yooo it feels SO GOOD to update an LP series midway through and then get to be like: here’s where we /were/ and then at the end be like here’s where we /are now/!
I see someone’s using FRAPS.
The first LP I tried to do was Mystic Heroes on the gamecube, a repetitive hack-n-slash style game that I like very much.
While visually, everything looked “alright”, the audio was a mess. I decided to do live commentary, since I didn’t even know post-commentary was an option, which was a huge mistake because the gamecube controller is very loud. It also didn’t help that I had to speak softly so that my pet bird wouldn’t hear me and attempt to join in on commentary.
I attempted to fix this by moving my entire set up to the basement, but unfortunately that still didn’t help with the issue of the gamecube controller’s loud-ass buttons. I ended up abandoning the LP when I got to the first boss and realized that I didn’t know how to actually beat it with the character I had chosen. I’m considering going back to it some day, but I don’t know when.
I’m still super unprofessional about the way I LP, but I havent ever abandoned one, so I’ve got that going for me.
I used to be pretty bad at this and now I just use it as an excuse to just joke about whatever on top of a videogame.
Stuff like NiGHTS into Dreams and the Steven Universe mobile game garnered alost no views and meanwhile someone at school recognized my voice from Cooking Mama so I mean, its weird.
I never had an LP fail, but then again, I only ever did two. (Well, three technically.) I had a few projects I made test posts for but I was never happy with them and they sputtered out. I don’t know if failing before making a thread is better or worse.
And then suddenly you realize that your last thread was six years ago.
There is one project that I still want to do, to complete the trilogy. Maybe some day.
I’ve only tried to LP twice, and they were both I want to say in 2009 or so. It had to be a long time ago, because I think my primary mirrors were Viddler and Google Video, ha.
Attempt #1 never made it out of the sandcastle, fortunately. I really loved (and still do, depending on how the emulation for it is I may re-attempt this One Day ™) Lost Kingdoms II, top tier Gamecube title for me and very underappreciated. I was excited when I realized that my family’s computer inexplicably had a capture card…From 2001. It could only record in 480i, which I realize now, but at the time I had no idea why the video looked like trash, and there was no way to fix it! 17 year old me was sad, but the project did not progress past that.
Next, I gave Vectorman 2 a shot, because I love relatively unknown sequels to relatively unknown games. This one got past the Sandcastle, windows movie maker and all, and I even got about 2/3 of the way through the game before I burnt out. The commentary was not great (I was 17, still), the quality was…not good, and honestly the game isn’t that interesting by itself. I recall a lot of the problem being that I got to the point I would get to as a child and then stop, so I didn’t really know much about the rest of the game, which makes talking about it kinda hard!
Oh well, I haven’t tried once in the 8 years that follow. However, I did recently got into speedrunning, which in a bizarre way is making me think about trying a let’s play again. Weird how that works.
Illusion of Gaia…oh boy Illusion of gaia
this was my first LP, that I started in 2011 and didn’t actually finish until…oh…2016
This one is a long’un, so I hid it under details:
[details=Summary]So here I am, fresh and eager to get into things. I’ve read a few threads, I watched a ton of RP videos, I was determined to do it right dammit. Avoid the pitfalls. Avoid emulators and savestates, avoid tons of dead air, avoid WMM and facecams, get the software and editing tools recommended, and do it right…
So, the advice thread on SA at the time hadn’t been updated in a while, but I trusted it, so I ended up buying a DAZZLE HD, an RCA capture device that cost a hundred goddamn bucks because it also came with Pinnacle 6, the WORST editing software I’ve ever used. In order to capture using a dazzle you had to open up the video editing software and capture from there, and because it didn’t have TV out it meant you had to play it on that, with the TERRIBLE delay. I also bought D3Drive or something like that, a screen capture program that was supposedly better than fraps but ran like ASS. I discovered that with Pinnacle it rendered videos at the settings your preview window was on, even if you specified otherwise, so if you tried to put in too many transitions or made too many cuts it’d run slow, not show transitions in the final rendering, put random green screens in the final footage, SO MUCH NOT GOOD STUFF, but this was all I had.
So I recorded the first 3 updates and tried to do commentary in audacity. I found doing solo commentary scared the hell out of me cause I kept flubbing the first few lines and needed to start the whole thing over. I eventually had to write down my commentary line-by-line, timecode by timecode until I got it right. I kept the first 3 episodes unlisted on my old channel and showed a few friends. Response was lukewarm from them, so it kinda killed my dreams for the moment. I tried making a few more videos in pinnacle, and it just wouldn’t work with anything I wanted to do.
A few years later, I saw Dectilon’s hard games thread and Slowbeef’s shooting gallery, saw a lot of submissions that were just single videos, and decided to get on the horse and try again. I deleted pinnacle, installed Sony Movie Studio, which ran a MILLION times better. After doing a few small videos for that, I decided to try my hand at doing an LP proper, and decided emulators could be ok. I did rocket knight adventures, a considerably short game, and found a unique angle (focusing on the callbacks to other konami titles in that game). That got me inspired to try Illusion of Gaia again. I used an emulator and D3Dgear to record, and re-recorded the first 3 updates again, this time I got a friend to help co-commentate. This time it ended up WAY better. But two things happened around then: I ended up lucking out big time at a local best buy and getting an elgato hd60 for about half price, and I bought a retron 5, which had SNES compatibility and HDMI out. So I tried making use of the “live commentary” on the elgato capture device for an update, since it featured auto-ducking. What I failed to realize was that my co-commentator spoke too softly to trip auto-duck, so we basically recorded a 3 hour session of the hardest part of the game, and the audio was just UNUSABLE (that audio is still technically in use in the LP playlist, and one day I vow to replace it) in between that and my friend being less and less available to record, I gave up on the LP again in 2013/14
Fast forward to 2016. I’m streaming weekly with Pullahoko, and he suggests one week we do that. In one session we make it to about where we ended off, so I just say ‘fuck it’ and decide to finish the second half of the LP in stream sessions edited down.
So this LP started in 2011 with a busted setup and commentary pre-written down to the line, restarted in 2013-2014 with co-commentary growing pains, new tech and completely bombed some parts, and was finished in 2016 with live streaming commentary[/details]
This LP pretty much captured the entire growing pains I felt in general of getting into LP, and how much work I had to put into it, and how much I had to fail at it, before I could produce work I could stand behind
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I got partway into a co-commentary LP of Typing of the Dead back on SA like, a year or two ago that suddenly died when my partner just completely fell off the face of the earth with no warning and I didn’t hear from him again until months later and he told me there was no way he was going to get stable internet for quite some time and we just decided to kill it off rather than me finding a different partner.
Nothing I could’ve really done, but I still regret it somehow because the thread got off to a really good start and it was probably the most active LP thread I’d ever ran and that was great fun and then it just flatlined on the table.
Said partner is around and online again, but screw restarting that LP at this point.
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I ended up doing a casual streamed let’s play of Vectorman 2, so I closed the book on that almost decade long saga!
3 Likes
I know I haven’t posted any LPs here yet (soon), but I’ve been doing it elsewhere for a number of years.
I recorded a huge session (2+ hours) of Twilight Princess, only to find that it had some of the worst desync I’d ever encountered. By this point I had already recorded too far in advanced and saved over the backup file from that session (don’t do that until it’s uploaded, or at the very least rendered) so I had to fix it (which at the very least I did bother doing that). As a result of this, and other issues, including me deciding to switch to Linux even though my capture card wasn’t yet supported by it, the LP I started in 2012 wasn’t finished until 2016.
Other fun ones include recently in an LP of Super Mario Galaxy 2 I had a great recording session. Turns out though, that my 1TB internal hard drive was full so only the first 10 minutes of footage was recorded. Galaxy 2 of course being a game that auto-saves and doesn’t let you copy files (I should have backed them up onto an external, but I hadn’t done this). As an added bonus this was the recording session where I got star 120, and re-beat Bowser meaning I completely lost out of the green star cutsceen. I ended up … “borrowing” it from a random video (with proper credit given) but having to re-record that (with the bonus of having to figure out what stars I got all over again) while getting clear stars was just bad.
I’ve also lost footage in a blind LP due to me forgetting I had my computer set to go to sleep (which I normally don’t)
Finally microphone quality, oh microphone quality. Early on I had a decent mic (after figuring out how to not use my laptop mic) but then at some point it died. My next mic I bought, was the single worst quality mic I’ve ever seen. I think I used it for a whole 3 videos, and it was BAD. The 3rd mic was also kinda terrible quality with popping. After that I bought a Blue Yeti and have not regretted that decision.
There’s some videos I’ve looked back on relatively recently and been embarrassed at some horrible editing blunders, like where I forgot to crop the video. It’s a good idea to watch your rendered video before you upload it.
Not having an audience can be extremely demoralizing, but I think it also allows for a relaxed attitude that isn’t possible with fans that have expectations. My let’s plays are horrible, to the point that I’d say that my commentary is extremely boring. However, with nobody watching, it also allows me to hone my skills and get more comfortable on the mic without having to worry about people piling on me and criticizing me.