Let's Play / Master Classes Archive

Of course now you're obligated to write a DROD article for Gamespite. =)

Also I uploaded the last video of my kooky Mega Man 3 LP to the yubbatubes. Here's a link to the playlist. It's about an hour long so make popcorn.

Out of curiosity, will you be doing all three difficulty paths? And you're totally gonna show off the black holes and the secret "ending", right?

But of course! (In fact, I just finished route 2 right now - at this rate, I'll have the entire thing screencapped and ready to be written in an hour or so.)

Awesome! Can't wait.

Knowing almost nothing about it, except for it seemingly being considered to be of poor quality, but possessing a cavalier spirit that knows no bounds, I might be willing to do that when I (finally) finish SO2, this would likely put the LP somewhere in the neighborhood of a year from now, that soon enough? If not, I might be able to make time for it earlier if you particularly care about seeing it done and/or done fast.

Dude, WTF? Video 18/19 isn't available.

Man my friend told me it was busted last night, so I looked at it myself and it worked. Maybe there's some crazy checkbox or something on my youtube page that isn't working.

Anyway I'll spoil it for you: I fight Wily and kill him but it's not really Wily after all.

Oh bugger, I forgot about that. I should go watch that sometime.

All righty, I've finished screenshotting, uploading and outlining my Star Fox LP, so I'm ready to start posting at anytime. However, since some people seem to be overwhelmed (which I honestly don't see, but whatever), I'll hold off until, say... maybe September 21st? A lot of the currently-running LPs should have finished up or close to it by then (around five, by my count), and it's a small LP, so it shouldn't be too cluttered then.

The problem seems to be that the Talking Time user base is dead set on writing up nothing but role playing games. Serious props to Alixsar for nearing the end of Ogre Battle 64 (a loooong game!), but most of them seem to fizzle out before finishing. If I ever get around to doing a LP, you can be damn sure that it'll be for a game whose playtime (in hours) is in the single digits.

Meanie! (sticks out tongue)

This is going to sound incredibly stupid, but the point you made with your edit hadn't occurred to me at all. Actually, that doesn't just sound incredibly stupid, it is, der. So yes, I'll write it up.

Since someone else ended up going on Aug. 17th, I'll go September 28th since no one's claimed that yet.

Hmm okay hey guys I finally got a decent recording rig set up on my lady fan's Vista box, so I can record video LPs in real time (rather than recording the video first and then narrating over it, which sounded like I was reading cue cards, which was because I effectively was, except instead of cue cards it was a file called lpmm3.txt). I did a short experimental playthrough of some game last night and it worked pretty well, and I don't think I'll stop doing them anytime soon.

So... what's the etiquette here? Does anyone mind if I were to create a new topic tonight to keep my tyrant homies updated on my video shenanigans? Or is anyone else thinking of doing a video-style LP and maybe we could just have a master video topic? Or does nobodoy want to hear about it? I NEED GUIDANCE.

I like the idea of a master Video Let's Play thread. The posts don't need to be much more than "Hey guys I posted more of [game] at [link]!" after all.

I hate my voice too much to attempt a VLP. :/

I would personally favor a system where every game you VLP gets its own thread. It would make discussions about said VLPs less confusing. And I do think such discussions should be held here. YouTube comments are for masses far more unwashed than us.

You do have a point there...

At least label them with [VLP] at the beginning of the thread title or something. I doubt I'm the only one who reads this board from work where streaming video is banned.

If you're going to narrate live, you're going to have to be on the ball all the time. Almost all video LPs are made insufferable by players half-heartedly trying to mumble something interesting over an abundance of dead air.

Considering how well your MM3 LP turned out, I think that format is worth sticking with.

I've considered doing Video LPs as well, when I get back into broadband territory. And I really would like to have seperate threads, mainly for the discussion it offers. Though it might be worth testing the waters to see if discussion really happens first.

Separate threads get my vote. Though I say stick with the postplay-recording if you can, since you can make notes and practice your lines a bit to help improve and perfect it, which you can't do when you're recording live and have little room for error.

I dunno, I think the test vid I did last night came out pretty good. I choked on a few sentences but that's to be expected when doing anything live for the first time. There's no rule that says I have to do all one thing or all the other though, so maybe I'll take each new project on a case-by-base basis.

I'd also like to make it clear that I have no intention of stopping the regular screenshot LPs, but those are more lengthy once-in-a-while things. Some games lend themselves better to one thing than the other. (Seriously, could you stand to watch a 64-part Suikoden VLP?)

I don't know the logistics of doing one but if you can record the game audio and your commentary seperately you could piece together the good live stuff and rerecorded stuff over the game audio into one fabulous video lp.

The Luca Blight battle in 2 would be entertaining. Because it never freaking ends! Or some of Star Ocean 2 where the player is begging the enemies to stop hitting Opera because of her horrible banshee screams.

Edit: Just to be clear: I don't mention Suiko2 because I'm under the impression you're going to LP Suiko2, rather because it's just the Suikoden I think of first when Suikodens are mentioned.

There's a line between what's possible and what I'm willing to do. The MM3 vids involved recording the .avi from the emulator, loading them into some video editing software and increasing the speed (since, even played at 150% speed, the emulator recorded them at 100%), then watching them and taking notes, then scripting each section of the video as it came, re-recording until it sounded right. In other words, a lot of work.

The "live" method involves a fire-and-forget screen capture program which gets the video and audio at the same time.

Capturing video and live audio simultaneously but separately has proven to be impossible so far, but maybe there's an option for it if I really want to do it that way. I know if I ever do it that way I won't be able to use any built-in record function in the emulator, since it drops lag frames and will cause the audio to desynch pretty quickly.

Ugh... this is all stuff I've tested and re-tested and tweaked and troubleshot over the course of the past few days. The hardest part was getting Vista to let me enable the Stereo Mix, but that's another story entirely.

Hmm... I hadn't thought that, but it would be entertaining to just do like a "best of" compilation of an otherwise too-long game. Nobody wants to watch a 90-part Suikoden 2 series, but I could watch a three-part series of, say, Luca Blight, a tour of the castle, and as many Hai Yo minigames as can be squeezed inside of ten minutes.

I've finally gotten my technical issues out of the way and I'm planning on supplementing my LP with some videos. RPGs are almost universally unsuited for video simply because of random battles, but there's no reason not to have videos of the more important bits. The next LP I've had on my mind after that will be all video, but I won't get ahead of myself there. =p

Also, here's a great idea for anyone who wants to do a video LP (because their game is more suited for video) but doesn't like the sound of their voice: subtitles. Two of my favorite LPs (Siren and Siren 2) use subtitles exclusively, which do an excellent job of maintaining the (very creepy and tense) atmosphere of the games while remaining informative. Those are examples of LPs that work better because they don't have any voice. Subtitles, I believe, also have the advantage of allowing for a little more "silence" than voice.

This is an excellent point, ESPECIALLY considering that Youtube lets you add these in after the video is published, pop-up-video style. I haven't used them myself, but I have seen them used to great effect.

If anyone's interested, I'm blogging my experience playing Morrowind. It's not a LP/MC because it's really time consuming to make the posts and I don't want to be on a schedule when other people have the ability to be consistent.

Cool, I'll be keeping up with that.

So I guess my Shiny Gold LP has slight notoriety over on the hacker's message board of choice (look for the reply to the member Ramengan near the bottom of the post).

I'll admit to neglecting this corner of the forum lately, so I guess it's my fault for not noticing until now, but I just checked the Let's Play queue, and September's all booked up. D: I said I'd do Metroid II in September to line up with Metroid Replay Month! (I've really got to get around to putting up the website to promote that...) I'm playing it in September, LP or not. ...of course, it's not like Metroid II is big on audience participation, so I can play and post it later, but still. It'd be a decent VLP if I didn't think my voice sucked in recordings and my computer didn't suck.

I finally finished Brickroad's MM3 video Let's Play. You should stick to your method of doing that one. They were awesome.

Weeelll... I could move mine ahead to October and let you take my spot, if you want. I'm already in progress with another LP at the moment and it might be more kosher anyway if I finish it up before posting my next LP thread.

That would work. It's a little late in the month, but reworking the schedule any more would probably be annoying and I'm happy to get whatever slot I can get. Thank you. (I'll just play a Prime game in between Zero Mission and Super instead or something... pairing up Metroid II and Metroid Fusion might work better anyway)