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Suspicious Dish posted:Twilight Princess Glitching I enjoyed it, and I was totally happy to have something else going on in the thread beside the LP. I was bummed when Morpheel didn't work out. The glitches were nuts, and I wanted to see where else it would go from there. And don't sweat it, dude. You're right, we didn't gel too well, but I don't hold that against you or anything. Seems to happen pretty often around here. It's a shitton of people with different personalities, senses of humor and commentary styles.
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May 8, 2015 00:47
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Of the LP's I've done I think two stand out to me: Battlefield 4 About this time last year I wrapped up the last video for BF4 just in time that I wouldn't have to be thinking about recording or editing on my honeymoon. Having played the campaign for BF4 prior to this and having LP'd Battlefield 3 I knew that I couldn't do it alone and so I recruited a bunch of people who made LPs I liked here for most videos and bookended the LP with people I play Battlefield with for good measure. In addition, I did an entire series of multiplayer videos and posts to go along with the campaign videos, which admittedly didn't set the world on fire, but I had tons of fun sharing my love of loading jeeps up with C4 and ramming them into tanks with people reading that thread. Really, though, the fun part was bringing people in to do commentary and just listening to their reactions as dumber and dumber poo poo happened in the game. Having an ever rotating cast of co-commentators was probably the best decision I made when doing that LP, not only because they couldn't get burnt out on the game because every episode was something new to them, but because we got to have some conversations before and after about how things worked on their LPs, what they wanted to do, what they were working on; sort of talking shop with people who made stuff you really liked watching. Hilariously enough I apologized to Gatz for telling him that his Vampire: The Masquerade LP was going to die on the first page of his thread a few months before his computer died on him and he ended up handing it off to McD. I also got to talk to Blind Sally and Nine-Gear Crow during that LP and so I got to appear in their insane attempt at the entire Killzone trilogy a couple times now. And Tin Tim let me guest on Mace Griffin. Actually, outside of a single Homefront video that's all my guesting ever. I'm not popular. I keep telling myself I want to do something like that again, but realistically I thought that was the last LP I would be doing for a long while at that time like suddenly I wasn't going to be allowed to play games for the internet because I got married. I started recording FEAR 2 a week after my honeymoon because it turns out if you already live with the person you are engaged to nothing really changes in your life when you get married. Wolfenstein: The New Order Before Wolfenstein I was kind of known for doing sub-par to average first person shooters. I was pretty OK in that niche as well as it made everything kind of low pressure. It wasn't that I didn't have to put effort in to making videos, it was that I didn't have a huge audience (still, I think my LP videos average higher view counts than most, but nowhere near some of the more popular people) so I could be a bit more loose and screw around a bit more because who cares if I spent three minutes showing off how weird perspective in first person games can be by standing up and going prone next to a soda can? I bought Wolfenstein a week before I started the LP, not because I was desperate for something to LP, but because I played through the drat thing in two days, then beat it again over the course of a weekend because it is seriously the best game of 2014 and I will fight you over that and am really, really strong. When I saw that the game had been out for close to a year and there wasn't an LP of it I figured I would take things into my own hands and start one. I think it was around episode 4 that I had some thing or another happen that took me away from the internet for a day and when I got back there were something like 50 new posts in the thread, which was loving bizarre to me because most times I could leave for a few days and not have new posts. That thread and the love people had for the game really made that LP for me. I would come back and see that the thread spent half the day talking about German language movie translation or about an anime movie about Japan building their first metal-skinned plane and it was some of the funniest, most interesting stuff I've ever seen people post in one of my threads. What sort of made it was the fact that one of the game's developers ended up being alerted that the thread was happening and started sending my videos around the office. I ended up with a signed poster by the dev team along with some other pretty neat stuff, which I never expected when I started the thread. It really felt like letting people in on a secret to a point. I know more than a few people who dismissed The New Order as just another rebooted franchise (it's actually a sequel) and due to the popularity of the thread I was sort of able to shake people into their senses and make them realize it was way more than what they had been sold on. I actually considered closing the LP like once a week because I frankly didn't like that there was all this attention on me. I don't know why, but it seemed weird I was getting all this praise for the LP when the game was just so amazing I could have just never said a word and the LP would have been fine.
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May 8, 2015 01:53
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Lazyfire posted:Wolfenstein: The New Order Exactly how many copies of the game did you end up being responsible for people buying due to the LP? I know I was one of them.
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May 8, 2015 02:43
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Galactic Civilizations 2 So for a while it seemed as though Wiz had made parliamentary LP's a big thing for a while, but unsurprisingly it's a lot of work and most folks who attempted it burned out. Me, though? Somehow I'm immune to that. The premise of Gal Civ 2 was simple enough: the game has eight parties to choose from, so I divided it into eight concepts and had people develop ideas based on each committee and then vote up or down on one unified bill. Oh, and each party was represented by one of the faction leaders from Alpha Centauri with Ulrick the pirate from the expansion thrown in as a bonus. Unsurprisingly, Ulrick was enough of a dick to win the vote to pick who is in charge, which was good since the Universalist bonuses are actually pretty good. I'd never actually played a 4x on the "parity with the AI" difficulty before, and based on how things usually went downhill when I started playing on my own just to see what was coming I can say with some confidence that the thread really was responsible for our resounding win--both of them. I just wish the debate in the thread had been more lively than it was. Loom As you might guess from my forum name, Loom holds a special place in my heart. A lot of things I've gone back to as an adult only to discover that kid-me had terrible taste, but that has never been true about Loom. I wanted to LP this earlier, in fact, but DOSBox has trouble (or did at the time) recording Red Book audio straight from the CD, so it wasn't until I got Fraps for my next LP that I had the ability to record it properly. I think I also switched to post commentary at this point since the resource strain on my computer was causing lag. Still, in the end the Loom LP was simply a guided tour down memory lane with a little bonus music from Swan Lake thrown in to fill some otherwise dead silent passages. The Thief Trilogy If someone else were to sum up my LP "career," the Thief trilogy would probably top the list. These games have been the most consistently recommended in the recommendations thread, to the point that they're now in the OP of the new thread. Now don't get me wrong, I put plenty of effort into making this a thing, especially in order to show off all of the secrets and as much of the loot as I could, but looking back all I see are a bunch of dull videos chopped up seemingly at random and with little editing beyond some guy mumbling into his microphone. But I do have a confession to make: I was actually watching Khad's Thief videos as I created my own. I made sure to watch his only after I finished a level to avoid cross-contamination, but I honestly found them somewhat entertaining in a bumbling sort of way. Temple of Elemental Evil The return of the gaming group! Once again I focused more on the players than on the characters, which was honestly a pretty good idea considering how combat-heavy the game is. I recall Captain Garlic tried to tackle ToEE at one point but had to give up; I got through unscathed and even managed to beat a balor to get the best ending. 3rd/3.5 edition was the centerpiece of my old RPG group, so it was especially nice taking those memories for a walk. I even spiced up the later updates by recounting my own personal stories of P&P sessions past. I also met a few forum-goers thanks to how I ended things by running real people through the Tomb of Horrors, and having a few contacts would come in handy later. Academagia If I were to sum up my own LP "career," Academagia would top the list. I warned people right in the thread title that there would be words aplenty, and boy howdy was I right. I'd first found out about the game from (you guessed it) a failed LP that died a few updates in, and I had a lot of fun playing it and seeing the absolutely absurd variety of things you can get up to. Academagia was probably my single biggest project, at least before Deus Ex, involving two updates each week which regularly ran up against the character limit, and this despite how I had a full-time job at the same time. Thanks to my particular style I didn't often make note of my personal additions or corrections, and I like to think I managed to fool not a few people into reading my original work. I also liked that I both fooled and didn't fool people with my little scheme at the end, because while it's flattering to consider oneself cleverer than the audience, it's bad form to have a twist that isn't properly foreshadowed. Alpha Protocol After Academagia, I decided to stick with VLP's exclusively so I could save my creative juices for actual book writing. My first VLP project was Alpha Protocol, a game in which choices matter so much that I figured I'd need to play through it twice to properly show everything off. I also started using AVISynth at this point, a program which has gone on to define what I can and cannot do with video editing. Rogue Galaxy I still can't believe I 100%'ed a JRPG. I know I had help thanks to emulator cheats and watching episodes of MST3k during grinding sessions, but still. For this game I brought along KalonZombie as co-commentator, mostly because I wanted some first-time reactions to the great batshit moments of the game. I also got a few extra commentators for the slower moments so we could all bullshit around while nothing was really going on in the game. Brütal Legend I love heavy metal, and I love Double Fine productions, and so despite its flaws I really enjoyed doing this game. So much so that I even spotlighted various subgenres of metal at the end of each video, and whether I knew it then or not I was preparing myself for... Deus Ex This is another game I'd considered LP'ing from the very beginning, but I knew even at that point that I could only do so Trespasser-style, showing off not only all the little secrets and alternate routes hidden throughout the game but also all the references and philosophies peppered into everyone's dialog. I always put my extra stuff at the very end of the videos so that people who come for the Deus Ex footage won't have to sit through my ramblings, but I was surprised when a lot of people in the thread asked me to add an extra link straight to the Corners so they could hear my ramblings and skip the Deus Ex footage. In the end, I was surprised by how much I wound up putting my own philosophy into the corners. Bahktin Corner was especially a real turning point. The numbers on Youtube indicate that Deus Ex is my next most popular LP after the Thief trilogy, and this despite having three fewer years to gather viewers. Thi4f and The Dark Mod I remember seeing Chip Cheezum's thread title "Contractual Obligations: Metal Gear Solid 1 and 4," and that's basically what I feel about Thi4f. Fortunately, in looking up information on the official sequel I happened upon information about The Dark Mod, and so while the former was an annoying slog I needed two co-commentators to get through, the latter would provide me with that authentic Thief experience which I have so enjoyed despite the videos being overall less popular.
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May 8, 2015 02:50
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chitoryu12 posted:Exactly how many copies of the game did you end up being responsible for people buying due to the LP? I know I was one of them. I think like a solid dozen people said they either bought or were going to buy the game because of the LP. That's really the best outcome because that game was really great and more people needed to play it.
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May 8, 2015 02:57
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Rogue Galaxy This is still one of my favorite LPs I've ever been involved in. I don't think it's the kind of game I would enjoy playing, but it was definitely a fun watch once you cut out most of the grind. The sheer stupid fun of the plot made dealing with that loving cat worthwhile. quote:Thi4f and The Dark Mod This on the other hand, gently caress it. gently caress it gently caress it gently caress it. Good call on getting someone else to do this with us because I would have stopped paying attention even earlier than I did. I'm glad it's over. Between this and Watch_Dogs I'm not doing a bad game (that im not behind the wheel of) again for a very long time.
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May 8, 2015 03:04
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Thi4f and The Dark Mod  I actually downloaded the Dark Mod but it didn't have controller support and I don't game with mouse and keyboard. Definitely looks fun though.
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May 8, 2015 03:08
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Galactic Civilizations 2 I loved this LP, although I only got to read it on the LP archive so I missed out on the threads. It made me want to try my hand at a parliamentary LP myself, but I was always too worried that either no one would join in and it would just peter out.
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May 8, 2015 03:27
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Hmm sure. Titan Quest + The Immortal Throne I had wanted to LP for a while but just couldn't find my groove. I had tried a SSLP elsewhere and a couple of bad test posts here. Titan Quest as a co-op LP started to make sense since it wouldn't just be me carrying the entire thing. Can't say I really thought fully LPing a monster-clicks game through so it ended up mostly boring. It's a pretty long game PLUS I did the expansion. At times I wanted to stop but I really wanted to see it through all the way. For better or worse I was really tenacious about that. A big part of the LP was getting other peeps to join in the game for a session. With all the different time zones organizing the schedules was by far the worst thing about it all. However, I don't regret doing it at all since it was such a big learning experience. I was slowly learning how to talk to the internet, do all kinds of editing and package the entire format. And of course I met a bunch of rad people through the videos. I'm glad I saw it through. Spyro 2 and 3 I still remember that moment when I was just casually playing through the game and found the double jump trick. It blew my mind and then filled it up with possibilities. After exploring what the trick could do I knew I had gold in my hands. Add to that that the Spyro games were among my favorite games of all it was clear to me I needed to show the world. Spyro 2 started a bit rough, and I was mumbling a lot through most of it. With Spyro 3 the entire thing was just more polished. Zero regrets about that one. These LPs are my magnum opus. By far the best content wise and the most fun to do. The format was perfect, I was able to show off the games to the absolute fullest, with every detail, and then subvert it all with all the crazy glitches. Having Sinatrapod as my blind co-host with me cemented the whole thing as I got to surprise him each time with the coolest/dumbest/most broken things in the games. I spent a large amount of time exploring and breaking down each level so that I could find even more glitches and take them as far as I could. It was so much fun to do and I am really proud of the things I found completely on my own. Even after practice runs sometimes a new glitch would pop during the live run! Also really proud of the fast updates I was able to put out and of all the cool OPs I made. I'M SO PROUD OF IT ALL. Hercules It was a very small LP after a nice break. But I think I really like it. Very very straightforward stuff but it was fun to do something without many bells or whistles. Alice: Madness Returns It was hard to follow up from Spyro. But I eventually came to this game cause it was also a really pretty 3D platformer. It didn't really have many tricks or glitches but at the time I felt it was underrated. I say at the time cause I don't feel that great about the LP and it's because of the original complaints of the game: little gameplay variety and long same-y stretches. It was hard to balance it out in editing. I really wanted show off the pretty environments but I also needed to keep a good pace going. In the end I might have gone a bit too much to the environments side. Commentary was a bit harder as less things were happening compared to Spyro where I rarely had enough time to explain every little thing. I think it shows that we were less engaged but I haven't watched it since editing it. The LP stands strong as a tribute to the game and I'm happy for that but I guess not much more than that. Dust: An Elysian Tail This LP started out with really good intentions but I think became more sour and sour as it went on and I feel bad for it. I love 'metroidvania' games and adored my first playthrough of Dust. It seemed to make a lot of sense. Somewhere along the line the commentary got a lot more negative about the game and despite me still liking the game a lot it really seems like I don't. I was also pretty self-conscious about my commentary and that didn't do me any favors. Aside from Titan Quest this is probably my worst LP if nothing else but that I don't think I did the game justice. --------- It's clear to me now that my best LPs ended up so great because I loved the games so much. It shines through to the end product. I really wanna get to that point again but I just can't find the right game. I kinda doubt I'll top the Spyro LPs either way though, and that burns away motivation. That and a load of health issues. I'm constantly thinking of doing another LP. Hopefully soon.
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May 8, 2015 06:18
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I guess I should post about why I don't make an LP. I'm one of those dweebs who likes playing the Paradox games (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc). I also love modding them. I also enjoy reading the LP's on this forum. The authors put so much work into them you almost think that the games were made that way in the first place. I've always loved making worlds and stuff so it seems like a no-brainer for me to make an LP, right? Wrong. But why you may See, I don't just want to do a mega-campaign, I want to do the mega-campaign to end all mega-campaigns. I want to play as far back as I can possibly go and play as far as I can possibly go. If I could, I'd start all the way back as Ancient Egypt and try to become the first pharaoh. But there aren't any mods that go that far back. The best I could do is do what Ofaloaf did and start with the Total War series and then go into Crusader Kings but that doesn't feel right. Also there's the fact that I can't really run Total War games on my PoS computer anyways. There are a couple of other options but ultimately I know that it'll be a long endeavor and I get cold feet. The root of my anxiety is posters. See, Paradox threads are known to bring out the worst in some people. I'm pretty sure us posters were the reason why the Denmark LP dropped off the face of the earth. On one hand I could just have little to no participation, but I fear that people will lose interest if they aren't involved. Add the fact that I'm really bad at keeping a schedule and you got the makings of a failed LP before it even began.There's also the fact that I'm trying to make a mod for Crusader Kings II based around the era when Islam appeared so I don't want to start an LP without that being done but at the rate I'll get that finished Paradox will be done with Crusader Kings IV.  tl;dr: I fret too much to have time to do an LP.
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May 8, 2015 06:55
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:tl;dr: I fret too much to have time to do an LP. Don't feel bad about fretting over things you'd want to do in a LP. If you are really worried about a thread getting out of hand because of people being terrible either tell them to stop or just don't read your own thread. I can say this now that I've started to cut my LP teeth, if you want to LP something because you like it and have an idea go for it. The worst that can happen is nobody watches/reads it, but what does that matter if you're enjoying what you're doing. And if it is over-ambitious you'll be able to find out while doing it what you would need to change to make it manageable. The most important thing is that you do what you want, how you want, and don't let what some people say get you to a point of quitting because it is the opinion of somebody on the internet on a sub-forum where people can have fun doing a hobby showing off stuff to each other. As long as you are happy with what you put out it doesn't matter if down the line you look back as think it is awful, and want to change things in it. At the point you can look back and want to change things you've done it is because you've learned and grown from the point you started at so of course you'd want to make things better.
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May 8, 2015 10:05
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Just A Friend posted:Dust: An Elysian Tail That being said, it seems that just loving a game doesn't make for a good Let's Play. When I started thinking about doing Shadow Warrior, I figured I'd just go on about why the action in that game is so great and let the story stand out on its own; and as I went on I found myself feeling the need to defend it more and more, even spending a couple of videos explaining just WHY IS THIS THING SO BRILLIANT AND YOU IGNORANT SAVAGES DON'T SEE ITS PERFECTION. I am retrospectively really glad that the thread a)didn't get much attention and b)got mostly a positive one from the people who followed: when I try to recommend Shadow Warrior in the Steam thread nowadays, people just flock around and tear it apart for being repetitive and having this weird tonal shift as the story ends. It's down to personal taste, sure, but I think I ran into something similar as the Dust and Killer Is Dead LPs, where my love for the game blinded me to some of its issues. At least I haven't felt the need to replay it for months now, that's something that kept happening before I decided to show it to the Internet. edit: Don'ť get me wrong, I'm still willing to whack anyone who doesn't believe it's the best shooter in years with 7-10 shurikens, but LPing a game really gives you a new perspective on it.
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May 8, 2015 11:32
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Lazyfire posted:Future Soldier was great because I didn't have to do poo poo unless I had a unique perspective as Psion ran things, and BF4 was great because I got to talk to people who had made things I liked about how/why they did what they did and what they were looking at next. I'd love to do something like that again, but I would need the right game to pull it off. meanwhile, I make Lazyfire use the worst loadouts possible in black ops 2. You can see how this relationship works. Freespace 2 - I'd say it's not outright bad but it's not really good either. Or at least it hasn't aged well in the intervening eight years. It has good parts that I still think went well (using the mission editor to show how things worked behind the scenes) but I also said some really dumb, cringeworthy stuff back then (as opposed to now when I say different dumb stuff), and I still don't think it does proper justice to how good Freespace 2 is. I keep hoping someone will do a really kick-rear end new LP of the latest SCP updates, Freespace 2 and custom campaigns and put it on the archive so this one can retire or something. I think about asking baldurk to pull it every now and then but at the end of the day I did put a lot of work into that thread and LP even if I'm not wholly pleased with my output. Someone at Ars Technica just linked to it in a feature article (yes, an eight year old LP in 2015) which just astounds me. Like ... really? I refuse to believe nobody's done a better job since then. Or at least an LP not in a 4:3 aspect ratio. We're in the future and the future is 16:9, geez. GRFS I'd agree with Lazy that it went well overall, I have no major complaints. Sure there were some problems (my mic quality was half-rear end, editing was inconsistent, I didn't always have a good feel for when to talk/not talk, I screwed up the ColorYUV settings in Avisynth so everything looked washed out) but overall I think Lazy and I did pretty well together once we got into the swing of things and it ended up pretty good for my first attempt at a VLP, live commentary, and so on. We also had some nice assists from Cerberus and Pythonicus helping us round out on missions and Guerilla mode, which I appreciated a lot. I'm not really upset about the technical mistakes - I was learning how to use my capture device, Audacity, avisynth and meGUI as I went along so they were inevitable. One other thing that I also (eventually) realized: Picayune posted:It felt like OP-posting in my threads just crushed discussion. Eventually I started waiting twenty-four hours in between posting an update and posting to answer questions and joke around, so that other people could have a chance to get in there before I did. I have no idea if this actually helped, but it felt like it did. so true! I also feel like it really helped the thread discussion for me to wait a day or so before posting. I don't know if it was true but it felt true and I post too much as it is.
Psion fucked around with this message at 19:15 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 18:45
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oh and let's just go ten pages backTyrantSabre posted:Actually, the LP I regret most was Infinite Space, in the regard of never finishing it but also of starting it half-cocked to begin with. I don't feel like I ever had a particularly sound gimmick to begin with in it, the voice I developed was pretty inconsistent with the tone of the game at times, the writing of the updates was brutally slow and tedious, and (most critically) I hadn't ever finished the game to begin with, so I was going into the mid- and endgame with no idea of what the plot's actual result would be. Not a formula for success. I was sad that you didn't finish this one but I can't blame you at all -- Infinite Space is dense as hell. I was impressed you were taking it on, but I had no idea you hadn't even finished it yet. In retrospect I think it's impressive you lasted as long as you did. That game is lllllllllllong. I've finished it like three times but I had an hour long commute back in the day, so grinding through long DS games wasn't as much of a challenge as keeping my DS battery charged was.
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May 8, 2015 18:54
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Sorry about going absolutely overboard here, but I could write an entire book about my LP regrets. Get ready for the realest of realtalk... Banjo-Kazooie I think this was pretty well recieved and I had a lot of fun making it, but I don't really think I did it justice in terms of quality because I was mainly using it as a tech demo for Banjo-Tooie. Some of the videos have extremily questionable frame rates and aspect ratios, and a lot of the subtitles are absolute nonsense. It was definitely a learning process and I think you can really tell that I get better at the whole LP thing on an almost video-by-video basis, however if I had to do it all again i'd actually learn all that poo poo before starting the LP. I was just in such a hurry to get started! I think I posted the test video to the sandcastle, and then basically made the thread before anyone could actually give me any real feedback. People cut me a lot of slack though, because holy poo poo those games are popular. Regarding subtitles, it's actually something i fell into without planning. They were originally placeholders and I was going to switch them out for voiced commentary when I got my hands on a mic, but by that time I had recieved so much praise for not talking over the amazing soundtrack that I just rolled with it. It's probably for the best, since I ain't exactly the most charismatic vocalist (although i'm not the best typist either). Banjo-Tooie Like I said above, this was the game that I always wanted to LP, and I only really bothered starting with B-K because the notion of LPing the second game in a series was weird to me. It was so intricate and sprawling, and I knew that i could have a load of fun drawing up lists and plotting optimised routes through every level... and I did just that. I am really happy with the way this turned out in almost every way - going back and rewatching these, the only criticism I can really level against it is that not putting a pause between different subtitles makes them almost completely unreadble, how the gently caress did i make 82 subtitled videos of these games and never realise that. It makes it impossible to split your attention between the action and the subtitles, since the text doesn't catch your attention when it changes. Oh, and i wish i had never ended up with 'done and dusted' as a catchphrase. catchphrases are stupid, i'm stupid. Nuts & Bolts This is what i came here to talk about. Holy poo poo, where do i even begin? Firstly, capturing video from an xbox is an entirely different beast to using screen capture software to record an N64 emulator. I couldn't use save states to cut the videos into clean 20 minute chunks, so updates ended up being single videos that were sometimes over 60 minutes long. That is a LONG time to watch a subtitle LP for, expecially for a game that has larger worlds and a slower pace. Also, the game autosaves, which means that i only had one shot at recording an update. If I collect all the jiggies and leave the level and then realise the video didn't save properly, then that's an entire level lost. You know the solution? I had to delete the save file and start the game again from scratch. I did that SIX times over the course of the LP, it's a miracle I never got burned out on it. Let me tell ya, I got real good at speed running those early levels. It was worth it though, since the thread had such an amazing vibe. I'm so glad i chose to let people from the thread build and submit vehicles to me for use in the updates, because a lot of people who were really passionate about the game got together in one place and mad some INCREDIBLE stuff. I'm not kidding, the audience feedback was overwhelming, to the point that I barely even felt like I was the LPer any more - it was more like 'A collaborative let's play of nuts and bolts from the goons of SA, presented by your host Rooreelooo!' This game got lots of negative feedback from a LOT of people, and it seemed to me like everybody wrote it off immediately. The discussion of whether this game is good or bad is a matter for another thread (hint, it's good), but I can say that it was definitely a case of people judging it on what they WANTED it to be as opposed to what it actually was. So when I started LPing it, suddenly all these people started emerging from the woodwork saying 'wow i thought this game was poo poo but your LP has made me realise that it loving owns.' Haha, it was getting to the stage that after every update i posted there would be an inevitable slew of people saying 'i went out and bought this game after watching your LP, thank you for convincing me it was good'. I think i ended up being responsible for like 60 copies of the game sold, and the beautiful thing is that most of those people started building me vehicles and submitting them for use in the LP. The whole thing was a perfect storm of good vibes, and being involved in it was honestly some of the most fun i've had in my life. It was even responsible for the creation of this monstrosity (thank you lorak, history may not remember you but i will never forget):  So this just makes it all the more sad for me that I could never finish it. The first two games spanned from Aug 08 to Feb 2009, and I was able to keep up a healty schedule because i was a lazy student and it was my second year of university. The workload wasn't too heavy and i was a pretty bad student (big surprise lmao) so i basically had all the time in the world to work on those two games. I wanted to LP nuts & bolts as soon as i was able, because i wanted the game to still be fresh and surprising for people, so I kicked off the LP on pretty much the 6 month anniversary of the release date. This had the misfortune of being in my third year of uni, which was MUCH harder for me. As i mentioned already, recording the video was infinitely more time consuming without using an emulator, and i needed to do a higher level of editing on each individual video to cram in all the stuff i wanted and cut the loading screens out. As time went on and my study began to suffer, it was obvious to me that the LP had to go - it was physically impossible for me to do it alongside my university degree anymore. It broke my loving heart, since i was basically turning my back on a huge collaborative project that a load of people were really enjoying, myself included (although at this stage the update schedule had dropped so low that it was basically 3 weeks between videos, so most of my audience had dwindled away anyway). I was really depressed about it for a long time, especially because i went on to learn that my university degree would go on to be a waste of three years of my life anyway. Nuts & bolts is no longer hosted anywhere, and it never got archived because i never completed it. Now it's kinda like it never even existed - it will live on only in my memories and in Rirse's mega-archive of every lets play ever. This was all six years ago, and yet to this day i still get messaged by random people asking me if i'm ever gonna go back and finish it. I guess I was only four or five videos from the end, so it's theoretically possible, but in reality it's never gonna happen - I don't have a chance in hell of recapturing the zeitgeist of the original thread. Also i wouldn't be able to tap into any of the audience participation. At this stage, i just want someone else who loves the banjo-kazooie series as much as me to do it justice and LP it to completion.
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May 8, 2015 19:36
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Rooreelooo posted:At this stage, i just want someone else who loves the banjo-kazooie series as much as me to do it justice and LP it to completion. Dex01 and Vilemoon are LPing it right now and are only a video or two away from the ending. Though the tone is a bit... different from your LP. That is to say they think the game is loving garbage and hate it.
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May 8, 2015 19:49
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Rooreelooo posted:Nuts & Bolts
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May 8, 2015 22:53
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Nihilarian posted:Have you ever thought about starting from scratch? Making a new Nuts & Bolts thread for a new N&B LP? Or hell, doing it off-site. Doing anything differently; maybe you want to finally give voiced commentary a shot, maybe you have different ideas on how to complete some challenges, maybe a different forum will have a different kind of audience. It doesn't have to be the same as the old LP. It might turn out worse. It could turn out better. I'd be game to see a Nuts & Bolts LP redone, especially one where we can submit designs. I was a big fan of it when I was in high school.
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May 8, 2015 23:04
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Rooreelooo posted:Nuts & Bolts
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May 9, 2015 00:13
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Nihilarian posted:Have you ever thought about starting from scratch? Making a new Nuts & Bolts thread for a new N&B LP? Or hell, doing it off-site. Doing anything differently; maybe you want to finally give voiced commentary a shot, maybe you have different ideas on how to complete some challenges, maybe a different forum will have a different kind of audience. It doesn't have to be the same as the old LP. It might turn out worse. It could turn out better. Yeah i considered rebooting it from scratch, but my living situation has changed a lot in six years and honestly i barely have any time to follow someone elses lp any more, let alone make one for myself. And it sucks to hear that the online stuff isn't working anymore, guess the window for recording other people's broken challenge replays has closed.
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May 9, 2015 00:20
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Rooreelooo posted:Yeah i considered rebooting it from scratch, but my living situation has changed a lot in six years and honestly i barely have any time to follow someone elses lp any more, let alone make one for myself.
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May 9, 2015 00:28
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Nuts and Bolts is still one of my all-time favorite LPs and I wish it wasn't lost to the ages (is the online stuff really down? there goes my intent of maybe eventually LPing it myself)
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May 9, 2015 00:50
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Nobody asked but I like talking about myself and pretending I'm a big deal so: Mega Man 9 An off-site LP before I even knew what LPs were. Camcorder LP at that. I didn't finish it, but I at least understood that post-commentary was a thing and A Good Idea. I played skilfully and attempted to explain good strategies. Ignoring that it was an abandoned camcorder LP, I'm alright with how this worked out in a weird way?? Half-Minute Hero At some point, a friend of mine introduced me to SA LPs and I got kind of hooked. I'm glad it took me as long as it did to figure out how to get an actual LP going on a technical level because if I could figure out how to record my PSP's audio then Half-Minute Hero would have come out roughly two years earlier. Two less years of lurking and watching other LPs and seeing how things are done. I am so glad I did not work on it that early. I knew coming into SA that if I was ever going to LP something, it would be Half-Minute Hero, as it was straight up one of my favorite games and I felt it never really got a ton of recognition. Looking back, there's some things about the HMH that I'm not crazy about. I didn't ever once show off the intro or title screen and instead just jumped right into things. I didn't plan out ahead if I knew what I was going to talk about and, again, just jumped right into things. This came back to bite me in the rear end as I literally ran out of things to talk about in Princess 30. To get past it, I just poo poo out a video of the rest of Princess 30 and had my roommate and I talk about unrelated subjects over it. It's an episode I'm really not a fan of because of how much it stands out compared to the rest. I really wish I could have come up with a better alternative. My update schedule was all over the place, oftentimes putting off the LP for multiple weeks at a time just because I didn't feel like working on it. On top of that, some videos got way too long for their own good because I was married to the idea of certain chunks of the story all being in the same video. All this being said, the amount people seemed to enjoy it was staggering which meant a lot to me as my first "real" LP. When first posting it in the sandcastle, slowbeef said it seemed really cool which was a big deal to a Kaubocks back in 2012 who basically saw him as the head honcho of everything LP related. I eventually noticed that helloitsdan was subscribed to me on YouTube, which, again, was a big deal to a Kaubocks back in 2012 whose favorite LP was Mercenaries 2. A few pieces of fan art were being posted and the thread went gold which is way more than I was ever expecting. I re-read the thread recently since I got archives and tons of people posted saying they bought the game because of me and it's beautiful and I didn't deserve any of it. except I did because I'm amazing Mega Man X6 Hilariously abandoned. I was already getting burned out on Half-Minute Hero but I made a thread for a Mega Man X6 / X7 100% double feature LP because Zarah had just finished Mega Man X - X5 with no intention of playing the rest. I love Mega Man games! I know MMX6 and X7 are notorious for being terrible, but I played those games a ton as a teenager! Surely, while bad, they can't be as bad as everyone is saying they are because I would definitely remember how bad everyone is saying they are. nah they're bad I think I abandoned this like three episodes in. I tried doing co-commentary with another Mega Man bud of mine, but I didn't record the videos with co-commentary in mind. I played through the game like I normally would-- just straight speedgaming and basically dashing through as much poo poo as possible. Didn't really leave a lot of time for explaining things. Nothing about this was clicking with me. I soon realized that starting it was a bad idea and eventually just nuked the videos from my YouTube page; letting the thread slowly rot away into archives. Rhythm Heaven Ambisagrus was doing an LP for Rhythm Heaven Fever that I was enjoying. As a fan of Rhythm Heaven DS, I asked if it would be ok for me to show off Rhythm Heaven DS in the thread. I got the go ahead, and so I started working on an LP of Rhythm Heaven. I really don't know what I was thinking. I still don't think subtitle LPs are really a thing I'm interested in doing. Ambisagrus had long finished the LP and yet I was still only like 3-4 episodes in out of 10. I was hitting the wall of not really caring at all and letting it slip away, but eventually decided I didn't want to poo poo up someone else's thread by leaving it unfinished. I cranked out the rest of the episodes to the best of my ability. I think the later episodes are kind of sparse in commentary, but at the very least I didn't let myself not finish what I started. Overall it's pretty ok? I guess?? I dunno. I don't think the LP is amazing but each episode has a few thousand views and I still get the occasional comment here or there so I must have done something right. Saints Row 2 What the gently caress is even the point of me LPing anything anymore because literally nothing I do is ever going to be as good as this. Panzer and I wanted to LP this because we were both looking for an excuse to play a game we both thought was really cool and better than any of the others in the franchise. Nothing could have prepared us for the LP. Even the test recording we did and never published was ridiculous. On a technical level, it's kind of a mess. I was hitting the limits of what I understood how to do with AviSynth. My audio balancing was completely out of whack a lot of times-- I have no idea how people could watch the whole thread without mentioning that at all. That's about all I can say really went wrong, though. Well, I mean, lots went wrong, but that was part of the amazing thing about it. The game ran on wishes and pixie farts and was a source of constant setbacks and obstacles. The online functionality of the game was announced to be shut down while we were still LPing it, so we had to make sure to get everything recorded before it was too late. IdolNinja -- the creator of the modpack we were using for the game -- came into the thread and made a few things specifically for us. YouTube would constantly flag videos for third-party content; spawning a running gag of us replacing problem music with the shittiest MIDIs we could find. We frequently failed missions repeatedly and the game would crash randomly. It was an incredible disaster and it created 30+ episodes of content of which only a couple I could point to as being a "lull" in quality. Along the way I learned that keeping a schedule is important. We put out two episodes a week, every Monday and Thursday. People would know when to come looking for episodes and there was a lot more discussion. The thread hit gold with some ridiculous vote count and shattered any expectations we had going in. A bajillion gifs were created as well as a bunch of fan art. I was kind of burning out hard by the end, so maybe two episodes a week was too much for me. But, much like Rhythm Heaven, I wasn't about to let someone else down, so I pressed on. I'll definitely be keeping some sort of schedule going forward for any other LPs I do, though. As well as creating a backlog wherever possible. I'm not sure how much of the LP was me, though. The obvious superstars of the LP were Panzer and the game itself. There were a number of times I struggled with popularity-- wondering if, during the LP, had I been replaced, would anybody particularly care. What did I contribute? I just slapped the episodes together. I dunno. On one level I really don't give a gently caress what people think about me. On another level I crave attention. I make videos in hopes that people will want to watch them. I'm just not entirely convinced I'm a reason they did. It's very easy for me to be overly critical of myself and jealous of others, even if I don't show it much. I try not to let it bother me because I'm probably just imagining it all. Still something that occasionally eats away at the back of my mind. Regardless, the next LP I want to work on (but haven't had the time due to constant overtime at work (don't get into game development if you value having days off)) is going back to a solo affair. Multiple reasons. Panzer and I still can't find something else that we want to LP. More selfish reason is I want to remind myself that I can bring in viewers with just myself. sounds horribly lame and full of myself but I record myself playing video games for the internet so that kind of comes with the territory Kaubocks fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 01:56
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You're a great foil for Panzer, dude. Also, I'm still getting views of that stupid challenge video I did from LP Archive. No idea why, but I do appreciate the custom title gift card.
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May 9, 2015 02:36
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I actually forgot that I did one other LP, for slowbeef's old shoot-em-up thread of a game called Aqua Kitty: Milk Mine Defender, it was my first foray into subtitles, and I tried something new by having the subtitles 'follow' the action on the screen, eventually I'll put the feedback I was given to use. It's probably the best thing I've ever done, if only because I didn't abandon it like a total jerk! 
Kobold eBooks fucked around with this message at 02:40 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 02:38
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Psion posted:One other thing that I also (eventually) realized: I make a concerted effort to not post in my own threads unless I have something interesting or related to the overall flow of the LP to post. I feel like people do like interaction with the person playing the game but worry that they'll say the wrong thing and upset you at the same time if you are constantly posting in the thread. The problem can be that almost never posting cane make things worse because people think you just don't care about the LP. If the thread relies heavily on reader input it just seems odd that you wouldn't post pretty frequently, but with an FPS or action game you really have to let the conversations develop. I was wondering, mostly after I did the write-up on a couple of my favorite threads, why does almost no one even bother with multiplayer games. I mean, yeah, you have the race videos and audience participation opportunities, but rarely have multiplayer LPs come up. I guess after a point they just become people broadcasting (I refuse to acknowledge "shoutcasting" is a thing) them playing a game and not necessarily an LP, but I think in the right hands you could make an interesting LP of a multiplayer focused game. I keep thinking I will someday convince a bunch of people to buy Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and then get them to guest on a series of videos that culminates in a ten player all goon battle.
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May 9, 2015 06:58
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I've tried summing up The Skippy Granola LP Experience a couple times now and each time it comes out as just a huge pile of whining and self-loathing. But now I'm full of French Toast and a mild hangover so let's talk about what I've learned. Bulletstorm Some background: I discovered the LP archive through Yahtzee's Extra Punctuation column, which led me to the SA forums, which led me to creating an account so I could continue watching LPs. I guested on a multiplayer video for Niggurath's Space Marine LP, and figured this LPing thing wasn't so hard. So I bought a FRAPS license, studied the tutorials in the old Tech Support Fort thread, and hacked together a video of Bulletstorm. I'd picked it up for the 360 when it came out and really enjoyed it, but never finished, so I figured it'd be good to LP a game I distinctly enjoyed, and wanted to finish. The LP itself was a complete hash. I didn't shop it through the sandcastle, opting instead to use the TSF to solve my myriad technical woes and AVISynth questions. I was aware at the time that Proteus was also about to launch a Bulletstorm thread of his own, which was a huge party foul on my part. However, despite the technical issues and poor quality, the thread was reasonably well received, and I was pleasantly surprised at the welcome from the subforum. This was my one and only gimmick LP. At the time I thought that successful LPs needed a gimmick, so I decided that every time I said a bad word, I'd need to suffer a thread-provided challenge. This resulted in only three videos, none of which were particularly interesting or engaging. Stacking A quirky LP continuing my tradition of poorly-balanced audio. I think the relaxed pace, charming humour, and very objective-based gameplay made this a very easy game to LP. Not a particularly remarkable effort by any means, but I think it holds up as a fairly fun watch. It's also a nicely comprehensive LP that adequately shows off the charm and personality. I could have definitely done better on the technical front, but this has the somewhat wry humour that marked my earlier LPs, back when I was shy. Rage It looks good, it's well paced, and it's the first LP I actually had co-commentators on! The thread was active, engaged, and I remember PMF kept making awesome gifs of particularly hilarious kills. Despite being a bland game, I really had fun recording it. It's a really meaty LP with plenty of content, and the filler raceday videos are clearly marked and skippable. I also got to hang out with Paragon1 a lot (super nice guy and a good poster - I regret that we lost touch), and Maxwell Adams guested in one of the episodes! It was a surprising twist to have caught the attention of someone whose videos I'd actually watched. Amerzone This was more or less a trial run to see if I liked doing screenshot LPs. The answer is no, I didn't. Amerzone was not a good game to LP, being a watered-down Myst with a poor plot and very little action. In retrospect it was a mistake to try to inject more plot and character in the game, because I am definitely no Chewbot. It was a largely disappointing experience because there was no interest in the game, very little thread activity, and no technical feedback. Given that it was mostly a bridge to the actually good Benoit Sokal games, I suppose that can be forgiven. Syberia Definitely the high point of my body of work. It shows my highest level of technical proficiency at editing, and despite getting lost a little bit I feel that it is really well paced. The Draw Mammoth for Momo contest in the thread wasn't a huge winner, and was mostly a last-ditch attempt to spur some thread participation in a relatively linear experience, however there were some pretty funny submissions and I was happy to include them in the OP. Riding high on the momentum of Syberia 1, I flowed right into Syberia 2, and I think the result is a very decent showcase of some of my sentimental favourite adventure games. I'm very excited for Syberia 3, and I am probably going to persuade myself to LP it out of completeness. Magicka I have mixed feelings about Magicka. It was a very fun experience and I was lucky to pull together a very funny team. I think I knew Gharbad from the chat in Xaiter's Binding of Isaac streams, and I was happy that Kaubocks expressed interest in joining as I was a huge fan of his Half Minute Hero LP. Krysmphoenix was I think another Sandcastle poster who knew a lot about the game and provided some technical knowledge about the game mechanics. All in all it was really smooth to record and easy to put together. However, I was a little disillusioned because of it, since it took no effort to record, but garnered a bunch of views. I suppose seeing Magicka take off while my concurrently-running Syberia LP languished quietly made me realize that there is not necessarily a correlation between effort and success in LP - what the people want is yelling, team killing, and shenanigans. Paradise Kind of a cooldown period after running two LPs at once. Paradise was a "poo poo, I might as well" since it was the last Benoit Sokal game and I'd already done all the others. I kind of regret asking Panzer to join me for such a poor game, but without her commentary I think the LP would have faltered and died around episode 5. A definite step down and honestly I'm not at all fond of it. Scribblenauts Unlimited An off-site stream series, and the thing I mostly blame for putting me "on the map" as it were. This series was what introduced me to pretty much everyone who would be in the Saints Row 3 LP, and what partially formed the LP supergroup that I would be part of for a while before leaving in a fit of dramatic pique. Ahh, LP drama and mental illness pair like fine wine and cheese. Anyway, I highly recommend that you give it a watch, because there are still some incredibly hilarious moments, including our beloved Mod Geop serenading a flying vibrating cactus. There are in-jokes a plenty, and this is honestly a sentimental reminder of a much happier time. Saints Row: The Third Following in the tradition of Magicka, I think this is the LP that I'm most well known for. At least it's the one people keep referencing. Numerous co-op partners, plenty of ridiculous moments, and missions that reliably go entirely off the rails. Saints Row is a game that mostly LPs itself - you just hit record and see what happens. I ended up taking a 6 month break in the middle of it due to burnout, and wasn't actually sure if I'd come back to it. However, some friends talked me into clearing the last few episodes and the DLC, and I think the end result is a super long and quite funny LP. There were a few episodes in there where I agreed to play with people I didn't really know and who I didn't have a lot of chemistry with, which was a very strong object lesson that it is okay to say no to people if you're not sure they'll work out. If I'm 100% honest, I'll admit I don't really like my SR3 LP. It feels cheap, like I was just coasting on funnier people and not adding a lot of value to the game. Definitely doesn't feel like it deserved to be my only gold-rated thread, and I'm slightly ashamed that I sold out so thoroughly. Sang Froid: Tales of Werewolves This right here marked the beginning of the end of my LP career. After some unpleasantness and losing touch with LP pals, I decided to get back to first principles and do a solid value-added LP of a game not many people would have played. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake. I'd spent the past couple years either unemployed or marginally employed, but about 3 episodes in I got a full time office job (still working there, btw!) which drastically cut the amount of time I was able to spend on the LP. Consequently, it became entirely too much of a hassle to record gameplay AND write history segments AND edit together pictures and music. Each episode was taking about 6-8 hours total to do and that was 6-8 hours I just did not have anymore, so I sadly had to cut it off. Redneck Rampage Here's the lesson: LP a game because you like it, not because it would make a good LP. I had high hopes of burning through the series, having some fun, and hanging with buds. What ended up happening was the game became completely unplayable, I was having a miserable time recording it, and the commentary was suffering. This LP was killed by my lack of interest in the game, lack of interest in LP in general, and a feeling that I was suffering just for sweet sweet numbers. Looking Forward It seems like every year I say "No, I quit, that's it" and then am almost immediately back, and I guess there's a certain satisfaction in producing a video and watching people enjoy it. I'm really more interested in streaming once in a while, or doing oneoff LP projects to show off interesting games. Stuff with small time commitments that show off perhaps overlooked games. Anyway, all in all I don't regret my time in LP. I think in the 3 or so years I've been doing this, I've done a lot of growing up. I've developed a much better set of social skills, and a great deal more confidence in myself as a speaker, so there has been growth. I've also hosed up an awful lot, which I regret (and for which I'm deeply sorry!) but all in all getting thrown into the goddamn crucible on this subforum has been alright. And I've got some pretty fun videos to show for it. Thanks for reading, and I hope I see y'all in whatever threads I may end up making in the future.
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May 9, 2015 20:32
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Skyman and the Seven Golden Mods There were a lot of lovely mods I couldn't show off because I don't have the Dawnguard DLC, which from what I've read is a massive pile of poo poo. I selfishly chose to not buy something I'd hate and my LP suffered for it. I am sorry. Also this LP made a lot of people who take LP seriously really mad so I guess it's a regret for them??? Smash Bros the Fourth When fighting my arch-nemesis CharlestonJew, I chose to change my Mii Brawler's customs from the ones I usually use based on a guide on Smashboards written by a 12 year old. I lost. Suspicious Dish posted:Elebits time to watch this rofl
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May 10, 2015 00:45
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Skippy Granola posted:The Skippy Granola LP Experience
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May 10, 2015 00:48
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Putty posted:When fighting my arch-nemesis CharlestonJew, I chose to change my Mii Brawler's customs from the ones I usually use based on a guide on Smashboards written by a 12 year old. I lost. No Johns, putty. No Johns 
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May 10, 2015 01:23
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UZworm posted:Every LP I've ever done was a trainwreck but that's my own drat fault so I guess I can't really be too upset at it. That may be, but you and I are friends now because of my dumb projects. At least you got to beat me up on camera. I have no regrets over the three LPs that I have made so far. Cyberia was a great start in the short games thread from 2010-2011. It was the right kind of LP to do in order to figure out a recording and post-production process. When I did Descent, I know that I intended for it to be informative, but the devolution into it being an excuse for the group to rib each other over a game that has so little to talk about. It ended up being the best format for the LP and it continued in Descent II. I only wish that I had been more consistent on updates, but a 56-video LP is pretty impressive. I'm looking forward to starting my Gradius games thread in a couple of weeks.
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May 13, 2015 00:01
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You know I thought writing this was a bad idea at first but I'm in a different mood today and I'll give it a crack. Before I formally started on a thread I wrote a bunch of OPs and edited first videos for a bunch of ideas that went sour almost immediately after I got general approval from the Sandcastle. Games like Voodoo Vince, and Grabbed by the Ghoulies were ideas I originally had for threads but binned for technical reasons. This was back when recording with a Dazzle was the norm and now Dazzle is garbage and so is every other capture card I buy and throw over the balcony. Rocket Knight (the newer, awful one) I did this a a favor for Mec at the time since we had the occasional chat in Skype group chats prior. Having played the game once before I decided to record it for his thread and my god was it awful. I should've let Dectilon suffer through that game like he offered because the game was bad, my footage was bad and my commentary was awful. The only reason I finished it was I felt obligated to and I had a bunch of free time to work on it anyways. Rainbow Six: Vegas I like this game but I did not do it justice. I edited it like poo poo, didn't play on realistic, I didn't know how MeGUI worked for half the thread and the general participation gave the thought that I had another one of those bad ideas. It was also my first proper time working with a co-commentator and that was basically the only really fun part. I said I would LP the sequel but seriously gently caress that. Ragnarok Battle Offline I love this game to bits but the reason I stopped this thread was because I didn't think it through properly before I started. The intention was that I would do a few playthroughs and then if anyone wanted to do their own they were welcome to. This was inherently flawed because I asked people if they wanted to record their own playthroughs for a game that was not on Steam or even released in English. Eventually I gave up on the thread participation and just went for three varied playthroughs. The solo playthrough was going fine then I had trouble getting the 3-player one coordinated to times where we were all available. The 2-player playthrough was about to start and then a few days before the friend who was going to help me with it fell very ill for just over a year. I closed the thread because I felt bad for the external circumstances and realized the ideas I had weren't going to work out. Maybe I'll retry this thread because I really like the game. Puzzle Agent I did this LP in just one week while studying for exams. It was the thing I did to kill time when I wasn't studying. It was pretty successful as far as thread participation went, though I credit that to hamming in Deadly Premonition references while SGF's LP of that was going on. Ys I Oh boy, here's where things really started. I LP'd a game I had completely memorized. The PSP quality was garbage, the commentary was atrocious aside from episode 2 but the playthrough was so smooth. I found out through this that if you really know a game back to front doing an LP for it is often incredibly easy. Ys II Same thing here but I never played the Chronicles version before so I actually missed some easter eggs in my playthrough and didn't find out about them until years later. Falcom buried some secrets really deep in this game. Aside from that the playthrough was fine because I drew full maps and routed every section of the game. The commentary was OK but garbage at other points. Ys: the Oath in Felghana This is the thread I'm probably most well known for outside of SA because it almost looked like I was the herald for the game finally getting a PC release. I did some weird stuff with the game including being one of the first people to beat the Steam on Inferno in under 10 hours, adding the PSP version's voice acting to the PC cutscenes (this confused a lot of people), poorly scanning concept art and making my own boss cards. The intent was the videos acted as a fully detailed walkthrough and in the end it turned out great. The video quality got chewed up by YouTube's encoder degrading over the years but I still have the mp4s and they look great. Ys III A notoriously bad game that I gave a noose and let it hang itself while lots of people watched. I also learned to never record commentary with 6 other people. It was goofy but otherwise OK commentary-wise. Asura's Wrath This is the LP on SA that everyone noticed. The game is awful to play but really fun to watch which really worked for the format I had in mind. My only real problem was that the PS3 port runs like poo poo and my capture device started having serious problems towards the end and I'm still not sure what happened. Everyone seemed to enjoy it though and it was by far the most successful and fun projects I've completed to date. For the record the capture device used for this thread has since been thrown off a balcony, flushed in a toilet and smashed with a crowbar. We have been liberated. I also learned about how lovely the posting in a thread gets when it's even remotely popular. Holy poo poo some of the posts in that thread were bad. Ys IV At this point I made a joke where I was blood pact-ed into LP'ing all the Ys games. In the end I scrapped a playthrough of Mask of the Sun because gently caress that game, but I finally got a full playthrough of Dawn of Ys. Dawn of Ys was sweet, the commentary was OK and all-in-all I enjoyed working on it even through like 3 people were watching. Legacy of the Wizard The whole "no-one is watching this" inside joke was put to a road test when I decided I would make a thread for a NES classic and update it regularly and try to fit the whole thing into one page. It happened. It was part really funny and part really sad. I also have sincere regrets about some of the things I said in the commentary for one or two of those videos since I use combinations of words that retrospectively make my sick to my stomach. Ys Origin My ideas coming into this thread were thorough. I knew exactly how long the thread will take and I went into it guns blazing. The videos were ok, the commentary was decent, Deeps' playthrough was a ton of fun, but then the wheels kinda fell off for me. I lost track of what I was doing and started hating what I was doing. I was making this huge thread but most people weren't reading it. There were enough people watching the videos but the thread was a ghost town short of one or two people who just got the game and were asking me for a personal walkthrough instead of watching the videos. At this point I really hated LP and most of everyone in it. Prior to this I lost my poo poo at the streaming thread and locked it because I resent the idea of making money off recording videogames in any capacity (my reasons are a completely different spiel) which caused a lot of people to get unnecessarily snappy at my reaction. That wasn't cool. At all. After that I considered just closing up shop on the LP gig altogether: I was rapidly losing interest in what I was doing, I started to hate the game I was playing for really stupid reasons and I started to hate the subforum outright. I was getting really snappy and agitated towards random users. External circumstances basically caused a meltdown and I finally closed shop. Maybe one day I'll finish the Origin thread and do other stuff but I've been so busy lately with real-life stuff I just haven't had the time for videogames. I would like to get back to making threads but I need to get some personal stuff sorted out first. Also I'm not apologizing for the snapping at the people I did - they were colossal fuckwits. I guess that's it?
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May 14, 2015 02:28
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toddy. posted:Asura's Wrath I was incredibly tempted to do an LP of Asura's Wrath myself, just because it was such an over the top fun ride of an experience, but then I saw your LP on the Archive so I elected to do Prince of Persia 2008 instead. That and, well, I say "experience" and not "game" because it never honestly felt like I was actually playing Asura's Wrath except for like three or four points. Especially that one flashback chapter that's literally got like 45 seconds of gameplay sandwhiched between 20 minutes of cutscenes. I can totally see why you'd have a difficult time with it.
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May 14, 2015 03:03
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toddy. posted:Legacy of the Wizard I really enjoyed this LP and was glad you LP'd it.
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May 14, 2015 03:37
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Alright, I'll give this a quick shot, even though I've only done 3. Honestly I'm pretty happy with most of them. I'm not really beset by any particular loathing, but there are things that I could have done better. Jet Grind Radio This was the one I cut my teeth on, and honestly, I don't think I could have picked a better game. The levels are short, the editing fairly simple and relatively painless, and it introduced me to a few simple tricks in AviSynth that I could put to good use, like fast forwarding through segments, and overlaying static images on top of the gameplay. I only regret that I didn't really plan anything out when I started it - I made a few mistakes such as saying in the first episode that it wouldn't be a 100% LP, which it actually did turn into when I realized some of the graffiti souls weren't nearly as hard to get as I remember. Doing solo commentary definitely felt pretty awkward at first, but once I found a comfortable flow I setlled into it pretty easily - there's rarely any dead time in the game. The only thing that makes my skin crawl is the few occasions where I'd curse - I don't censor myself in any later LPs but it seems to go against the grain of such a bright, fun game. Honestly, I had a ton of fun doing the LP, and it's probably my favorite still, which is mostly from the satisfaction of the graffiti-making segments. Even now I'm still pretty happy with how most of the designs turned out, and selecting an appropriate soundtrack for those segments was a lot of fun as well. Vanquish Frankly, I was surprised that no-one else had beaten me to it, seems like a spectacle shooter like this would be prime LP material. This was the first, and loving LAST time I'd try to do an LP of a game running off a console. The technical side of this was a goddamn nightmare. I have a piece-of-poo poo LED TV that's completely inappropriate for a twitch shooter like Vanquish, so I had some horrendous setup where the 360 would output straight to the DVI recorder, which then had a secondary output to my computer monitor via a HDMI/VGA conversion cable, which was then a dedicated gaming monitor, and there was no vidual output from the PC itself. Since audio was only coming from the computer as it recorded, all the audio was a full 2 seconds behind anything I did in the game (though only for me, it was fine in the recordings themselves). On top of that, actually making sure that I'd hit the appropriate keys to start / stop recording was a total crapshoot. I don't even remember the hotkey, but since my PC monitor was repurposed as an alt-output from the DVI directly, I had to manually switch cables to go back to the PC output to check that poo poo was recording when it should have been. Aside from that, I'm kinda bummed that I simply wasn't good enough to get through the challenge missions. I think I made it up to challenge mission 4 or 5 before I just gave up. gently caress that last part of 5 where you have to fight 2 crystal geckos simultaneously, I am man enough to admit that that fight far exceeds my capabilities. I'm somewhat comforted by the fact that there are plenty of people much better than me who have recorded footage proving that it's not impossible, and high-level vanquish play is some crazy poo poo to behold. It wasn't all bad, though. Again, I learned a few neat tricks with video editing and had some fun with the looney-tune style 'screen pause' ding thingies whenever I wanted to point something out. One thing I was particularly proud of was my little Plot Synopsis at the end. I'm just a little bummed that being at the tail-end of a 40 minute video, a lot of people would have missed it. The Burea: X-Com Declassified The merits and faults of the game itself notwithstanding, it was fun as hell to do with alongside Silent W, who was on a QA team throughout the game's production and had a ton of awesome insight into the game's development. One of these days I'll get around to doing the Hangar 6 DLC (which I actually have and have beaten, and is awesome), but for now I've got a half-dozen other side projects sucking up my time. One of these days! McKilligan fucked around with this message at 08:09 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 08:06
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Since a couple people gave more in depth looks at their LPs I feel like doing the same for some reason. Early poo poo: The very first LP I did was a blind SSLP of Earthbound on a Forum dedicated to a webcomic that and long since finished at the time I did the LP. It was a fun thing to do. Contrary to what blind LPs usually try to do this one didn't focus on my experience with the game but was mostly me trying to be funny. Some people thought it was funny but I don't know if it really way. From the technical side... well. Let's just say I took screenshots while playing rather than recording video and taking single frames from that. Next up was a short lived Devil May Cry 3 LP and to date is the only LP I didn't actually finish. It was also by far the worst LP I've ever seen. Imagine completely unnecessary commentary, done live bad looking footage recorded from a cheap USB capture thingy, no game audio due to technical reasons. Instead I played some of my own music over the game. And since no game audio means no voice acting for cutscenes I voice acted them myself. With alternate dialogue. Which I thought was really funny. But it wasn't. The plot turned into Dante being out to avenge his Pizza some demon dude steps on in the intro cinematic. Even Vergil was angry about the Pizza despite sending the Demon's there... because he was trying to steal it. I stopped doing that after about two bosses because I noticed just how bad it was. After that fiasco I took a break and after that went back to the roots for a bit. I did a mostly informative screenshot LP of Terraria, focusing on exploring all the different biomes and beating all the bosses. That would be the end point. A lot of people seem to believe you can't LP a game like Terraria because it has no End. But there's since there's just gonna be a time when you've shown all the distinct content it's actually surprisingly easy to find a way to just cut it off. It's just that there's no credits crolling. While it was an SSLP I did do videos for the bosses. Because those don't quite work in Screenshot form. It wasn't a bad LP but by my standards today pretty lackluster. This was also the last SSLP I've done to date. But then a couple really bad LPs followed. I streamed Dark Souls but essentially made it out to be a live Let's Play. The footage was recorded from the same device as DMC3 so it was bad. After that I did Demon's Souls. Which was bad for the same reasons, though at least I didn't stream it. Then I did Demon's Crest very poorly and then Guardian Legend very poorly and then Super Castlevania IV very poorly. Those last three I plan to revisit at some point to do them justice. I actually already did that for Demon's Crest. All of them very live commentated which turns out to be a very bad idea if you are not super well prepared on the commentary front or just can pull good stuff to say out of your rear end. Newer stuff: I then did Dark Souls again, because I was not very happy with the first time I did it. It was essentially just a stream. But I really really love the game and wanted to give it some proper treatment. This LP was a turning point. I joined LPF, which stands for Let's Play Forum (dot net) and posted a first draft for feedback. That one was live commentated. And not received very well. I was recommended to do post commentary instead. I was a little hesitant on that because it felt very awkward when I did it for some of the Boss videos in Terraria and a few segments for Demon's Souls, where my recording hosed up. But I decided to give it a try. I showed them my new video and they had a few more issues with it, which I then fixed and I released the final video and started the LP-thread proper. I don't really know why no one complained about the Audio. Because that was god awful. I got a better mic after twelve episodes. This was a fuckoff huge project of six months and I decided never to do a game that big ever again. But I did grow comfortable using live commentary and saw that it's benefits far outweigh its drawbacks (which is basically none for what I'm trying to do) Next I did a very short game I've done very poorly in the past. Demon's Crest. This was the first LP I did on SA. There's not that much to say about it, really. I just applied what I learned during Dark Souls and it turned out pretty solid. In the end I criticized the game a bit. While it was a fair criticism regarding the uselessness of most power-ups it apparently gave off the vibe that I didn't like the game to the thread. Which just isn't true. I enjoy the game despite it's flaws. Otherwise I would not have LP'd it. I'm of the opinion that you really shouldn't LP a game you don't like because you probably won't enjoy doing it. Even if you are LPing a bad game you should be able to enjoy it on some level and playing through it shouldn't be a horrible chore for you. I also did a short playthrough of Contra at some point. By the way. After all this I decided to try something a little different. I'm only mentioning this because I'm preparing to do it again right now. It's not really something I'd call an LP, though. Of course that's debatable anyway because the term doesn't mean poo poo. This time I'll probably include SA too because almost all of the participants are goons anyway. What I did was called LPFWA - Let's Play Forum Wrestling Association. I made custom wrestlers in WWE '13. The custom guys were based off of forumites (mostly people who requested them and gave me some direction) and had them fight each other in AI matches. Since there's a story editor in the game I wrote stupid little storylines with silly feuds and all that jazz. It was fun for everyone involved, until I decided I wanted to do something else. So... remember how I said I'd never do a gently caress-off huge project ever again after Dark Souls? Well. Next I did Dark Souls II. While I did have a total of 3 playthroughs for Dark Souls in order to show everything, not all of them were complete or even completely recorded. For Dark Souls II I decided to splice both a regular New Game run and a NG++ run together. Honestly, this was mostly something I did because I wanted to show different weapons and armor sets you'd have to grind for in order to show remotely well due to stat requirements and the availability of some equipment. And since Dark Souls II makes the amount of grinding I'd have to do this very hard to achieve due to some mechanics. But I didn't just want to show an NG++ run. While having to play through the same section twice for every update seems like it's just gonna complicate things you have to consider Dark Souls II's save system. There are no retries. The game saves constantly and every thing you do is permanent. This is not always an issue, but sometimes bad play can ruin your plans for showing a particular part. In that case it was really nice to have a back up. I'd ordinarily do practice runs anyway, which would have been very hard to do for this game. Overall the LP turned out pretty good, I'd say. Though some fatigue set in at the end when I did the DLCs. It wasn't really me being too lazy to do what I did for all the other videos but I was just trying to mix it up a little. Instead of splicing two runs together I showed two separate runs. One on NG that focused on showing everything with mostly informative commentary and one in NG++ that was going through the areas at a faster pace with co-commentators just showing the poo poo. While I delivered just that I feel that not everyone was happy with it. I put A LOT of effort into making this. And even though I released at least one video a week it still took me nine months to complete the entire thing. And I'm never gonna do a gently caress-off huge project like this again. In my last post here I think I said I didn't regret anything about this LP. Well. Now that I think of it there kinda is. Well. At least something that frustrates me a little bit. I already said that I put a shitload of effort into it. But Dazzling Addar is currently doing an LP of the game herself. And just let me say that there's nothing wrong with Dazz and her LP. But after putting so much work into it it's a little frustrating to see her thread eclipse the entire lifetime of activity of my own thread in an just two months. Still, while mentioning this may make me sound like I'm bitter about this I'm really not. And next time I'll LP something I'll give it whatever treatment I think it needs and wont slack off just because the additional work isn't gonna net me any subs and views and YT-bux. Because I frankly don't really care about that. As long as there's some people watching and enjoying everything is all right.
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May 14, 2015 10:00
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I told Maple Leaf I was too cool for school to post in this thread but I'm bored out of my skull and want to express myself, so here we go. The reason I joined SA in the first place was to do an LP. Yeah, I know I'm not the only one. I also started an LP because I wanted to get some recognition. Again, I'm not the only one. Today I do still feel a little tug of self-promotion when I start an LP, but I don't do it for the recognition anymore. All LPs I've ever done, and still choose to do, either haven't been done before or were abandoned (on SA, at least). I like choosing an original game to LP, but that's becoming less and less easy to do. Anyway, enough prefacing. Let's get to the games. Republic: The Revolution The first LP I've ever done. I approached the LP with the intention of doing screenshot LPs because this is a political simulator and video wouldn't cut it. Instead I decided to go all-out and make it a narrative with CYOA-style choices because I liked the game's aesthetic and wanted to practice my writing. I don't mind it at all, and actually feel that the success of this LP in terms of reception and writing quality is what made me keep making LPs. I also kept to a pretty strict schedule for this LP, back when keeping up a screenshot LP didn't feel like such a chore. Shameful admission: I still re-read parts of this LP from time to time, and I know exactly how masturbatory that is. Imperialism II Another screenshot LP following R:TR, and in the same style of narrative. However, for this one I was taking a page from Jerusalem's LP of Medieval II: Total War and the Paradox LPs. I wanted to write an epic, a story about the goon-chosen dynasty of Holland and go all-out with pictures, memorable characters, and tie in goon participation by making them part of a story. This was also the first time I began to exhibit signs of burnout. I think I aimed too high, and eventually I stopped writing updates for this after a couple of failed restart attempts when I mentioned taking a break to get my interest in writing again. I'm very glad there's an LP of Imperialism I currently ongoing, though. These are fun games. Diplomacy Back before play-by-play of board games were moved to the Game Room subforum, Diplomacy was one of those games that I jumped into with relish, and now find unbearable to play because I get so hopped up and tense. I was adamant about being the host for these play-by-plays, being a GM and ordering my participants to submit their moves and compile them into updates that would throw the players into chaos. Shoutout to my old Diplomacy buddies and players. The only downside of looking back at this? I was way too much into My Little Pony at the time and put smileys of ponies as power rankings. Yeah. At least my players were also MLP fans and liked it, and I did finish this one. Populous: The Beginning My first foray into video LPing with live commentary, I should have finished this one, but again, laziness and burnout kicked in and I lost interest in completing this LP. I blame the fact that I had so much video editing to do, and that I underestimated how much work it took. This is one of those LPs that I do want to go back and finish someday, but not anytime soon. Crosspeice did start a new LP of this and finished it in the archives, though, so I congratulate him/her on sticking through with it to the end. Need for Speed: Most Wanted I have Maple Leaf to blame for this one. After abandoning Populous and not LPing anything for a year, he kept pressing me to do an LP of my own, and suggested this game. I ignored his suggestion for a while but eventually figured, sure, why not. And you know something? I had fun doing this LP, so thanks again for continuing to press me, Maple Leaf. Not wanting to repeat my abandonment of Populous, for NFS:MW I decided to go all the way and finish it. This LP was live-commentated again, and in the spirit of keeping goon participation when possible, I had goons submit car ideas and come up with names for them as we went. I also decided to be informative and give Wikipedia'd info on the cars and car companies in-game, as well as tap Triple A, a car-loving goon, for his opinions on the cars we drove. This LP is actually still getting me subscriptions and comments on YouTube, mostly from Russians and other Eastern Europeans who like fast cars. The Last Express If I had to choose just one LP of mine to remember me by, or to say which one was my favorite to do, I'd have to say The Last Express. Admittedly, I almost abandoned it in the end in my goal to 100% it and translate languages that the main character didn't speak, as well as not follow through with my goals of going Geop-style into the backstory of the history of the game. However, the game itself is actually very near and dear to me, and I felt it was a crime that it hadn't been completed by previous goons. This being a subtitled video LP, I actually went a step further in showing the 100% run of this game. Because of so many game overs and choices we can make in this game, I decided to split the videos into two "runs" that were taking place simultaneously, inspired by Lord Mune's own approach in his/her LP of Heavy Rain. One run was the "right" way of doing things (with a few exceptions), and the other was the "wrong" way. Viewers and thread readers really dug into that. Tropico I tried going back into screenshot LPs with Tropico. Needless to say, I failed, because I abandoned this LP as well. I can't even find the original thread to link you to it, even though I still have the first five original updates. I don't think narrative SSLPs are my thing anymore. I don't have the patience for it. Transistor My latest (and likely last) LP, this one was subtitled videos again. I learned how to use Avisynth a little better than in NFS:MW to have subtitles move and fade with this one. In my quest to nearly 100% it I found some cool art online, and I took pains to make the biographies of characters as game-looking as possible. I am proud of the effort, but after all the work I put into it, unless another great game comes along that hasn't been LP'd before, I will probably not make any more LPs. I am still up for co-commentating and participate in LPs done by another person, but now that I have work and my own non-internet hobbies to pursue, I don't feel like putting in the effort or time into another LP again for a while.
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May 17, 2015 19:20
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Mother 3: I've done a handful of Let's Plays, and the first, and most embarrassing one I've done is Mother 3. I did Mother 3 because when I joined Something Awful, I looked at the request list and I saw the game in the list, requesting that it was done "in the narrative style of Travis343's Earthbound." I saw the word 'narrative' and I thought that I could do that, without really thinking about why Travis's was as well received as it was. So I did it. I hate it because it was so wordy; in the interest of time no update was edited or proofread; and I change the story of the game for the sake of my own narrative. It turned from Mother 3 by Shigesato Itoi into Mother 3 by Maple Leaf. It was a fan fiction and it had the nerve to not be entertaining. That said, I still get notifications from people watching and commenting the gameplay videos on Youtube, and at least one person PMd me (on Youtube) saying how much they enjoyed it. I don't like looking at it, but some people still do. And if I had to choose one thing I did like about it, it'd be the work ethic: some updates went in excess of 15,000 words, and only once did I ever miss my once-a-week update schedule, and only by a single day (equaling about 2100 words a day). Troddlers: Troddlers is a Lemming's type puzzle game for the SNES and for MS-DOS. I love the game to bits and I didn't mind doing the LP, but the problem I had with it (it was a subtitled video LP) was that I did every subtitle by hand in avisynth. Everything from the font to the colour to the size to the kerning was all hand-selected and if I wanted to add a second line to one subtitle, I'd have to do it all a second time. A single line looked like this: code:Big Mutha Truckas: This was a silly game about spreadsheets, probabilities, and stock management wrapped in a deep-south redneck aesthetic. I loved this game when I was a kid but I wasn't very good at it; I just bought the most expensive stuff because the returns would also be a lot of money. Makes sense, right? Doing this LP was my first time actually doing well in the game and playing it the way it was meant to be played. It was fun! It's also one of my most viewed LPs on my channel, with the opening video having well over 10k views, which is kind of weird, but it's nice to know the game is more attractive than I thought. The game had a sequel for the PS2 only, which I didn't own, but I don't think I'd mind doing it someday. Goldeneye Wii: It was a game that I enjoyed and I wanted to replay it, but I figured, why not do a Let's Play and show it off? The biggest problem was that I wasn't well-equipped to do it: the game is naturally very dark, lighting-wise, and my crappy SD capture card and less-than-amazing editing techniques of the time made for a grainy, difficult picture. I replayed every checkpoint dozens of times, looking for the perfect route to fight enemies, and this wound up being some kind of pro-level Goldeneye run. It wasn't very fast by any means, but I always knew where everyone was and the best way to kill everyone without getting seen. I could probably do this LP again on the Dolphin for a much clearer picture. Metroid: Other M: I specifically did this LP because I knew my co-commentator and close friend Olive Branch wouldn't experience the game any other way. He wouldn't play it and he wouldn't watch someone else's LP of it because, in his words, he'd have to "experience it himself," so this was my way of making sure he knew my pain. It turned out to be a good decision! To this day I get compliments on our dynamic in the videos. His first-time reaction to all of the game's awful plot points and storytelling got a lot of laughs and the thread for the LP was always busy. This was probably my most successful LP and I sometimes go back and rewatch the videos and reread some parts of the thread. And I have Sakamoto to thank! Donkey Kong Country Returns: Olive Branch, who is a Brazilian living in French-speaking Quebec, came to my end of Canada to visit for a week, and we took advantage of the time by doing an LP. My biggest regret was using our real names for this LP, but whatever. It had a major technical snafu with the audio for the first world, which we had to re-record, but it was a fun time. Just a couple friends goofing off and playing a game on a couch. Kid Icarus: Uprising: I got my 3DS hard-modded by this guy for something unrelated, but when I put in the order I was already fantasizing about doing this LP. It's such a good game. I had never been so excited to do a Let's Play. It was criminal that some people had a 3DS, but they hadn't played Kid Icarus: Uprising. If they weren't going to play it, I was going to play it for them, gladly. A lot of people shared my enthusiasm and this was my second most successful LP because of all the audience participation. The game was crushingly difficult sometimes, but I just loved it so much that I put up with it and kept at it, and the final videos were as much a treat to watch as they were to record and edit. Paper Mario: Sticker Star: I tried to bring back Olive Branch for this one to emulate our Other M dynamic, but the problem with Sticker Star was that it was boring, as opposed to offensively bad. The game features some of the best music I've ever heard from a Mario game, but the story was boring in that there was barely any, which apparently was an executive decision from Miyamoto himself, and the gameplay was boring to watch and frustrating to play when you ran low on stickers.. Not to say that the plot was the only reason. Editing the videos was a chore and I just wasn't having as much fun with the game as I thought I would from replaying it. It might have been better if I did this game blind, but with an off-screen test-run of the levels just so I didn't look like a total idiot. Eventually I got burnt out and I haven't touched the game since. In The Groove 2: American Dance Dance Revolution, with western techno music and a much more intense difficulty curve. I love this game, enough to spend an embarrassing amount of money on buying a legitimate arcade cabinet and shove it in my garage. I still play it as often as I can, but I wanted to make sure that I'd get the most out of the game by doing a 100% Let's Play of it. Every song on Singles and Doubles on the hardest difficulty. It was about as exciting as watching someone play Guitar Hero, even with the footcam to prove that I was really moving my body as fast as the game implied. It was also a bitch to record because I don't own a laptop, so I had to haul my entire rig from my house to my garage, then hook it up to the arcade machine, then record for an hour and a half, then haul it all back. I did that four times (sixteen videos worth of material) before I lost my patience for it. I also happen to play the game barefoot, and my feet freezes to the metal once it gets cold enough, so I would have had to stop by mid November anyway.
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May 18, 2015 03:19
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I do not regret doing my Wizardry IV LP. I do regret that I'm not as entertaining a commentator as I wish I was, however. The Wizardry IV LP may not have suffered too much due to that because it was pretty much an encyclopedia-style LP, but the rest of the LPs I did weren't as good. I'm glad I had the chance to show off a couple of cool old RPGs, though. I did have fun doing most of my LPs, including those off-site - particularly the first two I did, 4 Heroes of Light and Dark Heart of Uukrul, which I did on another forum - and I guess it's the fun that ultimately counts. Actually, sometimes I wish I still had time for LPing so I could do an Uukrul LP in the same style that I did Wiz4. 
CrookedB fucked around with this message at 21:18 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 20:04
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I've been working on this for weeks and should probably just post it now, because every time I try to trim some parts out, I end up adding to it and not trimming anything. It'll be a novel if I try to make it any shorter. To me, it's strange to think that anyone would care enough about what I do to want to read my thoughts on it, but acknowledging that there are people who are interested in my work is something I have to do because it's such a foreign idea to me. So here's my collection of mistakes and lessons learned, as best I can remember them - things I probably should have written long ago, because lessons can never be learned enough. Before I was a Let's Player: I first stumbled into Something Awful LPs back in 2003, briefly, when it was just a couple of threads of screenshots in the Games forum. I found the forum somehow during a break at work and read some of the early Leovinus threads, but when the paywall went up, I stopped - I figured the free preview had expired and since I'd just started the job after nearly using up all of my savings, I didn't want to spend any money I didn't have to. I found my way back over Christmas vacation in 2008, via some Youtube LPs while I was looking for something to do. I found the LP Archive and watched a couple of the ones that were already there, particularly Malorie's 7th Guest LP. I noticed that she was still playing Alone in the Dark, and I commented in Viddler for a while until I realized that there was a forum thread where I could comment less obnoxiously. I paid for the account, followed a couple of threads, and finally decided I wanted to do something myself. I posted a test video for the first Legend of Kyrandia game in the Sandcastle where I got absolutely every possible aspect wrong, and in light of the feedback pointing out that there was already an LP of the entire series, I decided to make my start with a game that hadn't been done yet, which was a much easier prospect back then. Gobliiins: My first game didn't have a lot of talking, and it had a ton of silly stuff to do, so I poked around a lot and spent most of my time describing what I was up to. I think I found a good style right off the bat - pretending that I was solving the puzzles in real time, talking through the process of reaching those solutions step by step and showing the game's logic as it was meant to be experienced. I was doing everything as simply as possible, though, which wasn't always simple. The audio in particular was a mess, because I was using an early version of DOSBox that didn't capture the Redbook CD audio. Fortunately, the laptop I was using was old enough to have the hardware necessary to play the audio, and I could use Audacity to record it while I played. The recordings didn't quite synch up, so I had to edit the audio in post to make it align with the video. That was all the editing I did - I wouldn't learn how to speed up the boring parts until some time later, opting instead to cover them in musical gags in the style of The Spoony One's reviews. I had a disturbing tendency back then to pick up humor from whatever I found funny and use that style of humor myself. People rightly pointed out that it wasn't particularly funny, and starting with the next LP, I made sure to edit the parts that needed it. Gobliins 2: There was a lot more talking in this one, so I had long periods where I didn't have to say anything. The audio was still as painful as it had ever been, especially since there were a lot more transitions between the music and the talking, so I had to do a lot more trimming. But I made a few meme jokes (including a "telepor" when I skillfully edited out a save and some Yakety Sax over a few sped-up parts), and I had a really great moment at the end when I put a lot of work into a single gag - I recorded some footage from the first Kyrandia and edited it with sound from the Gobliins 2 CD, which I think was pretty good for a first effort and doing the whole thing in VDub and Audacity. I want to return to the Gobliiins series someday and do a better job, including the entire series, but I want to recreate that gag as closely as I can. I never made the final bonus video for this LP because the effort involved in doing the CD audio was too much for me, and if I cared about preserving my early work, this would bother me. At least I completed the game itself. Alone in the Dark 3: I started this one while I was still doing Gobliins 2, and for a few weeks, I was doing three videos a week. It's an interesting contrast, since nowadays, I barely manage two a week if I push it. AITD3 was something I took up because Malorie didn't want to continue the series when she finished 2. 3 was my favorite game of the series, and I had the means and equipment to record it, so I figured, why not pick up where she'd left off? She used subtitles, so I used subtitles - I'd learned to use Aegisub to make a credit video for Gobliiins, so the only difficult part was getting the timing right. For a while, I made them frame-perfect, but after a while, I started rounding to the nearest second to save myself some effort. The audio on the CD was also separated by track, so it was a lot easier to rip the CD and lay out the audio manually in Audacity, which is why the LP doesn't match the sound of the actual game in a few parts. The thread had more participation than I was used to, since I had an established audience from the earlier LPs in the series, and I went out of my way looking for interesting things to do, like doing the fights in more challenging ways or editing together long failure reels with music that would never survive on Youtube. This is the first LP I did that's still around in any form, and the videos were low-quality enough before going through Viddler's processing. I don't think the originals of any of the above LPs still exist. Buy some extra hard drives or online space and save your videos, because you never know when you'll want to see them again. King's Quest: Mask of Eternity: I stopped doing LPs for a while, and was watching Frankomatic's King's Quest series LP. Early on, I commented on some things he'd missed and offered to do some bonus videos highlighting those things. I still have them all, but I think Youtube would have issues with some of the soundtrack, so I haven't uploaded them anywhere. Frankomatic either couldn't or didn't want to continue to Mask of Eternity, and again, I had a copy and found a way to record it, so I took on probably my worst decision - a semi-blind LP based entirely on the fact that I'd beaten the game when I was in college. I did live commentary, minor editing (I didn't even start cutting out the save and load screens until about halfway through), and spent way too much time in a couple of areas just because I'd missed an obvious detail somewhere and didn't have the chops at the time to record more footage than I needed and edit later. (Literally - I was using Camstudio, which could only record up to 2GB of video in a file without corrupting the entire thing.) I accidentally created a running gag where I'd play a bit of a different game every few videos or so and pretend it was a recap of the last video, so at least there was some entertainment value. The real reward for this tedious LP was that I encountered a bug in the game that required me to replay a portion of it, and I decided to try to make a music video out of it. VDub didn't have the capacity to reverse video footage, so I finally bit the bullet and learned Avisynth. I've used it for everything I've ever done since, because it provides a way to reconstruct a video from the raw footage, whereas I had to do all of my VDub editing in one go and export it. I said it earlier, but the bonus video I did after completing the game is probably the best LP thing I've ever done, and it never would have been possible without Avisynth. (Especially grabbing an animated sprite from the game, erasing part of an animation, and replacing it with the sprite. I'm very proud of that.) I gave up on live commentary, though, because while people seem to have enjoyed it, I think I'm terrible at it and depend heavily on the ability to re-record if I don't like what I've said. I don't even like to stream without someone else in the Skype call. Toonstruck: I wanted to follow one of the worst games I'd ever played with one of the best, and another one that not many people were familiar with. It was a pretty straightforward LP, except when someone reminded me that Christopher Lloyd was Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I wanted to end with a gag where I dubbed his lines from that movie over scenes from Toonstruck, but since all of the voice actors in that game had a lot of other credits, I expanded it to cover as many of them as possible, including a callback to the Mask of Eternity bonus video that didn't really make a whole lot of sense. It was one of those games that LPed itself, and those are my favorites. Lost in Time: I went one version of DOSBox too late, and while it finally recorded the CD audio inline with the video, the recording would cause the entire program to slow to a crawl after a few minutes. I'd have to quickly end the recording and start a new one, then splice them together in post, several times per video. I wasn't entirely fond of the last half of the game or so, but it was mercifully short and laying out the convoluted timeline in the thread gave me something to do. I didn't do anything fancy with it, and it filled a gap until I could figure out what else I could do to follow up Mask of Eternity. Space Quest: I think most of the other major Sierra series either had been covered or were being covered, but Space Quest was just a SSLP from long ago, so I figured I'd do videos for the entire series. This was the first time people commented on my video quality and size, but I don't know whether that was the forum's standards rising or just having enough of an audience to include people who cared about that sort of thing. I even got my first heckler, which I think is how you know you've hit the big time. I learned some Avisynth shortcuts that I still use today and developed a few custom filters, like one to mimic fast-forwarding a VHS tape. It was a long and involved project, but I had fun with it, beginning to end. The only downside is that I still leaned pretty heavily on meme humor, so it can be hard to watch parts of it today. Be careful when choosing between the latest humor techniques and the longevity of your LP. Rayman: I did this one while doing Lost in Time and Space Quest, because I assumed it would take me a long time to beat the later levels of the game and I needed something to do so I'd have updates to post between videos. I very quickly discovered that I didn't have nearly enough to say about the game, so I brought in guests for each video, and I think that's pretty essential for games that don't have a story or much gameplay variety. It was twice as much work doing both solo and guest videos, and that's probably what I'd do for platformers in the future. I needed to vet my guests better, though, since one or two of them didn't have the necessary equipment to record the audio and I had to do some complicated editing to make the audio work. I'm pretty sure I'd never be able to handle the freestyle group commentary style of some of the LP groups who post here, though, which means having a steady set of co-commentators probably won't work for me. I don't think my life is interesting enough to carry that for more than a few videos. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within: I'd been wanting to do this for a long time, even to the point of doing a test video of the PS2 version and buying the PC version in case I could find a way to record that. I finally got the PS3 version and the Hauppauge HD-PVR and made it work. I didn't have much to say about the platforming, but I didn't really need to. I probably didn't edit as much as I should have, but this was the LP where I switched to Youtube (first as an alternate host, then as the only host when Blip shut down my account), and it remains my most-watched and most-commented on - as in I still get comments on it to this day, generally incomprehensible mishmashes of what looks like English only because it uses the same alphabet or people asking questions about the videos but having replies turned off so I can't answer them. It was good to do something different and to fill the gap in the other Prince of Persia LPs, and I'd like to LP Sands of Time and maybe even The Two Thrones someday. It's just more effort to keep the videos entertaining. Between Rayman and this game, I've learned that my commentary really isn't suited to gameplay-heavy games, but I can fake it for long enough to make it work. Flight of the Amazon Queen: Another game that I'd tried and failed to LP previously, finally working out for me. Lots of humor and dialogue, practically LPed itself, nothing much to say about it except that I probably should have contacted John Passfield a bit more and tried harder to get him to do guest commentary. I recorded a bonus video of the game's demo and the plan was to talk to him about the game and his other work with that as the background, but it never happened. Commitments from prospective guests and definite schedules are handy. Torin's Passage: An adventure game with some horribly dull parts that I could cram into single videos, and some fun parts I was able to take my time on. The big lesson here was perseverance, since I managed to find a long-lost Easter egg in the game by throwing myself at it way too many times, giving up, then spotting something I'd never seen before at that exact moment. So always give up when something gets too hard, because that's the path to success. Folklore: Forget what I said earlier about perseverance - THIS was the epic interminable LP that took about two years from the first test recording to completion, but I loved the entire thing, including the tedious parts. If you love what you're doing enough, there's no such thing as too much effort. I owe a lot to my guests, though, since the main motivation for doing the LP at all was the chance to learn about the myths it was based on, and I certainly did that. I managed a few musical gags and jokes here and there, just to keep things lively, and it was a good balance. There's a leap in quality from start to end, but not as big as you might expect, I think. I bought a click removal program to help me manage my audio a bit more automatically, and I think that's really the only noticeable difference. Fable: A little side project I took on for the Bad Games thread while I was still doing Folklore. I don't think everyone was convinced that it was as bad a game as I claimed, but it definitely deserved to be in that thread. Even a loathsome game can make a good LP if it's short, and it was kind of interesting to dig into the optional plot of the game. I think the best LPs are of games you either really love or really hate - as often as not, you'll probably reach the opposite opinion by the end. Altered Destiny: Another quick side project I did for the 2007 thread while bronchitis prevented me from working on Folklore for a week or so. It was nice not needing to do the heavy audio editing I'd been doing and just post videos quickly. Low-effort LPs are fun to do every once in a while just to keep you active without burning out. And somehow, I'm still going. If anyone bothered to read all of that, I'm sorry I kept you from LPs for that long. Go watch something fun.
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May 25, 2015 23:30
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