I'm likely in the minority with this opinion, but is anyone else annoyed by Let's Play channels? I don't mind no commentary channels, but...well, let me set the scenario:
Me: Oooh, someone posted an early access video of this game I've been interested in!
LPer does intro speech, exposition, etc.
Me: Mmm-hmm, okay, thanks for the info.
game starts, really cool voice acting is going on
Me: Interesting premise-sudden noise while talking is still going on
LPer (talking over sounds going on): ZOMG that scared me! Blah blah...
Me: What did that character say?!
Watches for a few more minutes before leaving video
Personally, channels like that annoy me. I don't mind if they talk in between bits like that or at the beginning/end of the video, but when a game has an interesting story, narration, acting, and/or music, I like being able to hear it.
I understand that many really like this audience interaction/LPer reactions, but half of the reactions to me don't even seem...well...genuine.
I agree with all of this, except I don't really understand the appeal of Let's Plays to begin with, so I can't say I'm a fan of uncommentated LP's either. The extent I might watch LP's are the comedic ones, such as Game Grumps or PBG's Choas Edition series, but even then, I gotta be pretty bored to get into those.
@Tyranexx@Nicolai I've seen the appeal of some of the Mario Maker ones, where you get to peek into the window of the people who might actually be trying your levels. And in competitive games or speed runs or whatever, there's obviously some appeal to watching something done really flipping well, and potentially some benefit for your own play. I used to play competitive Pokemon, and people would often narrate their own battles, which was interesting - especially if you were the opponent. There's some element of community or interactivity in all those games anyway, and watching people play them gives you some more insight into what they were thinking. I'm not sure if they count of proper LPs because they don't really progress through a game from start to finish. They're more just isolated events.
So I've watched some of them, but for single player games... I can't see much of the appeal. I completely agree with all of the original poster's irritations, and well, there doesn't seem much point. Either I'm watching g someone spoil the game for, or it's a game I'm not interested in enough to worry about spoilers (in which case, why am I watching deliberately watching footage of it), or I've already beaten it, in which case I'm probably done and dusted with the whole thing.
I suspect it's not so much about the games though, and the games providing stimulus for the Let's Player to (over)react to. You get to watch someone do something without them... having to get up and really do anything.
I guess gaming itself as also kinda lonelier that I used to be. Local multiplayer isn't as popular as it used to be, so if you want to feel like your playing games with someone, you have to do so from the audience. Or something.
Anyway, yeah, I agree (with the above stated exceptions).
@Maxz Agrees all around, and yeah, speedruns have a whole different appeal I'm really into. It's like the difference between watching a pianist play Liszt versus watching your friends do a piano sing-a-long to Journey that you can't join into. Speedrunning is a beautiful art, and I love watching top records, as well as listening to explanations of what's going on. It fascinates the heck out of me.
I can kinda see the appeal of Mario Maker LP's over other games, but it's still not for me.
I sometimes watch let's plays to get a sneak peak and see if I'm interested, but you have to be careful about what game you do this with. I watched the opening segment of undertale, and immediately regretted it, wishing I had experienced that cold.
It's like the difference between watching a pianist play Liszt versus watching your friends do a piano sing-a-long to Journey that you can't join into. Speedrunning is a beautiful art, and I love watching top records, as well as listening to explanations of what's going on. It fascinates the heck out of me.
Hahaha yess. With regards to SMM levels, some of them are so insanely hard that they have the same appeal as watching competitive gaming or speedruns. In fact, due to the world record feature, some of them actually ARE speedruns. And in other cases, it's a decent way of previewing some levels you might be interested in. And then there's just the egotistical joy of watching someone play your own level, which is particularly gratifying if you've spent a lot of time on it. I managed to get one of mine into the 'Special Collections' on the Bookmark site, so there've been a few videos of that scattered around YouTube as a result. I think I also made a Christmas level that got into a couple of videos, which was fun to watch. It's sort of like sending a letter out to sea in a bottle, then watching someone of the other side of the world read it.
Anyway, self-indulgent yabberings aside, everyone seems to have just about agreed with every complaint that's been posted in the last page or so. Which makes me doubt whether the opinions are all that unpopular. It's nice, but kind of ironic that the 'Unpopular Opinions' thread seems to be the quite haven of Nintendo Life where everyone agrees with each other and gets on splendidly.
So I'll try this; I'm (almost) completely cool with indies milking the 8-bit aesthetic as much as they are. The fundamentals of animating 8/16-bit are - I think - widely understood, and while it limits what your options, I think it's more likely to smooth over any rough flaws that might be crop up with a more ambitious, modern art style. I've seen a few indie titles that just look like games produced by larger studios, but noticeably rougher around the edges, which is really off-putting for me. 8/16-bit style games usually at least look deliberate.
@Maxz: I agree with the vast majority of your post. Games like Mario Maker are more suited for Let's Plays, I think; there's not much there to interrupt other than what's going on in front of your eyeballs. Same with watching competitive Pokemon battles since none of the videos that I've seen in that regard have any meaningful story, text, cutscenes, etc.
I've never been that into speedrunning as more often than not it involves playing and/or "beating" a game by breaking the rules, physics, etc. in said game (which I view as a form of cheating). I don't mind speedrunners that play through the entire game as fast as possible (using level/stage skippers like SMB's warp zones are fine as those were intended by design). I do acknowledge that plenty of people enjoy speedrunning and that it has its benefits (such as the Awesome Games Done Quick event).
I typically watch Let's Plays of games that I don't believe I'll ever play, either because I'm not interested enough to play it myself (like FNAF), or because I don't believe it'll come to a system I own or because it was on a retro system/a game that's very hard to obtain/on a system that doesn't have enough other interesting games to entice me to get one (I watched a full no commentary play through last year of Batman: Arkham Asylum shortly before playing Arkham City on my Wii U for some story background). Once in a great while I'll watch some commentary on a game that I'm at least mildly interested in but don't feel like buying yet for whatever reason (Firewatch and Among The Sleep).
I don't intend to come off as hating LPers/Youtubers as people; many of them seem like they're genuinely nice people both on and off camera, and some truly have touching, serious videos; I'm just not fond of many of their methods of calling attention to themselves with stunts that would earn me weird looks in public should I try the same things.
@jump It's a Platinum game, what else did we expect? To be fair, I do plan on playing NieR: Automata later this year, but with Horizon and Zelda, it has to wait. I even skipped Gravity Rush 2 because of those two games, and Nioh too. I'm building a mental backlog of games I have to buy at a later point, and there are too many at this point..
@Maxz Procedural generation is like CGI in film; If it's good, you don't even notice it. Most games are build with some form of procedural generation. Nobody manually placed every blade of grass in Breath of the Wild for example. Most of the foliage in games these days is done through algorithms and procedural generation. I think the issue is when a game tries to sell itself on the premise of PG alone. Especially when it's not really good (No Man's Sky).
@Octane Well, yeah. I'm not boycotting the use of PG as some sort of weird moral stance. I don't have anything against its use in games, and it obviously plays an integral role in filling in aesthetic details in practically all modern games, as well as stuff like shaping large swathes of landscape in a more true-to-life manner than a human could ever manage. Humans slip into patterns incredibly. RNG is less fickle. Or more fickle. Or, whatever; less predictable and more random.
I'm sure they've got algorithms that absolutely nail what a convincing distribution of trees looks like, how to the land should rise and fall, how clouds should drift across the sky and in what formations, etc., all without the glaring repetitions that a human spamming C&P would probably end up producing. These things are all wonderful, and take a great deal of strain off the developers to actually make important design decisions rather than fumbling around with clouds and grass.
My post - which I'd hoped made clear - was about games where these explicit design decisions have almost entirely been forfeited to the PG engine; where there are no concrete levels, and where everything is built from scratch uniquely every time you enter a stage. Of course, a huge amount of time in these games must be spent on designing a PG engine that works flawlessly, and that can be relied upon to produce a near infinite number of levels that are actually compelling to play and not inherently broken. That in itself is arguably more challenging than just building the levels by hand, but still leads to a different type of game experience; the type I was trying to address in my initial post.
So as I've said, I've got nothing against PG as a technology. But my post was about games that are built around it as a core mechanic for real-time level generation; not just as a handy tool for smoothing out grunt-work in development.
I believe that the low cost of content these days has had some negative impacts. 10+ years ago the only way to get new content was to go to the shops and physically buy a game. And most games were about the same price. These days there are game bundles, free to play releases and DLC packs for extending the play time of most releases. And if you don't get the game in the first month? You can expect heavy discounts not long after.
This has changed the way consumers churn through games. It used to be that you'd buy your $70AU+ game and that'd be the game you'd play to death. Even if that game wasn't really that great. These days a Humble Bundle can come up where you get a whole bunch of games for $15 or so. Of which you'll play through maybe one of them before going back to that new game mode that's just been released for Overwatch. Or you'll see a new game come out and not buy it because full RRP has somehow become "too expensive" for a game like Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Same deal with console launches. It used to be that one great game was enough for a console launch. We also didn't expect to get a game for free when we got that console. And now the Switch is coming out and 1-2 Switch not being bundled is a massive miss-step.
Why are gamers such whiners when it comes to reviews? You aren't supposed to burst into tears and write hate comments when, say, Jim Sterling gives the new Zelda a 7/10 instead of a 10/10. Seriously, you have to be a certain kind of pathetic to be bothered by that! This isn't new behavior, (see the response to Zero Punctuation's review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a game from 2008, for proof of that) but these days, it seems worse than ever, because now people are upset at reviews that are positive, but not positive enough.
To quote Yahtzee Crosshaw in his great response video to the hate he got for the SSBB review:
"It's worth remembering that all reviews are subjective personal opinions, and if you personally enjoyed a game, they really shouldn't get to you (unless of course, there's a despicable little niggling doubt in the back that maybe you're not having as much fun as you've convinced yourself you're having, but doesn't go away no matter how many times you try to slap it down with a wet flannel of weak excuses like this one)."
"I'll take a potato chip... AND EAT IT!"
Light Yagami, Death Note
"Ah, the Breakfast Club soundtrack! I can't wait 'til I'm old enough to feel ways about stuff!"
Phillip J. Fry, Futurama
Why are gamers such whiners when it comes to reviews? You aren't supposed to burst into tears and write hate comments when, say, Jim Sterling gives the new Zelda a 7/10 instead of a 10/10. Seriously, you have to be a certain kind of pathetic to be bothered by that!
Jim Sterling is a "PC master race" person, So i'm not surprised he would give that kind of score.
Not really. He gives a lot of favorable reviews to console games. He hated the weapon system and the stamina bar, which are pretty central to the game's mechanics.
Matter of fact, here are his other Zelda reviews since his site started:
Why are gamers such whiners when it comes to reviews? You aren't supposed to burst into tears and write hate comments when, say, Jim Sterling gives the new Zelda a 7/10 instead of a 10/10. Seriously, you have to be a certain kind of pathetic to be bothered by that!
Jim Sterling is a "PC master race" person, So i'm not surprised he would give that kind of score.
I'm mainly a "PC Master Race" person, but BotW is a masterpiece. We're not all terrible!
Why are gamers such whiners when it comes to reviews? You aren't supposed to burst into tears and write hate comments when, say, Jim Sterling gives the new Zelda a 7/10 instead of a 10/10. Seriously, you have to be a certain kind of pathetic to be bothered by that!
Jim Sterling is a "PC master race" person, So i'm not surprised he would give that kind of score.
The PS4 controller is the worst controller I've ever used.
It's broken on me 6 times (the right trigger keeps breaking), the touch pad is oversized stupid and pointless, the light bar is annoying, the option/share buttons are too hard to press, the battery life sucks beyond belief, and most important of all — the home button is in the worst place imaginable; I can't even count how many times I've hit that stupid button by accident when playing games the requires the joysticks. I hate the PS4 controller.
the home button is in the worst place imaginable; I can't even count how many times I've hit that stupid button by accident when playing games the requires the joysticks.
Hmmm? Isn't a home button in the centre of a controller pretty much standard? (XB360, XBO, PS3...)
I love the Wii U gamepad & think it's a very comfortable controller.
Completely agree. In fact, I think I prefer the feel of it to the Pro Controller, in terms of both weight and button placement (and of course, functionality).
On the topic of controllers...I've never really had an issue with controller battery life. Surely you're never far enough from a charging point that it becomes so big of a deal?
Ok i see this is a thread where i have to be arrogant enough to know whats unpopular.
Just because games are colourful and try to be cute doesnt make them feel warm. In fact i often feel more warmth from many gritty games.
I think the swan song of the wii u is actually color splash and not botw. Even with that bad battlesystem.
Jhena
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