Does he still have the footage? I’ve ran across that issue before and I think I know how to fix it.
I may be about to go through an LP bombing right now as it turns out. For some reason Rainbow Six Siege is super quiet to me though a friend said it sounded fine to her. And I’m editing on a PS4 so oh god.
I’ve had a lot of failures, most of which have never seen the light of day because they happened once I had enough judgment not to think they were worth posting. I hope nobody here remembers my first attempt at commentary over the first Kyrandia game. I think I’d been watching too many annoying Youtube LPs at the time and wanted to emulate the comedy style. My first Gobliiins series LP was of better quality, but I’m still glad it’s mostly lost to the ages and I’m currently remaking it. It died at the end of the second game because I was recording the CD audio separately and syncing it manually in post, and I didn’t have the drive to do a bonus video that way. I did the same thing with Alone in the Dark 3, and those videos are mostly still around, but in such poor quality that I don’t intend to repost them. The subtitles are barely legible. I had huge issues with King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, including a hard limit on the length of video I could record at once, and the computer crashed near the end of a video, destroying both the footage and my progress. I’ve had to upgrade computers and software a few times, and there are always some hurdles to overcome - I stepped on the PC’s power cord and the Windows folder ate itself, requiring a full reinstall that somehow messed with the memory settings while I was finishing the editing on one of the most editing-intensive videos I’ve ever done. That was the first time I had to export a video unencoded, because it was all the computer could handle, and then encode the result in a single step. The good news is that I didn’t lose anything. There were technical difficulties the first time I tried to use Voicemeeter Banana to record a live stream, and those are actually still part of the unedited video that’s online.
After all that, I still love doing LPs, but I think you really have to love the process as much as (if not more than) the games to do it. Otherwise, you’re really better off just playing the games and enjoying them.
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This sounds very similar to issues I’ve ran into in some of my LPs, either because the video recording drops a few frames (on emulator, probably to eliminate slight lagging, caused separate commentary track to be desynced), or because the recorded footage is encoded in variable framerate (in the case of my Walking Dead LP which was recorded using ShadowPlay, the audio track for the game itself started out okay but by the end of the footage it would be delayed by a few seconds).
My usual solution to this was to manually resync the audio by cutting some of the commentary dead air every time the desync became too noticable. This only works if you record gameplay+game audio and commentary track separately, though. If the audio track on the video itself is the problem, I think re-encoding the video at a fixed framerate using Handbrake (or similar programs) could work?
Eh, I don’t know, if @bob may have a solution you should listen to him instead, he knows his shit. And sorry if this post seems a bit poorly written, I’m writing this on a phone.
I got cancer and that’s why Yoshi’s Island will never be finished, lol. Really, by the time chemo was done I had a ton of catching up to do at school, then a big internship in the summer, then a Hell Semester, and by the time I got my head back above water it just felt like so much time had passed that I didn’t really have the drive to start it again
Basically when real life gets in the way for long enough, circumstances can change, and sometimes you just gotta to with that and let it be. I ended up doing some solo projects eventually, and I think they’ve turned out well
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It’s not a competition, Vicas. Jesus.
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I tried to do Necrovision. It’s a bad game that gets REALLY ANGRY if you start recording and I didn’t really know how to schedule co-commentary sessions. I’m glad I dropped that game like a bad habit.
Generally what ends up killing my LPs (at least 3 attempts at a modded Minecraft series, and one Cataclysm DDA runthrough) is just my brain psyching myself out, usually to the tune of “This is boring, nobody comments on your stuff so they must not like it.”
Stardew Valley is sort of the opposite problem. It’s interesting and a lot of fun, but I try to record 20-35 minute videos in part for the sake of upload and editing ease, but I end up finding myself wanting to play more and more, and I end up getting impatient and just straight-up playing it without recording. That game gets me hooked, man.
Sounds like you might enjoy streaming Stardew Valley rather than LPing it, then.
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I was doing an LP of Corpse Party: Blood Drive. Bought a PS TV for it and everything. And the computer with all my mugshots, updates, screenshots, etc. on it died. It only refuses to turn on so I’m sure the data is fine, but I have no means to get the data off the drives at the moment so it kind of ground to a screeching halt. Doesn’t help that the game is really bad and while I want to show it off, it doesn’t exactly motivate me to get my data back super fast.
One day I will finish the Corpse Party series. Just not right away.
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The only major one I had bomb on me was my The Darkness 2 LP. Everything was going great until I couldn’t get the co-op campaign filmed and lost a level or two of footage. That game is the special kind of awful where it has no multiple saves and no level select. I was also getting towards the end of the game.
Hope to pick it back up again soon!
I was playing through NEED FOR SPEED THE RUN and literally couldn’t beat a level. I spent four hours on it, then tried again on later days. Never got through. So I didn’t finish…
So I LP’d the Steam version of Pid. At the time I had only played through the game once and hadn’t gotten anywhere near all of the secret constellations, let alone all of the souvenirs. I ended up making the promise in the first video that I would totally do both of those throughout the LP. After recording a handful of levels I actually opened a guide and realised I’d missed some constellations. And Pid has neither a manual save option or a level select feature. This was my first experience with cloud saves in an LP, and I don’t remember the exact method I did end up having to use, but I do know that just making a copy of the save and transplanting it in made the game very unhappy. Unhappy like “gentle white autosave text in the corner becomes angry red gibberish” unhappy. Between trying to find a good way to get around that and playing through the entire game again, with the guide to make sure I knew where everything was and could get it all, before recording the next update, I ended up with about a seven month gap between updates, by which point the Hard Games Thread I’d originally posted it for was basically a ghost town.
For some reason I didn’t learn my lesson after that and still used the Steam version of Fez. That one was at least easier to revert saves on, but I also got very good at quickly running through my route in that game from a new save.
I remember that LP, and my hero Jack Rourke.
He is everybody’s hero.
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You can actually turn cloud saves off on Steam, if you want to (I’m not sure they were actually your issue?)
You’re actually right, none of my save-related issues have been because of cloud saves, it was just Steam saves, which, on both of those games, were harder to swap files on than the DRM-free versions. Not sure why I keep thinking of cloud saves.
I kind of regret leaving Dark Wizard to die on the vine after barely getting started, but I just kind of hit a wall of not having the energy to put into it, and it was already starting to look like a more labor-intensive LP than my previous one.
Yo. I’ve been doing this for five years now and yesterday I was playing a new game that made silly things happen when hitting different buttons on the keyboard. The last thing I said on the recording was: “I wonder what the function ke-”
before I hit my recording key and accidentally stopped my own recording midway through without realizing it like a dingus
I just love stories about technical difficulties in LP, because this stuff’s like trying to paint a painting while balancing plates on a stick.
At this point I’ve almost abandoned as many LP’s as I’ve finished. Luckily it’s never for technical problems, usually I get bored partway in (Knights of Pen and Paper, Sword of Mana), distracted by other things (Magical Melody), idiotically tried to LP multiple games at once and had to cut one (Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley), or simply tried to undertake a massive wall of effort that I clearly wasn’t eager to deal with (Phoenix Wright). This doesn’t include the numerous other attempts at various games that didn’t work out (though some I’ve tried multiple times, like FF6 and Paper Mario, did eventually see the light of day).
However, I don’t regret starting any of these because they’ve all been valuable learning experiences that helped me improve the LPs I did finish. Phoenix Wright got me to learn how to make GIFs, the various HM-likes made me learn to balance priorities, I learned how to balance improving my presentation with necessary effort in SoM, which I’ve incorporated into my current LP, and so on. Most importantly, if I’m not enjoying it, I’m not going to continue doing it. Life is too short to be miserable doing things, I’d rather move on to a game I enjoy covering.
So yeah, don’t be afraid to attempt something and fail, or attempt something and find out you don’t like it. It’s just more experience you can use to further improve and make stuff you enjoy doing even better.