Sometimes Let’s Plays go badly. Your PC dies, your console dies, your saves are lost, your footage didn’t record, your audio is all garbled or your videos got content ID’d by some random account and now you’re without a channel.
As a sort of vent and to also give newcomers an idea of how things can go horribly wrong outside of your control, let’s share some horror stories.
My biggest catastrophe was a Dark Souls LP. It was bad enough that we lost 5 hours worth of audio (we were gonna do post commentary over the footage to fix that), but we were also playing when the game transitioned from GFWL to Steamworks. It introduced some new bugs, including this elevator which destroyed all desire for us to play the game further.
My big LPtastrophy was our attempt to play through Amnesia: Justine. Not only is the audio AND video terrible (this was before I knew what ‘bitrate’ meant), but the game quits to windows when you die. Well, I managed to die on literally the last monster, and when I restarted the game OBS decided to lose focus and record nothing but black.
Original Yakuza 2 LP died because my backwards-compatible PS3 died Lemme tell ya, getting my Revengeance disk out of that metal clam was a fuckin’ trip.
Still got got a bunch of raw footage from that on an external drive somewhere!
My LP’s from quite a years back(Like 11 or 12?) of Kotor 1 and 2(Before I knew what LP really was) when the games just kept dying and destroying my PC and I had to give up because I couldn’t run the games anymore about halfway through them both.
I played through Yesterday using a gimmick: Every time I’d get someone new to solve the puzzles. I thought it’d be cool to see how different people solve puzzles. Anyway, before recording each and every guest confessed that they hadn’t watched any of the other videos.
I want to clarify that I’m not pissy that my videos weren’t a smash hit within my circle of friends or that any individual wasn’t a fan on my videos. It’s just discouraging when they all tell you that they don’t watch your stuff one after another.
The whole thing was a technical mess too. One episode only had my guest’s audio because my mic was partially unplugged. Just enough that we could talk to each other but not enough to capture my audio.
Legend of Zelda Randomizer and Famicom DIsk System games
Zelda crashed because as it turns out I was wrong and replaying Legend of Zelda 1 over and over does gets tiresome.
Famicom Disk System crashed because I then realized that my nostalgia I had as a teen lied to me and I didn’t love the games as much as I thought I did.
Did not help that the video software I was using was a pain in the royal ass to use.
I basically sucked at LPs until I became buds with ChipCheezum, who really helped my tech set-up. Look at how FUCKING HIDEOUS looking/sounding my first LP is, holy fuck. It was made in iMovie and I literally just encoded it randomly to see what looked less like shit every time. A trainwreck that I truly cannot believe anyone watched!
Why did I make some of the episodes so fucking short I don’t even know why I did that.
And I should have never even posted the Blind Run of Shattered Memories, it’s practically incomprehensible, it looks like such total trash.
Was that program somehow worse than Windows Movie Maker? That+Fraps is what I originally used and oh god the horrors of WMM.
Oh I remember an LP I finished but totally fucked up the ending of because of audio issues. Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast. A game I love to death, and it was so simple I accidentally set my mic to the wrong thing and the last few episodes were just the gameplay audio without me talking. Which was probably an improvement because I was an annoying little dork back then lol.
I dunno man, I thought that run was pretty hilarious. That game is the perfect level of jank for a blind playthough, I think, because so much wacky shit is happening constantly.
Edit: Also I have to confirm that iMovie is nothing compared to the horrors of WMM. I dropped that program like a bad habit when I first started making these videos.
While I’m no stranger to leaving LPs to wither and die on the vine, I have three spectacular failures that come to mind.
The first was my first attempt at a video LP, Deus Ex: Invisible War. The LP itself was a fine attempt, if probably a bit dry to listen to. The problem came when each video was 200-300MB, and I was trying to upload them on a connection that got 12KB/s upstream. Don’t try to upload 20 minute videos on a connection that can be measured in kilobytes per second. It takes most of a day.
The second was halfway through the second thread of my .hack LP. My external hard drive had decided to give up the ghost and die just a few days before Christmas of I wanna say 2013. Unfortunately, I had previously recorded all of the game I was playing through and all of those recordings were on my external hard drive. So I was left in the middle of a 40 hour JRPG series with no footage, and the last backup save I had was some 8 hours prior. At the best of times, the .hack series can be gently described as “grindy” with “terrible controls” so the prospect of replaying a bunch of game to get back to where I could start recording again was not one I wanted to face down.
Finally the last complete failure was a short Mario is Missing series I did very early last year. I didn’t have any technical problems with it, just absolutely nobody was watching it. The first video got maybe 50 views, and the second half that. I don’t want to claim I’m doing this hobby for views on a youtube video, but it is pretty disheartening to pour hours of your life into something to get such a tepid response.
Pokemon White crashed a little because my computer couldn’t handle DS emulation that well and lagged like a mofo, a little because my workflow for getting screenshots and transcribing dialogue was bad, and mostly because of depression completely sapping my motivation at all times.
I did have the save still so I at least beat the final boss, as a bonus update years later.
The only one I had bomb so far was Zelda: Parallel Worlds, because I made the mistake of trying to LP it before finishing the game. I soon realised that if I did an LP of it, I would need to do a lot of planning and practice, and I got burnt out on it pretty quickly. And this was with the update that supposedly made the game easier.
Shadowrun Dragonfall had a whole lot of text to transcribe, and at the time no one had dumped it all. So I got really exhausted retyping all the dialogue and gave up.
Not an LP, but my Twitch recording of about 2 hours of a Lost Kingdoms stream got corrupted, so it wouldn’t port over in full to YouTube, downloading it just gave me audio and a black screen, and when I transfered it in chunks I discovered that the audio was desynced by a good five to eight minutes for no obvious reason.
I still don’t know why it broke like that. Video games!
I mastered Chantelise, (a bad game with actually likable action elements), with the intent making an LP for it.
Sent it to the Sandcastle.
They said it was bad.
I redid it and sent it to the Sandcastle.
Same thing.
I redid it again.
… This time I overlapped two of my own post recordings, cutting out the track that was less interesting imo, when they overlapped too much. Plus I added… a really dumb opening…
I still cringe when I see this video.
It turns out it’s actually really hard to do all the post commentary by yourself for a 30 minute video in one or even two go’s.
Although, I would experiment with the idea of doing commentary along-side another track of myself. (Definitely not how I did it here, because then you just get twice as much bad commentary.)
Honestly, this is the main thing that made me give up on (classic) video style LP’s in general.
It’s just really hard to make a 30 min. video by myself, that someone wants to invest the time to watch, with a game that the audience doesn’t already like or have a prior interest in.
Also, more importantly, getting a co-commentator for any video LP with audio commentary is WAYYYY better than trying to go it solo.
I just yesterday finished binge-watching your SH:O LP and it had a certain charm to it! You have definitely improved, but it wasn’t unwatchable or anything.
MoominBiscuit and I did a Let’s Play of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Video Game Of The Movie Of The Comic Book Series. We were joined by our friend PlasticBertram and my housemate Chris. We played through and recorded the whole game in one sitting, as the four main playable characters
To prep for this LP, Chris and I played through the game multiple times by ourselves to farm money that we could share with the other players so we could upgrade our characters in between levels and get through the game in one sitting without having to grind on-camera.
The whole process took a long-ass time but it turned out really well. It was a good LP and I’m really proud of it except that some weird shit happened when Mooms tried to edit it like the audio had been recorded at a different speed than the video somehow and it made all of the footage completely 100% unusable and that was the official end of my Let’s Play career and now I hate video games.
I spent a good month working on a Bleed LP before I just suddenly realised my commentary was awful to listen to. Like, I was fine with it, then suddenly, hated every minute.
Lemme tell ya, getting my Revengeance disk out of that metal clam was a fuckin’ trip.