Brotherly Abuse, Poor Recording Skills, and my love of chests, a Kingdom Hearts 2 LP.
 

So my brother really likes LP's. He watches them all the time, has a few favorites, watches the streams and whatnot. He heard about my failed attempts to finish a GS LP, and wanted to do one. I wasn't very sure, but I decided to try and work with him anyway, because he can be very persuasive when he wants to.

But then he wanted to do a Video LP.

"But dearest Brother! My crappy video capture device does not work well with my new computer, it only captures video!"

"Then we'll just record the sound some other way! Let's Play!"

"But I have a horrible track record of not being able to sync sound and video! It'll look unprofessional and generally horrid to the extreme of hearing us talk about things five minutes after they have actually happened!"

"Don't care. Let's Play!"

And then he decided that the only game out of our vast, vast library of interactive media worth playing for the internet was Kingdom Hearts 2.

"But brother, this game has been done to death! I mean, one can trip over LP's on that game like hippie in a mushroom store! I mean, you are personally fond of Kung Fu Jesus's run of it for hissake! It would be derivative and fail greatly in comparison, even if we don't suck nearly as much at the game!"

"Don't care. LETS PLAY."

"And for that matter, i've got nasal issues so bad it's a minor speech impediment at the moment, and don't sound as nearly Sean Connery-ish as I should! I'll be mostly unintelligible, and you'll sound a bit like a jerkass!"

"DO NOT CARE. LET US PLAY."

And then he punched me in the shoulder, and it hurt for like an hour. :crying:

So here comes the fail and lack of substance of a Kingdom Hearts 2 LP.



Herein:

• We fail to address each other by our online personas and increase the chance of getting tracked down an raped.
• Loner fails to grasp the concept that he doesn't need to preach to the choir, all of you know this shit already when explaining the plot, game mechanics, and how to win at fights and be generally successful at the game (hint: press X, and if that fails, occasionally hit triangle.)
• Kitty Pyros (whose young, virgin eyes are kept safe and away from the violent abuse and butchering of his/her favorite non Zelda game) sits this one out, and some dorky baritone cat food can opener speaks as a non-kitty "Pyros."
• Comments about a love of big chests are made, a favorite anagram of Xemnas is said out loud without much forethought, and an arm is punched so hard you can hear it in the recording. Repeatedly. Ow! Seriously, is there any such thing as a shelter for beaten siblings? Geeze!

The videos are on viddler, and I've got a nice backlog to have constant updates. Furthermore, my brother will bug me every bloody night to record a new episode, so this trains should keep running into it's inevitable trainwreck with no long delays.

This video LP is a bit experimental (because I don't know what the shitaki I'm doing) with voice commentary from myself and "Loner", aka "Ninjamon325" and he also stole a name from some forumer here named "Madwithininsanity" for Facebook.

The style will be a Speed run LP, wherein Loner will try and blow through the game as quickly as possible, skipping all cutscenes and unneccesary content: IE most chests, sidequests, shopping, minigames Winnie the Pooh. Even though he's playing on easy, this also means he'll mostly get by only with Bonus levels and drive form spamming. I doubt we'll break any speed records, but the idea is quickly and skillfully, and the hard way.

Despite skipping Winnie the Pooh, all worlds shall be cleared (Hundred Acre Wood is a book, not a world, apparently in Loner's eyes). Yes, this means we will play Atlantica. Oh god.... :(

If we ever do get stuck, I will grind his Sora in the background, and go back and get stuff he missed off screen (unless you wanna see that).

One final note: You might want to turn the sound up sometimes, my voice intermittently drops despite being right next to the bloody mic, and Loner sits on a chair further away. His voice carries better than mine, and sometimes drowns me out, and sometimes I forget to adjust the game volume so it doesn't drown out the both of us.

Well, here we go. Let's just hope I don't murder him in his sleep before this is over. Assuming he doesn't break my arm first...

First Episode: Recording Fail and Mansex, ne'er again shall they meet. (Roxas to Sora, no matter how speedy you are, always takes 40 minutes!)

I like it so far, Pyros! And for the record, I too am one of those gamers who insists on speaking to every single NPC in the area. They might say something interesting!

Please tell me that's suppose to be a joke.

Hey there used to be a time when every NPC who had a quest didn't have an exclamation point over their head, or a notation on the minimap, and you had to work for your sidequests! Also this seeks to be a good waste of time.

You have lost all gamer cred. Talk to everyone, all the time.

Then talk to them again, because they might say something different, even if no previous NPC has done so before in the game. And wouldn't you know it, that was the only way to get the infinity plus sword?

Funnily enough, when I played Animal Crossing and the NPC's would not just have new things to say every time I spoke to them, and even walk up to ME to tell me something, it kinda freaked me out and I started avoiding them whenever possible.

It's almost like that episode of Salad Fingers when the little girl talks to him, and he freaks the flip out.

Aw... I got all excited by the title thinking it was a BBS LP...

And I'd totally do it too, if I had a PSP and a PSP component cable!

And what made you think BBS from the title? I know Vanitas and Ventus abuse each other, and Aqua's got it goin' on, but I'm not sure any of the precursor Keyblade masters knew how to record video.

Oh the brotherly abuse thing. That and I didn't really read the thread title per se.

Now, y'know all the current episodes are on Viddler and you can watch them any time you want, but I'm still only going to post about them one at a time.

To make up for that, I'm just gonna mention what went on at that time during recording.


Kingdom Hearts 2 Ep 2: A farewell to short shorts.

So, a main problem is that I seem to record audio and video at different bitrates, and recording both sound and video at the same time doesn't work so well with my capture thingy. Mainly, Easycap USB AV recorder doesn't have updated drivers for Windows 7, but it caused it's own sound lag anyway, so it's not that bad. I just bought a component to 3.5mm jack cable, and i'm recording game sound through the line-in jack on my computer.

However, I also want to record me and Loner's voices, so I record me and Loner talking about the game with my iphone's voice recorder. I aim to sync up the voice recording (that also captures the game sounds too) with the video and game recording on my pc.

For some reason, Virtual Dub (the only one that actually works, or at least displays our gameplay on the screen in a manner that is playable) keeps messing up the sync between audio and video while trying to maintain the sync between audio and video.

So, the audio bitrate is off, so the sound exponentially lags behind the events in the video, starting with a few seconds in the beginning and up to several minutes in the ending. The program tries to fix this, and seems to fail- the audio is all kinds of messed up. So instead I just remove the audio track entirely and use the Iphone recording....and then there's just the normal sync issue. This is a problem, but while I was mending the third recording I got some help from my brother's boss, who clued me in that the problem was the video's FPS, which could be adjusted down to the smallest digits to perfection. So I then went back to this video and tweaked it a bit and at least got the commentary matching up perfectly to the actual game events.

As for our commentary, Loner understands every word I've said, as we are brothers and he's used to my nose being more clogged than a shower drain after all your hairy relatives get their wash on. However, he does not often know exactly what I'm talking about, as some comments go over his widdle head. On the other hand, sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about, as I started talking, lost attention, and yet kept on talking. He's used to that too.

As far as Kingdom Hearts goes, we're both pretty good at it, both having done about everything you can do in it (except in my case, I've done more because he REFUSES to do any more gummi ship than he needs to) but he's one to stroke his own ego because he plays it more than I do.

This isn't really a fair statement, because you have to realize that we only have 1 PS2 (at the time we got this game and it's predecessor) and as it is a one player game, not both of us can be playing. For a lot of the games in our possession, us playing a game together is just one of us sitting behind the others shoulder and talking about shit, and sometimes swapping the controller when one of us gets bored or wants snacks. (Tales of Symphonia was the first time we actually played a game from start to finish together) So when Loner religiously played Kingdom Hearts 2 for three weeks after he got the game, I didn't so much as touch the disc with my bare f'ing hands!

On the LP thus far: You'll notice despite our speed run and pro strats :rolleyes:, and our experience at playing the game, that we're constantly near failing all the 'mission' type battles- The heartless and Nobodies nearly break through the gate both times, and we nearly lost to Demyx's watery version of "Friday." We've seemed to have pissed off the Random Number gods, as well as Loner losing his edge while talking.

That, and Loner does seem to be guilty of wildly mashing the attack button repeatedly without actually moving towards the enemy, wait for the Lilliput battle, that shit's hilarious.

Damn I wish I could take some pics of the Star Destroyer Gummi Ship I made in KH 2 with a matching TIE Fighter Teenie Ship.

Kingdom Hearts Ep 3: Things Going Wrong

So, the first time we recorded episode 3, the mic picking me up was a little too sensitive, so half of everything I said was BLAARGHGCRACKLE instead of actual words. Add in really loud soundtrack drowning out everything Loner was saying, and then add in a relative shouting down the stairs about an air filter, not getting her desired answer, forcing an awkward pause in recording where we had to go help fix a perceived but non-existent problem, and then when we restarted recording she yelled downstairs asking who we were talking to, and if we had company over.

So, I just destroyed the video and we redid the shoot from scratch. This time, the sound is perfect...but there are some serious flaws with the video- The frame rate suddenly drops drastically during the Pete Fight, and a few other times, so matching the sound timing to the video timing became too much of a beeyatch. In other words, you'll notice that it's sync'd near the beginning, and the end, but lagging in the middle.

It was probably because we were recording with Audacity and a mic for once, and also Java and windows update were going at it in the background, so it made it hard for the video recording in the foreground. Bleh!

So....I said F'k that, and I posted the video. Thus far, 4 has been the only one where nothing bad happened. Something to look forward to, right?

So, Auron is in our opinion, the coolest party member, in that he's not meant to be a KH clone that is just named and acts like the original, but is meant to actually be Auron from FFX. The only downside is that he's the one party member you use the least, as he's not in your party for most of the actual plot of the underworld. He is available for the Hades underdrome stuff, but you're better off sticking with Donald and Goofy for that.

If I could get an action replay, I'd have him in my party all the time until it broke the game. The other party member would be a second Sora. Though if I really had it my way....

Pyros and Loner plays Kingdom Hearts 2 ep 4&5
 

So, here's two episodes to make up for lack of updates. Even if no one views this thread, or the videos, I shall continue posting them, just because I never finish anything.


Episode 4: Talking about things after the fact!

ITV, we recorded our commentary after the video aired, and then edited it in, and it is noticeably better in every aspect. Might keep doing it this way, Loner plays better when his mouth isn't flapping, and it shows!

Episode 5: Late night addition

ITV, it's 3 AM. We were pretty drained after a long day, and it shows...somehow even in the video medium.

Pyros and Lonner play Kingsion Hearts Two: Episode VI: Brawlin'

Man, me and Loner have been real busy lately, since he took up seminary work and therefore is worked like a six year old third worlder in a sweatshop, and I'm stuck trying to get a job for myself, as well as dealing with all sorts of family drama!

That, and I got Fallout: New Vegas. Man, that takes up the time!

So, believe you me that I was real lucky to get some time to churn out another episode, this time just using Viddler's recording function, though I bet that will still somehow mess the video up or something! I'm already looking at the video, and it looks a little off, though I can't quite put into worlds how it is...maybe there's a little video lag or something... oh well! I can totally fix that later!

In other news, I have gotten myself a copy of Final Mix 2, though I have no way to record myself playing it! Though as you can tell, it's messing up my A game, on account of the Japanese having the jump and attack buttons switched! Trust me, I tried fighting Sephiroth and found myself going Jumpman on him and he's like a spiny or something.