian and a big SSB fan, I was distressed by the news that we'd have to wait 6 months after Japan and America just to play it, which is what got me searching way back in 2007-2008. I knew of SA and lurked the forums before that, though. After that I started doing my own LP's on youtube, which went from god awful to ok, and started posting on the Let's Play Forum and DTOTG (Don't Turn Off The Game) (both tiny communities of people that found SA too scary to post on because goons are big scarys that will judge you far too harshly). From there I moved to the SA forums and started an LP which I quickly I watched mainly ProtonJon and his friend Azureblade49 (who is still LPing as I just found out apparently) and then moved on to people like Cybershell, ResearchIndicates and the Freelance Astronauts as well as some other LPers I've forgotten completely about. Dr. Dubious fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Mar 13, 2014 |
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Mar 13, 2014 09:34
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