Why do people actually watch Let's Play videos?

@Dick_Mohawk said:

Well at the end of the day, Giant Bomb are the original and best at these kind of gameplay videos. It helps as they have an extensive history with games, plus the wit and humor to pull it off.

After that, pretty much everyone else is going to seem like second best, but they do it because Giant Bomb does it. They just can't do it as well.

Well, that's my take on it from my own experiences.

@TobbRobb said:

@Zippedbinders: The only thing better than that are the videos dedicated to making fun of him.

OH WHAT THE?

FANTASTIC!

I watch an LP for a few different reasons

1) Nostalgic game that I don't own anymore or don't want to set up.

2) Curious about a games story but it exists in a genre that I hate to play.

3) Bored and don't have anything new to play. (or can't afford anything new to play in some cases)

edit: and maybe you should stay away from the random youtube people who think "Hey I can do that too, who cares if i'm not funny"

If you are basing your opinion completely on looking for an LP on youtube then you are doing it wrong. There are countless lists all over the internet of people that actually do LPs right. I have never searched for an LP through youtube.

General tip, stay away from YouTube, stick to Something Awful. On YouTube people seem to think the point of a Let's Play is the person playing, when the point of an LP is to show off a game you really enjoy. There are a few "YouTube style" LPers who are genuinely funny (The Freelance Astronauts can be hilarious at times, though their stuff is really hit and miss, and pokecapn and his crew who did the Sonic 2006 LP are really funny, and Twisted Pixel even had them do unlockable in-game commentary for The Gunstringer), but most of the people on YouTube are shut-ins raised on the internet who think yelling a lot and spouting memes is comedy gold.

Personally, I'd recommend anything Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus did, as they have a great balance of being informative and being funny. Their LP of No More Heroesis one of my favorites, and Metal Gear Solid 3, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and Killer7are all great as well. Slowbeef and Diabetus (also known for running the YouTube channel Retsupurae, where they record commentary over bad YouTube LPs poking fun at the person and video's technical incompetence) also do some really good LPs, although not everything they do is great. Their LP of Snatcher is another one of my favorites, and Dead to Rights is a riot.

The Let's Play Archive, a site that collects various completed Something Awful LPs, is a great place to start, and you'll generally only run into quality LPs there.

Hope I didn't scare you off by writing way too much about people playing video games for the internet, there's some great stuff out there, there's just so much more shit that a lot of people don't even know Let's Plays can be more than some kid with a camcorder pointed at his TV.

@Taku128: This man speaks the truth! Something Awful (especially Chip and Ironicus, Wolfshirt, Slowbeef and Diabetus, etc) provides the best LP content I've ever found, especially since that's where it originated. Chip and Ironicus' Uncharted and Metal Gear LPs are great, and the Dungeons & Dragons LP by Wolfshirt, Plasmaman, Ironicus, et al. is wonderful too. There are plenty of great Let's Plays on SA and dwarf almost all YouTube crap.

@benpicko said:

@zaglis

Legendary

Not a single episode is boring or unfunny from Toby

Also this.

"Toby" is exactly the type of moronic drooler that makes me bewildered as to why anybody would enjoy a let's play. Stupid, nonsensical one liners? Check. Annoying voice? check. Pretentiousness? check.

He's unfunny, nasally, and annoying. Like most Lets play narrators.

Yon can’t imagine the bonner I get wen filming my 13" TV while I play crazy taxi on my Dreamcast man, that why there is a lot of let’s play videos.

@allworkandlowpay said:

@benpicko said:

@zaglis

Legendary

Not a single episode is boring or unfunny from Toby

Also this.

"Toby" is exactly the type of moronic drooler that makes me bewildered as to why anybody would enjoy a let's play. Stupid, nonsensical one liners? Check. Annoying voice? check. Pretentiousness? check.

He's unfunny, nasally, and annoying. Like most Lets play narrators.

I don't think you know what nasally means.

@CL60 said:

@allworkandlowpay said:

@benpicko said:

@zaglis

Legendary

Not a single episode is boring or unfunny from Toby

Also this.

"Toby" is exactly the type of moronic drooler that makes me bewildered as to why anybody would enjoy a let's play. Stupid, nonsensical one liners? Check. Annoying voice? check. Pretentiousness? check.

He's unfunny, nasally, and annoying. Like most Lets play narrators.

I don't think you know what nasally means.

Tobuscus by himself is nasally, which means he breathes heavily through his nose while talk, making a muffled and rather irritating sound. In that video in general, "Toby" is mentally masturbating to his own voice, which he is doing a dumb ass accent that for some reason he thinks funny. If you watch the rest of his videos, You'll hear the snuffly, irritating, muffled sound of his voice.

@allworkandlowpay said:

@Meowshi: I've gone through a cursory examination of all the top rated ones on youtube. They all seem like driveling, nasally morons.

Well there's your problem, Youtube is definitely NOT the place to go for good high quality LP's Chip & Ironicus are good places to start, and the Something Awful LP forums have a generally high baseline quality to them, as well as the LP Archive

There are some good LP and bad, I only really watch SSOHPKC and Xcalizorz. Its good though if you want to look up oldish games to see what the gameplay is like beyond reading reviews and what not.

@Video_Game_King: You failed to mention DeceasedCrab or whatever his name is in a Let's Play related thread......I believe that is a first for you.

@Video_Game_King: Why because its just annotations and you realized that making a let's play out of annotations is a dumb idea?

@Video_Game_King: I know and making an annotated LP is a bad idea....get a mic or GTFO is the stance I have on them....but then again that is a double edged sword because most people who do let's plays have god awful voices that make them unwatchable.

@EuanDewar said:

This was the only LP I've ever enjoyed because he hates every aspect of what he is doing and is very synced up with my own type of humor.

That doesn't count! He has an english accent, which makes it funny/interesting either way! ^_^

The problem with most LPs are that they are usually one-man affairs. Gaintbomb's ERs work because they have two people in house which makes for better commentary (not to mention their superior recording equipment). It takes a hell of a personality to make a one-man LP not teeth-grindingly boring.

@Video_Game_King: Alright yeah you make a good point....however for some games it would be bad, like a game with constant action on screen (e.g. a shoot-em-up game).....in that case the text would be distracting from the gameplay.....if a game has enough breaks in action then it could work if the annotations are placed correctly.

Some games, id rather not play, and while some people would "pay" some one to play it, i know i can find it online for free.

@Dagbiker said:

Some games, id rather not play, and while some people would "pay" some one to play it, i know i can find it online for free.

Who pays someone else to play video games for them?

Sometimes I like watching people play vidja games more than I like playing them. But I only watch Hamster, since he doesn't say a lot and has awesome editing skills.

Your problem with terms of content is probably due to looking at the youtubes for terrible shit.

The only real LP community that has anything good is the origins of LPs themselves, The SA Forums: http://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=191

The question is why people watch them.

The answer is probably that there's a bunch of games that are only fun socially. There's some games that are well suited for armchair players that don't really control the game. Some are boring to actually play but interesting to watch, some are old and have annoying nonstandard controls or have other reasons why you wouldn't want to pay them alone.

But hey, these days, who has time to regularly visit a friend for two hours a day just to play a game you don't have or don't want to play alone? I remember doing that as a kid, but I'm an adult now, so if I go to a friend's place it's never to play through a game. I did that when I shared an apartment, but even that is a thing of the past. So, to me, and I suspect to a bunch of people, a decent LP with an OK host is a good thing to have for "background noise" while doing some other stuff, like other people use talk shows or soap operas. I agree that the quality of them is terrible 99% of the time, but stuff like the ER here and a select few others online can be a nice watch.

The Yogscast Let's Play videos are fun. Those are the only ones I like, however.

Two reasons
 

• It's a game that I'm unlikely to actually play through, yet I would still like to experience it.
• I've played the game before and it's interesting to see how others play it - I find that other people tend to pick up on some things that I didn't, or have different play styles.
  

So they can say they played a game without actually having played it. 

@louiedog said:

Hell if I know. I don't have the endurance to watch someone run through an entire game. I'd rather play it myself.

I see what you did there.

The same reason why the Endurance Run reached Godlike status on GB

Some good commentary (If people are gonna listen to you over the course of an 100 hour RPG, you need to be entertaining) and a fun game and you have win, full internet WIN!

Yeah you have to wade through the bad ones to find the good ones, I personally like Vash12349's the best because he is just quick with fun quotes and one liners. I've recently gotten into SSOH's playthroughs, but I had to stop watching his Fallout new Vegas walkthrough becuase he was just blowing over stuff and missing cool piece of loot.

Which is my pet-peeves with some, they either blow through a game and miss a ton of cool content or items, or seem to be at an ongoing invisible war with their subscribers constantly talking about them bitching at stuff.

Because playing videogames is hard.

@EuanDewar said:

This was the only LP I've ever enjoyed because he hates every aspect of what he is doing and is very synced up with my own type of humor.

That doesn't count! He has an english accent, which makes it funny/interesting either way! ^_^

The best one I saw was a guy doing a blind run through the Silent Hill series. It was funny to watch him flip the fuck out over every little scare and it was interesting to hear his perspective on the series having never played the games before.

The worst one was an RE4 lets play with a teenager who would laugh and loudly exclaim Fail! Every time he shot a hatchet out of the air or killed a ganados before they threw the dynamite. He didn't seem like a bad guy it was just his over use of the words "epic" and "fail" that grated on my nerves.

@BrainSpecialist said:

Exactly the same reason people watch Quick Plays, or Last Saves. They either want to see what a game is like being played, or they think the person playing is funny.

I must just not be seeing the right ones, because I have not seen a single one where the person doesn't just sound like some idiot making one word quips or dumb sentences in stupid voices.

@Omega said:

The worst one was an RE4 lets play with a teenager who would laugh and loudly exclaim Fail! Every time he shot a hatchet out of the air or killed a ganados before they threw the dynamite. He didn't seem like a bad guy it was just his over use of the words "epic" and "fail" that grated on my nerves.

That truly sounds excruciatingly bad. Like whoa.

People mostly watch Let's Plays to at least see a game that they otherwise might not be able to experience otherwise. The problem is that at least on Youtube, there's a lack of quality control and the people doing LPs don't really have much of an idea what they're doing, either because it's their first time or because they assume that just doing the bare minimum is good enough, such as using a Camcorder to record their games or having "commentary" that is either a combination of lowbrow jokes or curses without anything really relevant to say. Notable offenders usually include anyone who plays recently-released games and end up showing that they have no idea what they're doing. As noted, SSoH tends towards blowing over stuff seemingly to get things over with, with a strong tendency towards ignorance towards anything that doesn't involve "killing guys with shotguns".

Of course, Retsupurae (and other similar spinoffs) are there to criticize the lower-quality ones.

In the case of the Endurance Run here, the guys are able to record the games with good quality and have a good enough sense of humor to actually be entertaining while (for the most part) understanding how to play a game competently and when to be quiet and let the game speak for itself. In Brad's case, he might just have a case of the "Let's Play Curse" in which his chances of goofing up are increased whenever he's playing while recording.

@Deusoma said:

@allworkandlowpay said:

@BrainSpecialist said:

Exactly the same reason people watch Quick Plays, or Last Saves. They either want to see what a game is like being played, or they think the person playing is funny.

I must just not be seeing the right ones, because I have not seen a single one where the person doesn't just sound like some idiot making one word quips or dumb sentences in stupid voices.

Ahhh yes, I see the problem. Your over-aggressive tone tells me that you're frustrated about something. Would you like a hug?

I'd love one.

I love Let's Plays, but the person has to be interested. The game is irelavant as long as they are interesting and funny.

@allworkandlowpay:

Stupid nonsense, always-on random ramblings and one liners is what makes him so damn funny. I dont really watch LPs because 95% of them are fucking boring but his stuff is legitimately hilarious.

@Hizang said:

I love Let's Plays, but the person has to be interested. The game is irelavant as long as they are interesting and funny.

I agree.

There's a couple of people on Youtube, such as NintendoCapriSun, that I think are pretty cool, but now everyone and their dogs are make Let's Plays, making the good ones hard to find.

@zaglis: Sorry, I don't like listen to morons that do shitty stereotype accents and make random noises. It didn't jive with me when Jim Carey did it 20 years ago, and it still doesn't today.

You can feel free to enjoy it, I just have taste.

@allworkandlowpay: People watch them because this generation is filled with lazy douches who can't be bothered to pick up a controller and play a game themselves so instead they find someone 'quirky' and 'funny' guy like 'Toby' and worship him like some kind of God, even though he is a pathetic loser who, to his credit, is making a load of money from the sheep who will defend his 'legendary' status to the bitter end.

@allworkandlowpay said:

@zaglis: Sorry, I don't like listen to morons that do shitty stereotype accents and make random noises. It didn't jive with me when Jim Carey did it 20 years ago, and it still doesn't today.

You can feel free to enjoy it, I just have taste.

Yeah, go fuck yourself. Just because you can't enjoy his humor doesn't mean you are better than people who likes his stuff.

@allworkandlowpay: To understand how to play the game? Google Paradox Let's Play Videos and you will see what I am getting at here.

@zaglis: Be upset at yourself for not having good taste, don't be upset at me, kiddo.