Let's Play / Master Classes Archive

Woah, wait. Princess Maker 2 is "Most Wanted"? Do you need someone to do that one? I know I'm more of a lurker, but I played that ton back in high school and I've wanted to try my hand at some sort of a let's play for a while. Anyway, I think it would pretty amusing to see how a girl raised by a message board turns out.

I will pay you $500 in Talking Time Fun Bucks* to make this happen.

*Actual retail value: -$15.00.

As long as our Resident Paedophile isn't on board, I'm down.

Spoilers: Gon joins her party. Hooray!!

In my search for PM2 I found the website of somebody attempting to translate either PM3 or PM4 (I forget which). Oh how I wish to play those games... There's even a PM5 now! @_@

*sigh* I loaned out my Petite Princess Yucie. I need to get that back sometime...

I know I've got a burned copy of PM2 sitting around somewhere, do you want me to send it to you?

I found a copy, the trouble is figuring out how to run it.

I'm not sure if this would help, but when I tried out PM2 years ago, I used DOSBox and had no troubles playing at all. All I had to do was start DOSBox and run the appropriate game file.

I only played for five or ten minutes, mind you, but the game ran fine.

Oh, great! Princess Maker 2 was indeed in demand! I'll try to get myself in order on that tech-wise and get a spot in line once I feel that I know what the hell I'm doing.

Princess Maker 2 had been working on my windows computer with no fuss on my part. I found it wasn't a good set up for screenshots, so I grabbed DOS-Box with a kind to novices interface add on. It seems to be working fine. However, I heard DOS-Box can't do save states. That might make things tricky in some parts, so I'll have to think of a good compromise.

Well, the fearless leader has begun a Mario RPG Fun Club, so I suppose that puts the kibosh on a Mario RPG LP for the moment. I suppose it's better that he went ahead and announced it before I actually started working on it...

That means I have to pick a new game, I suppose. I wonder how Gamecube emulation is coming along?

I'm not exactly sure what the policy is for "Fun Club vs. Let's Play", but I think the only restriction on this is that a LP can't be done while a FC is still running. So you could still do SMRPG if you want a while after the FC ends, if you want; people will probably still be reading for the running commentary, and having the FC first might actually help draw people to your LP instead of hurting it, as people will be refamiliarized with the game from it.

Though if you want to switch anyway, then maybe this will help?

I may just wait. There aren't any open slots in the near future anyway, are there?

There are, though October 12th is the only spot that's completely open. Still, you've got options, at least - feel free to pick whenever you want to start.

What game were you thinking of doing for GC, Tanto?

Anyone remember Soul Blazer? Anyone interested in seeing an LP of it?

It was on the short list of games I was thinking about, but even my "short list" will carry me for the next year or so.

The message of this post is "hey it would be cool if someone went and did Soul Blazer because Brick likes it and was thinking about it himself" and not "none you bitches better touch Soul Blazer or I'm gonna cut you".

No, seriously, run with it, it'll be great.

It was one I considered before instead going with something overly ambitious instead. I say go for it and be sure to mock the talking dancing tulips thoroughly.

Okay, why not. I'll reserve that.

And do us all a favour, if I ask to reserve another completely unrelated game, feel free to tell me to shut up. Even I've noticed that I've gone from Half-Life expansion packs to Advance Wars to Half-Life 2 to Soul Blazer now and I need to stop being so jumpy.

So, yeah. And thanks for the support.

As long as you intend to actually finish them you can reserve every goddamn game you own for all I care.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Sure, I could do the original, but I know (not to mention like) the sequel much better. I actually own TTYD, whereas most of what I know about the original comes from a series of rentals and borrowings, which aren't the best of conditions for really sinking your teeth into a game.

I might also do Skies of Arcadia someday, but not in the near future.

I've got my next game in mind but it's kind of unconventional, since I intend to use reader participation in an unprecidented way (well, for TT at least).

Here's my idea: RHEM.

RHEM is a Myst clone. Obviously it has very little replay value since it's a pure point'n'click puzzle game, and I've already got all the solutions. However, I could do an LP and post all the pertinent clues and let the readers puzzle out the game on their own. It really would be a "Let Us Play".

The problem: if the thread doesn't get many responses, it would fizzle out and die. And I don't know that I want to do the game in a "here's the next puzzle, here's the answer" fashion. I'd like to see some discussion, see people bouncing ideas around, working clues together and asking questions.

I want to put your brains to work.

If this is a good idea, I'll go ahead and call oh I don't know beginning of December. Okay?

I think it's a brilliant idea. Audience participation's a bit of a worry, but you've already built a solid reputation with your Final Fantasy and Suikoden LPs that you might get enough readers from the get-go to carry you through. I say go for it.

A friend of mine tried to get me to play through Riven with him last December. Several hours later, I was ready to kill a guy.

True fact: Riven is a multiplayer game. I spent several hours playing the Wark game (the one that teaches you how to write the numbers) with friends.

Just in case anyone was wondering the limit on Photobucket photo albums is 2500 pictures. I surpassed this barrier and had to create a second one for my Shiny Gold LP.

Er.. are you uploading every screenshot you take?

PROTIP: Do your sorting BEFORE uploading!

PROTIP: Merge screenshots that will be right next to each other when posted!

It keeps the 10-image-per-post limit from screwing with you too.

If I had to guess I'd say I probably used 60% of the shots I took for my LP this time around. I would merge them, but when it takes ~2 hours to do some of the write-ups as it is I didn't feel like taking the extra time. Since the files were all numbered sequentially I didn't have to do any kind of special sorting.

What? No, don't - it's much faster, easier, and better to upload them all together, because:

1] You don't have to worry about deleting an image you might need. This isn't that big a deal if you're screencapping every single thing, but if you're trying to be frugal to begin with, the extra security is nice to have.

2] You can view the images as a group as opposed to one at a time. This makes it much easier when trying to organize and outline your update, as you can get a good image of how an update will turn out and plan around it. This is especially helpful if you're transcribing text or are doing an RPG and need to keep track of what happens when if you're writing the update over the course of a few days.

3] It's much faster. Honestly, it takes far less time to upload all of the screenshots than to pick through them and delete the ones you don't think you'll need. You can cut out a significant portion of your development time with your LP by forgoing this step, because it's ultimately uneccessary; if you don't need an image, it simply won't be used.

Seriously, don't bother with the pre-org - speaking from experience, it's an unnecessary step that'll just slow you down and make you significantly more frustrated.

I have to sort before uploading because I don't know how much storage and bandwidth my webhost will let me get away with sucking up, but I certainly don't want to push the envelope by uploading three times as many screenshots as I'm going to use. =)

My process is actually pretty damn archaic: I actually load up an image viewer and flip through them, jotting down the numbers I need as I go. Then I go through a second time and delete the ones I don't need. Then I go through a third time to break them into blocks of ten (because of the image-per-post limit) and then a fourth time as I write the update. After that I upload them all at once using the same oldschool FTP software I've been using since 1997.

*shrug* I guess if half of my screenshots weren't blurry/choppy, too dark, and larger than I want I might do it that way. I do set the screenshot folder to display thumbnails though so the mass viewing issue really isn't.

Reel: huh, differing approaches I guess!

I've run into stalls with photobucket uploads more than once, which necessitates restarting the upload. To top that off, freebie account photobucket only allows you to upload 50 images at a time. Doing batch uploads of 200-300 images a day would not have been funtimes.

I also like to make sure I know exactly how many images I'm going to be using. If my "update 5" folder has 30 images, I know that's 3-4 posts, and I can see how I'm going to split them up and what text to write, et cetera. If I uploaded the whole raw batch I'd probably spiral to 10 posts an update. =p