T w e n t y S i d e d
In response to feedback from part 1, we’ve shortened the episode to 30 minutes. We’re still learning as we go and playing with the format. I think our goal is to publish two 30 minute sessions a week.
From Josh:
Apologies if Randy’s voice seems a little (or a lot) louder than the rest of us. I’m not really sure how or why that happened; Randy’s volume sounded fine when we were recording it. The deadline we set for getting this out didn’t give me a lot of room to fix it (we only recorded this early Sunday morning), but I do have a fix in mind for episode three, so this will hopefully be the last time Shamus sounds really quiet and Randy really loud.
The setup needed to pull this off is insane. Josh runs two computers. He has his gaming PC, which is doing three things:
1) Playing the game
2) Recording via FRAPS
3) Broadcasting via livestream, so that Randy and I can watch.
It’s a good thing he’s got a solid machine, because all three of these are incredibly intensive operations. He also has a laptop, which is in voice chat with Randy and I which at the same time recording our chat session.
Josh must wear two sets of headphones. One for the game, one for chat. Randy and I view the game on a three-second time delay, which is why we might seem a little slow at times.
Once we’re done, Josh takes the FRAPS recording and mixes it with the Vent recording to make our final product.
So, sorry the sound levels are wonky. We’ll get better at this as we go.
Comments encouraged and solicited.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
I only got Mass Effect recently and haven’t had the time to get very far into it. I suspect that the next episode may go farther than I have, and I’m probably going to stop following along at that point, until I’m able to catch up in-game. To avoid, y’know, spoilers. ;)
Nevertheless, you guys have held my attention so far and it’s a pretty interesting compliment to the comedy-review stylings of Yahtzee or the MST3k-style Unskippable spoofs.
It reminds me of the many Youtube “longplay” vids for obvious reasons, the main difference being you guys obviously care about the actual quality of the video and audio. It’s also multiple commentators, not unlike the “commentary mode” of Valve’s games, but by you guys rather than the developers.
Which reminds me: do Half Life 2 next! I’ll be able to watch the whole thing! Or, y’know, any Valve game you want. I’ve already played through them all! ;)
A Lets Play of TF2 has been highly considered, and we will take your encouragement to do a Valve game to be the green light on our project. I look forward to spending the rest of my life doing commentary on Josh’s ability to play the spy class, since it seems that TF2 doesn’t have an ending per say
I would loooove if you guys did TF2.
I just recently rediscovered it after months and months of neglect, and it is fantastic!
Tell me if you need some enemies :D
Portal would be interesting to do one of, methinks.
Though if you do go for TF2, it would be awesome to put d20:Lawful back up and play it on there – so everyone who wants to appear in the video knows where to go ;)
TF2? Left 4 Dead lends itself to this format far more. Then all 3 can play at once and also comment on the bot.
Ironically, Left 4 Dead was the first one we started work on, but had alot of audio issues that I believe have since been solved. I am pretty sure all three of us want to give it another shot after we get all the kinks worked out. To all the people talking about TF2, while it is an option, its not a very likely one. Most of the best jokes in Lets Plays come from story, something TF2 doesn’t have. I could definatly see a one time episode featuring TF2 in between other games, tho. Also of note, me and Josh harass Shamus daily about him bringing back Twenty sided and playing with us.
Oh boy, this thread got to a hundred comments before reaching 20.
…been tinkering with your dice roller, Shamus?
EDIT: If this is your brilliant new idea to prevent first-posting, I give it my full support.
I do believe this is the first video let’s play I’ve actually been able to see happening, rather than watching months later when it’s already finished.
Also means I can see what’s so great about Mass Effect without having to actually play it. (I have something of a problem of starting RPG’s, getting halfway through, then wandering off to the next game and forgetting the RPG altogether)
First, if I havent said it already, these “spoiler warnings” to go along with your traditional “Lets play” are fantastic.
I am also glad to see you publish a little bit about the setup you use to make the “magic” happen. I would be curious as to the specs of Josh’s machine to make this run.
Finally, I blame the three of you for causing me to get less accomplished in the “real world” this weekend than I intended!! :) Because of your first “spoiler” installment, I reinstalled ME and am working my way through it. I had _intended_ to wait until ME2 came out, as I am planning on a new PC purchase. So much for the best laid plans….
EDIT: Now that I have seen this installment, you have highlighted one of the things I like about the game. In “spoiler”, you run through bits of dialog that I hadn’t seen in my earlier run-throughs (including my current one). I think Shamus even comments on it — there really are LOTS of ways to do the same thing in the game. Most cool.
The headphone rigging reminds me of my own logistical acrobatics. A while ago, I accidentally pulverized my headphone jack, making it impossible to plug earphones into it. Instead, I got myself a USB headset, but people complained that the mic quality was a step down.
Not wanting to deprive the servers of my dulcet tones, I came up with a workaround. I put my new headset on over my ears, in the usual spot, and hook my old headset around my neck. I use the new microphone to prop up the old one, and plug it into my (undamaged) microphone jack. So whenever I play online games now, I’m wearing one functioning set of headphones, I’ve got a nonfunctioning set around my neck, I’ve got a dead mike curled to my mouth and a working one curled around the dead one. I look powerfully stupid.
That is some awesome imagery hahaha.
I use a nice Logitech USB headset for all my listening, recording, and chatting needs. It has really awesome sound quality that brings across my manly voice with perfect clarity… except for upping the pitch to the point where I sound like a pre-pubescent moron. I also can’t use it with stereo mix…
Its really an awesome headset though. Really!
I have a cheap and comfortable Logitech USB headset with mike, primarily used for Skype, but the sound quality is very good for the price so I also use it for both gaming and when listening to music.
I do the same, except it’s because my headset phones broke while the microphone still works. So I wear this big (awesome, amazing sounding) pair of over-the-ear phones on my head, and my old headset around my neck.
I’m glad I’m not living in the dorms anymore.
Something you might want to consider if you’re having sound issues is getting an on-computer sound recording program for the remote speakers. A couple of friends of mine do a podcast from different cities; they talk over a voice chat client, but also both record their own side of the conversation locally on Audacity. Then one of them emails out the locally recorded file to be spliced together for the final version of the podcast, ensuring a clean copy from both sides.
Why is he running BOTH Fraps and Livestream? Livestream has a built in recording function last time I used it.
If it doesn’t allow saving to the HDD though, I can see why he would do that.
You can’t usually livestream HD video. Even after compression, it takes Josh about an hour to upload a 30min video.
Also, we can’t very well post the raw data. It needs to be mixed with the audio, add titles, cut loading screens, credits, etc.
So… FRAPS is there to capture it in HD, and livestream is there to let Randy and I see the action. The livestream we watch is much lower quality than the final video you get to see.
Ah, that makes total sense.
That was pretty good, but the voices of the characters make difficult to understand what you guys say. Especially that one with a soft voice, I think it’s Shamus.Also, there are some instances when one commentator is interrupted by the other, that also creates some difficulties in hearing the actual words.
Yes, that pistol is horrible. If only there was a conversation on Eden Prime that would have given you a far superior one.
Oh yeah, you skipped it. Oh well.
Honestly, the shotgun is better anyway. Even with no ranks in it.
Seriously, I played as an Infiltrator with solid ranks in both pistol and sniper rifle (aside: Electronics is the best skill ever. Barrier might give you a temporary shield boost, but electronics gives you extra shields all the time. And unlocks containers), and I still whored the shotgun any time it was close range stuff.
I was really big on the shotgun aswell, but Josh had alot of bad things to say about it. Must be a play style thing.
I was actually able to spot Saren at the scene of the crime through my sniper scope as I entered the area, so oddly enough, I never considered Shepard’s rage at the guy out of place.
But looking back at it yeah, it makes NO sense whatsoever if I hadn’t done that one little thing.
Next time you see him through the scope at that point, shoot him and see what happens.
Would there be the possibility next episode of getting a higher quality video if it, find it quite difficult to watch for 30 minutes at this size.
OH NO heaven forbid Shamus’ voice be drowned out by someone else. Just tell me that no ones head sits higher than his
He has the voice of 10 year old girl, it’s like a cheese grater on manly man’s ears.
Previous two comments are from my gaming group, one of whom is my brother.
“A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.”
The fun continues!
My suggestion for those of us following along at home: I know that you’re trying to cut out useless bits, but it still might be nice to give us a look at the ‘character sheet’ from time to time to see how Conan is developing. To keep the time down, you could show us after the choices have been made and give a (very) brief recap of why y’all are pursuing whatever path you are following during level ups.
Otherwise, I thought that the editing of dialog choices was very nice. Last week Josh spent some time spinning the choice arrow around the wheel while waiting for input or something. This is something that I do myself, but it’s distracting to see someone else do it. All of that was gone this week and it worked well.
Or make it a minute at the very end of the vid “during this play session, we added these skills because …, see our new character sheet”
Yeah, I intend to do this at some point, even though I’ve been messing with equipment and levelling mostly off screen. But it is an RPG, so don’t expect the character building aspect to be completely ignored.
Hmm, i don’t get any loading screens between elevator rides or transit uses (just played it through again). Maybe it’s because of the recording …
Yeah, I forgot to mention that. I haven’t notice NEARLY as many loading pop ups as the vid. In fact I think I’ve only seen it twice and my settings are at max. The only time I ever see any loading screen at all is when using the transit.
I suspect that this “insane setup” is being a little starved of RAM. 3GB (which is the max you’d get on a 32-bit platform) is probably a little low for doing all this stuff at once, so ME is doing its best to use less memory and keep things snappy.
Even on a 64-bit thing, it’s likely only 4GB of RAM, which is probably still a little light – not many end-users have 8GB yet.
I was thinking that it might be better or easier for one person to simply record a play-through of the game first,then have all three people sit down and comment on the recording. I imagine that the person playing is partially distracted the entire time, and if they were watching their own gameplay might have some interesting introspection.
Even though it wouldnt be all produced at one go it would probably be easy to pound out several hours of gameplay ahead of time without getting everyone rigged up, or having to think about being funny or interesting. You could even do a rough edit of the playback to rip out boring game portions before you even got together for commentary.
Also, everyone could watch it first before you got together, might help to have some things in mind that you want to comment on.
Just my 2 cents, though. It was fun to listen to and flows better than the first ep.
This was an idea that was discussed, and could easily be implemented for a later lets play. I personally like this idea, but it removes our interactivity. I personally have rather enjoyed being something of the Bad Angel on Josh’s shoulder, while for once in his history of gaming, Shamus is being the good angel. We could still do this with a pre recorded video, but the three of us aren’t exactly hollywood actors, and I fear it might sound forced if we pretend to be influencing Josh’s decisions when we know it won’t have any impact.
Agree here
Commenting after the fact might make the gameplay smoother, but that’s less like three people sitting down and playing a game together and more like people watching a movie together.
loses a bit of what makes this project unique.
I just hope the pace picks up a bit when you get out of tutorial world and into one of the real levels.
Having just finished playing through ME2, this is reminding me how much more interesting I found everything in the original.
Red Alert!!
Gah, I love you guys, but I just HAD to pause the vid and get this off my chest: in the Navy, a captain IS a flag officer; a Naval captain is an O-6 and the equivalent of a full-bird colonel in any other service. Therefore, Captain Anderson’s gold piping and braiding is well warranted.
Ahhhh….I feel MUCH better now. Carry on, and I’ll go back to finishing the video. :D
In general usage, I’m fairly certain that the term ‘flag officer’ refers only to Admirals, that is, O-7 and above; starting from Rear Admiral Lower Half/Commodore. Captains are generally not considered flag officers, nor would Colonels be if there were an equivalent term applied to Army ranks.
Of course, Mass Effect is some 170 years in the future, so that could easily have changed, though they do seem to use a similar hierarchical structure to the US Navy.
Gah, you’re so totally right; I’m an idiot. I was thinking of a STAFF officer, not a flag officer. You’re completely right that a flag officer is only the Admiral/Commodore/General rank. Imadork. (That kids, is why you should never pause the video and post before you’ve had time to think about it!)
HOWEVER, I still feel my original point stands–an O-6 still has plenty of scrambled eggs and braids to decorate him/herself with, so I still think that, as a Naval captain’s uniform, Anderson’s makes sense.
SoldierHawk: Oh, I agree that his uniform isn’t silly or anything. The only reason I brought it up was because his is so different. The guy who comes to inspect the Normandy later looks very different. And nobody else on the ship looks like that.
Although, that’s partly because everyone else who has any rank is always LEAVING THE SHIP IN BODY ARMOR TO SHOOT PEOPLE.
On a tangential but related note, I find the Captain’s uniform to be a bit difficult. Well, what I really mean is that I find the detail and texture mapping that ME applies to faces (and only a very specific area of the face at that) to be at odds with the cartoon level sketchiness of the rest of the body. True, the facial expressions are where the gold lies in terms of the feel of the game, but to have everything else be so rough in comparison is difficult for me. The captain’s gold piping just shows it particularly.
And don’t get me started on the hair. Well modeled hair must be unbelievably difficult to achieve, but unfortunately poorly modeled hair is eye-gougingly painful.
Yeah, okay, my comment was really really tangential. Sorry.
Hair modelling is absolutely insanely difficult to get right. Especially when it gets any length on it.
Wonder why Dragon Age is all short-hair by default? Because it’s impossible to get anything of length right. Unless you want to build a whole new physics engine purely for hair modelling, it either clips right through your armor, or hovers stiffly off the back of your neck.
Short hair is reasonable to do well (you can pre-animate it reasonably cheaply when you don’t have to worry about clipping), but long hair is pretty hairy to get right (if you’ll pardon the cringe-inducing pun).
That was a fun episode! I really appreciate the length being held to 30 minutes; that’s easily digestible in one sitting, and then you don’t have to stop and muck about later with finding where it was you left off. Very nifty.
You know, I really don’t understand all of the Kaiden-hate out there. I rather like him. (Liked him well before I was introduced to Carth, I might add, since I somehow missed KOTOR until just a few months ago.) Sure he’s a bit goofy, but his dialog’s no worse than anyone elses.’
Come to think of it, I like pretty much all of the allies in Mass Effect. None of them have QUITE the entertainment value of your HK-47, but I like having them all around and talking to them just the same. I hated giving up Kaiden or Ashley at the end. Sigh. :(
I don’t know about these guys, but I always leave Kaidan/Ashley out of the team for most of the time. I simply prefer all the other ones. So it’s not for the fact that they are bad characters, but because they are humans.
To fill in some backstory about Captain Anderson, Shamus (Or was that Josh?) was right; he was actually the first human candidate for the Spectres. Unfortunately for him, his assigned evaluator was Saren, who despises humans. On their mission together, Saren deliberately set off an explosion that resulted in over 500 deaths, most of them innocent civilians, and then blamed the explosion on Anderson. Not surprisingly, the Council took Saren’s word over Anderson for what happened, and he got rejected for Spectre-ship. Anderson remains quite bitter over the issue, but that’s how he knows firsthand how ruthless and cruel Saren is.
These events are detailed in the Mass Effect: Revelation novel, which I haven’t read, but the Mass Effect Wiki does an excellent job of summarising. ;)
The funny thing is that, aside from Saren’s disparaging comments to you in that initial hearing, you never ever see evidence of Saren’s racist attitude towards humans ever again in the game.
Actually, if you devlve deep into the dialogue trees with him (I am a completest. I did every part of every person’s dialog trees in the entire game, explored every single planet, did every single quest. – oh, except for the romance one. I don’t like that kind of stuff) you find out all those details.
I’m pretty sure you don’t get the option to have that conversation until he hands over the Normandy. At least, that’s when I’ve gone through it on each of my playthroughs.
Captain Anderson’s uniform is also worn by a captain who checks on your ship later in the game and attempts to write a bad report about you and the ship.
Oh I so hated that guy. I played as a good character but maxed both charm AND intimidate so that I could save/load and check out both possibilities. Intimidate often was so much more fun. In the case of that guy though, I could not use the intimidate option, as my skill was too low. I sooooooo wanted to yell at that idiot the whole time but couldn’t!
I wasn’t able to spare the time to watch the first instalment until today so I’ll sort of comment on both here. I have to say I love those things, it’s lime Mystery Science Theater only with games, and that makes a geek happy. On a more nitpicking note, I do realise that this is mostly for laughs but some of the stuff mentioned you’re making fun of is pretty obvious/natural for any medium that’s for entertainment rather than historical records, like we don’t get to see all the paperwork and management side of things (like, now we have a simulation of an anonymous tech filling our whatever tanks and you have to push the button at the right moment and then you get a math puzzle with calculating the change from your 1000credit bill). Also, there are “beds” of sorts (more like berths) for the crew on the Normandy, I think there’s even an entry in the Codex about them. Similarly the Asari attractiveness (and their function as dancers/strippers) is at least lampshaded in ME2, there’s a completely side dialogue between some NPCs that clearly shows that different races tend to somehow perceive them differently. Also, second part has bathrooms ;)
As for some plot stuff, spoilerspoilerspoiler, it’s perfectly possible to skip the Garrus plotline, I went with the Shadow Broker since it sounded more interesting than talking to some drunk, disgruntled C-Sec functionary and you can approach the thing from an entirely different direction, get your info through Wrex and loose sight of Garrus after which he only resurfaces right before you leave the Citadel, interestingly the Citadel doctor still insisted I helped her earlier with those thugs despite the fact I’ve never gotten the scene so this might be some kind of overlook (talking about the PC version here).
And finally, the looks editor, it can be seen as a silly feature but I’ve played both parts of the game with the same character based on a completely different visual concept (pale, sharp features and intense eyes) and every time there’s a sudden close-up at Conan’s face I’m like “who the hell is that guy?! Oh right, that’s Shepard”. Heck, I actually mistook him and Alenko once since I never used that character much.
Thumbs up, this is definitely a large improvement!
Actually, while in the first video I thought you were taking too much time, now I think you could take some more. This is probably because I haven’t played the game, so lots of stuff is new to me. Following the ingame conversation plus the commentary is a bit much. For someone who knows the game, this is probably no problem, so … well, you decide …
On the technical side: Of course the different sound qualities for each speaker and the deley between what the game does and when the comments happen are some dampeners. So if you manage to do something about that, that’d be great. I keep wondering whether it’s possible to grab the output from the video card with another computer. Then you could do a two-monitor setup with equal contents and use a second computer/HD-recorder/whatever to capture the video. A VGA port and a good old analog device would probably be enough regarding the online video’s resolution. For sound, I always use ventrilo, and the latencies are usually very low. I have of course no idea whether any of this could work for you.
Besides technical problems: Keep doing this, I think it’s a great idea! I like getting to see a game from the inside that I haven’t found time to play (and money to purchase…) but was always interested in.
Zak
I love this idea for a Let’s Play but right now it’s not capturing me. It may be because I’m spending half my time trying to figure out what Shamus is saying while being deafened by Josh and Randy. After the technical issues are worked out this may be a more positive experience.
On the other hand this video is far better than the first. I only expect it will get better with every iteration.
Everybody including my says that the audio has “issues” because someone’s voice can’t be heard, people interrupt eachother, some voice sounds loud and screechy…
But I want to add that the first video was ok, as I’ve been able to understand 95%of everything it was says and there wasn’t that “strange metallic screech” that appears when the guy playing speaks.
I just finished Mass Effect 2 and it’s really funny/nice/fridge brilliance to see how some things that you point out in both of these shorts are justified in the sequel.
You know, you could finish ME and just continue on with ME2, making one big series of videos capturing both games. That would give Conan something to do while he is in his 7 month purgatory. Or is that too much of the ME universe all in one go?
makes me want to finish the story in ME now X_X
interesting to see what powers you went for, with my team building i went for wrex/kaidan and me as adept to fully propel my team with psychic prowess.
Figured I’d better leave this comment here, even if I’d only seen the first video: for the love of baby Jesus and all the angels, if you have any characters that can pump it, TRAIN FIRST AID.
The first point alone is a huge benefit.
All the embedded vids on the front page are making the page load like it’s made of molasses (and you know what molasses is like down fiber optic cable). At least I think that’s what it is. I may be wrong.
I don’t suppose I could convince you to hide future videos behind a cut?
EDIT: Assuming that’s the problem, obviously.
One suggestion Ive heard of being used by some podcasts I listen to: If youre already recording audio and video separately and doing editing, why not record each voice separately?
If you each record your mic on your own PC while you’re chatting, you can send the file to Josh and you’ve got independent voice tracks that you can edit and adjust the volume on, and you get the added benefit of a higher quality recording without lag distortion, etc, too (not that Ive noticed any major problems so far).
Just a thought, since you made a point of being concerned about the relative volumes.
Thats the beauty of ventrilo, in a way, it does record each voice separately, in the sense that the file it records has to be converted the old fashion way, giving you plenty of time to spend 1h 30ms just converting the audio. The only real reason we had volume problems this time is that when we started recording, there was no volume problem, and we have no idea when it happened. We had already set ourselves something of a deadline goal to get this video out on a monday, so we decided to just live with the imbalance and hope everyone understood that this is still a work in progress.
Gay. tl;dr
A friend of mine used this for those sorts of troubles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelator
Sorry if this is a dupe, I didn’t really read the rest of the comments.
Awesome project! I could watch this all day. Thanks for the effort you’re putting into this along with everything else you do. It’s obvious when a person (like yourself!) loves what they do!
Wow that Randy guy both knows nothing about the video game and clearly didn’t even finish Star Fox 64. On top of that he seems like he’s in conversation with someone else through the entire vid. WTF. Also there wasn’t enough space hookers.vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
“It would be so embarrassing if someone actually died to those guys.”
Uhhh.
Try playing on hardcore difficulty with a class you’re not good at (infiltrator, for example). That’s why I died. ):
Josh died to them on the first play thru, we had to start over because of it. It was something of an inside joke for us. Also, you guys all saw him bite it during the tutorial, so it was just general razzing of josh.
Man, how did HE die? Isn’t he a vanguard?
And… not on hardcore?
He was to used to playing the end game when he could just run up to people and annihilate them. He tried this against the assassins and they slapped him down.
Also we were talking and I wasn’t really paying any attention until the “Critical Mission Failure” screen came up. I think we all sat there staring at the screen dumbfoundedly for about thirty seconds before universally deciding to start over (for the second time actually, we had three freakin’ takes for this episode).
Note to self: Get a lap dance from the hooker next time you get back to the citadel, and see if it looks better than the sex scenes in DA:Origins.
And I thought I’ve spoken to pretty much everyone in the citadel who has more than a one-liner to say to Shepard. Sheesh.
JEEENNKKIINNNNSSSSS!!!!
I can’t remember where that’s from. I wish I remembered.
This raises an interesting point: How much different would the game feel to the user if the cutscene where Saren kills the other Turian wasn’t there – that is, if the player had no direct proof that Saren was actually there and did what Mr. Nappy says he did.