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I'll toss in some of my favorite screenshot LPs. I've found that since many these days associate "Let's Play" with VLPs by default, SSLPs are a good 'icebreaker' to introduce people to the medium. Not helped by YouTube one bit, I'm sure seeing yet another horrible facecam VLPer on the "Recommended" list is a quick way to create the view that that's what LPing is. Plenty of excellent VLPs here already, so it goes without saying that there's much higher quality stuff than many may think. Boatmurdered: This is so obvious a suggestion that it feels like a "well yeah, duh" moment to say it. But that's exactly why it should be addressed. Boatmurdered is probably one of the most well-known SSLPs for a good reason, and it's arguably Dwarf Fortress' !!welcome mat!!. Toady One, DF's sole programmer, read it and thought it was hysterical apparently. Hype aside, this LP shows off what Dwarf Fortress is at its core far better than you might think possible. The ASCII graphics are difficult to interpret, but the general color of tiles is recognizable enough even to people who've never seen the game before, and it's really the commentary that matters. How many LPs result in jokes for years to come in their game communities, and how many wind up getting items made in homage to them in Diablo III for that matter? Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced: Orange Fluffy Sheep has been mentioned already, but the FFT games are of especial note. This can be best summarized as 'absolutely destroying a fun to play game via complete abuse of exploits and then gleefully making fun of how dumb the story is'. I recommend this before the actual FFT game, as he did the LPs in that order and FFT makes a few throwback jokes to FFTA. Final Fantasy Tactics: And on that note, FFT itself. Once again, OFS and FFT have something of an abusive relationship. OFS adores the game, but expresses his affection through completely destroying the difficulty curve and making an absolute mockery of everything it attempts to throw at him. For those who know the game well: No, he's more creative than just spamming Math Skill. If you want to see the hardest fights in the game ended in seconds due to bizarre stat setups and sucker punches, treating elder dragons and pigs like Pokemon, and teleporting fire/ice/what gun-toting buttpants that put Mario to shame in jumping nonsense, this is the one for you! Hatoful Boyfriend: Yes, the pigeon dating sim you may have heard of. This game premise is so absolutely ridiculous that it's worth at least a cursory glance to confirm that "oh my god, this really is a dating sim game featuring photorealistic pigeons". If you think that the gimmick premise is all it has going for it, you're very wrong! It has excellent writing and genuine entertainment. Now, full disclosure, I'd attempted to LP the game myself for a while but got frustrated with how long updates took to make due to such heavy emphasis on dialogue. ChorpSaway, the LPer there on the archive, had far more patience and took a hands-off approach. The game is gloriously funny (and yet can achieve the rare feat of making the player actually care about the cast) in its own right, so he mostly just focuses on showing its charm as much as possible without intruding much over it. A sequel LP is currently in the works on the forums. This can best be summed up as "a weird as hell Japanese dating sim game that is fully aware of how bizarre it is, revels in it, and manages to be genuinely entertaining without using the silly premise as a crutch." You might think that pigeon jokes are the only source of funnies this game has, but that's quite incorrect. The characterization is excellent, the game is funny, and among the dating options introduced in the first 5 minutes, we have a sociopathic school nurse (whose presence is always accompanied by Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy), a pudding fanatic, the manliest suave ladykiller possible, a melancholic bookworm, and all sorts of others. ChorpSaway goes on to, at the end of every route, break down which dating sim character archetypes are being mixed together while providing demographic data to show what tends to be popular, which assists in understanding how the parody works for those of us who've never touched any other game in the genre. Limbo of the Lost: The Dark ID plays a game with atrocious writing, graphi-gently caress it, EVERYTHING IS poo poo in Limbo of the Lost. Bonus points for it stealing resources from other games, so you get to play a very unusual game of I Spy while it goes on. Combine this with a completely unsympathetic sociopath of a protagonist, arbitrary stupid events that seem to only exist to be stupid and pointless, and a rich orchard full of screenshots ripe for forum avatar harvest due to how horribly the in-game models are handled. You get the quick sense that the developers did this game as some kind of scam or money laundering scheme for the better part of a decade and then shat out what we see here in about the course of a weekend. And because The Dark ID is the one LPing it, the result is inevitable. Silent Hill: Yes, From Earth's originals. It turns out that Silent Hill doesn't translate to SS format very well, the games end up a lot funnier in this state than they have any reason to be. The result is a great example of the tried-and-true LP formula of "the game is taking itself seriously while everyone else is laughing at it". Also notable for being from that "prehistoric" era of very early LPs, to the point that I think it was something like From Earth was actually the original LPArchive host, for these games themselves, before baldurk was handed administration of it. The You Testament: By General Ironicus with the first game, featuring Jesus, Charlie Brown, mutated models, and texture swap antics with Daeren handling the sequel about the life of Muhammad. Now, religious games have plenty to poke fun at depending on how they're treated and made, but these were the forums' first real exposure to the glory of MDickie. What happens when you take a wrestling-obsessed fundie who may have had a bright future as a Bethesda programmer if he weren't such an egotistic rear end in a top hat? This. MDickie may or may not in fact be Uwe Boll, I know I've never seen the two of them in the same room ever.
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Jul 14, 2014 00:32
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On the note of suggestions, perhaps we could include images with some of these recommendations and write them in a way that baldurk can use them as actual Featured LP blurbs on the archive?
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Jul 21, 2014 18:39
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Oh, not as something to shove onto the poor guy's list of things to do, I just was under the impression that baldurk appreciated it when people provided those blurbs, either when submitting an LP to the archive or just as a contribution so he didn't have to do so himself. If that's not the case, nothing to worry about. Since we're already talking about why particular LPs are worth viewing, it seemed like a reasonable idea to make these recommendations usable on the archive if that'd be helpful. That's all, I absolutely didn't mean that as a "more work for people already doing a lot of it" thing.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:20
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I forget how to check if some are featured already, however, and I think a few are. Some of the descriptions will need a bit of editing to fit in the blurbs, but here's an example of a few, one from each of the categories in Geop's intro: Deadly Premonition - A few years dated, but it shows the kind of game that's much more fun to watch than actually play. SGF knows this game a bit too well, but that results in a clear look at what makes DP memorably bizarre. Calling it bizarre is an understatement, really.  Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - Hands-down the most informative LP you're likely to find for this game. Chip explains how to play this game well along with the basic features, and also shows off a perfect-ranked playthrough on a hard-but-not-tedious difficulty. Also a good example of the "Chip and Ironicus" overall LP dynamic, so it's a good introduction to what they do.  Resident Evil 5 - RChimpCola and Sinatrapod make this easily one of the funniest LPs on the archive. Featuring the Legend of Spaghetti, eggs, Capcom's usual ridiculous writing, and all the jokes that naturally ensue whenever a game as unintentionally goofy as Resident Evil 5 is involved.  Cold Fear - Not only a really well done subtitled LP, but includes a set of Extreme mode videos, and Giragast basically takes the game apart to show you the tricks and methods the developers used to make the game do what it does, which is pretty unique. Survival Horror as a genre lends itself to being subtitled, and this is an LP that provides technical analysis without intruding upon the actual atmosphere of the game.  Kirby's Epic Yarn - This is one of the most calm LPs you'll find around. Medibot and Kaz play through the game in co-op mode and just have such a darned relaxing, fun time with it all. One of the best LPs for just winding a night down and watching internet videos before going to bed.  The Girl Games Megathread - Girl games are horrible. Absolutely terrible. Watch as DeviousVacuum and a megathread's worth of other contributors play through dozens of horrendous bright pink, glittery flash games including how to date the cutest boy and blasting growths in your nose. I'm serious.  The World Ends with You - One of the best JRPG to come from Square in the last years. The game drops the usual fantasy setting for modern-day Tokyo and changes potions into hamburgers, equipment into garish fashion statements and angst into the most entertainingly smug character in the history of videogames. OFS does a great job of showing everything the game has to offer, up to and including the post-game, and as usual optimizing/breaking things in amusing ways. (I think most of the Narrative SSLPs have Featured blurbs already? The only one on Geop's list I'm familiar with is Animal Crossing, and I know that one does.)  Dirge of Cerbeus: Final Fantasy VII - The Final Fantasy series hits its stupidest, and TheDarkId hits it right back, taking the piss out what has to be the worst video game Square has ever produced in a hilarious semi-narrative SSLP. I'm loving this poo poo! Would these be the sorts of things that'd be useful?
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Jul 21, 2014 22:37
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