The Hotdog Laserhouse

Makes absolute sense. Nintendo’s been getting exclusive Sonic games for a while now. Sonic Advance 1-3, Sonic Battle, Sonic Rush, Secret Rings, Black Knight and Colors were all Nintendo exclusive (preemptive defense: yes, a couple Sonic Advance games eventually came to mobile platforms years later).

Your mother and I are very disappointed in you.

Who’s to say that’s going away? It’ll probably still be an integral tool for indies - Shovel Night has already used it to great effect; every “professional let’s player” I follow had a video where they ran through the GDC demo.

Then there was the whole stupid Dead Space 3 thing - same deal. A strangely large number of LPers I follow on Youtube mysteriously put up videos of an identical demo all in the same week with customized promotion URLs in their descriptions so Electronic Arts could track which group did the best at promoting their product.

Some developers realize and utilize these groups as a marketing tool. The rub is: they don’t have to do that. It’s the same reason print is dying, and is the same reason traditional games media is changing. Companies like Electronic Arts are realizing they don’t need to go to EGM, or Gamespot, or GiantBomb to help promote their game, they can just speak to their fans directly. Instead of sending a trailer for Modern Warcraft 8 to the press, they just post it on their own Youtube channel, host the screenshots on their own site, and let fans get to them that way.

For big studios, the amount of money they throw at marketing completely outpaces a thousand channels like Game Grumps or Two Best Friends Play. Is Zack Scott partnered with Doritos? No. But Halo 4 is, and every time you go to the 7-11 for some snacks, you see Master Chief reminding you that Halo 4’s coming out soon and you better play it. Yes, a Let’s Player adds that personal touch - they’re regular, average people. Someone you can trust. When they come away from a game saying, “That was cool!” you trust their opinion simply because you view them as a non-biased opinion. They aren’t trying to sell you that game, they are just reacting to it and providing their honest opinion.

The question is: how well does that work for good games? Is the type of unbias, personal, word-of-mouth promotion from a Let’s Play group going to eclipse the millions of dollars they throw at marketing to get their game shown on Jimmy Fallon? I doubt it. And that kind of word-of-mouth can actually backfire in a big, big way. That’s why it’s better for big companies to pay to control the message.

When you’ve paid hundreds of millions of dollars in development cost, you don’t want some grubby Let’s Player spoiling your marketing roadmap just because he’s smart enough to know your game sucks.

This is less of an issue with smaller, cheaper games like Shovel Knight, because it provides valuable feedback on the quality of the game and helps get the word out in an easy, accessible way. No surprise: Shovel Knight raised enough to meet every single one of its Kickstarter stretch goals. Crowdfunding meets crowdmarketing.

Nintendo doesn’t need that. Hey, guess what: if you liked the last Mario Kart, you’re probably going to like the next one enough to buy it. And with their Nintendo Direct streams, you always know exactly what the company is up to on an almost monthly basis.

Don’t need no Zack Scott to tell you what’s up with Nintendo.

Your recording idea is sound, I guess, but part of the reason Let’s Play works is because Youtube is an easy and ubiquitous place to consume that content. Splitting it out in to a specific commentary-supported emulator isn’t much of a solution if only 5% of a Youtube audience wants bother with it.

Well, I mean, what do you mean by lag?

Poor framerates can indeed effect controls. This actually happens a lot in Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations on consoles - if the framerate gets choppy, sometimes your controls aren’t as responsive.

I used to know the exact technical description of this, but it basically boils down to the fact that every time the game draws a new frame, it looks at controller input and what buttons are being pushed. The lower the framerate, the less its checking to see what the controller is doing. There are ways to separate these processes so that controller input doesn’t entirely rely on framerate but that’s the part I don’t really remember. But yes, when a bad framerate makes the controls unresponsive, that is bad.

Otherwise, low framerates generally do not bother me, especially if they’re stable. Just the other day, for the first time in my life, I noticed that Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 runs at sub-30fps. It never even occurred to me that it does because the framerate is more or less locked down and doesn’t really fluctuate - it wasn’t until I saw video footage of Ocarina of Time 3D on the 3DS and saw what that game looks like side-by-side with the N64 version that I went “Wow, the 3DS version is way smoother.”

But yeah - I played most of Donkey Kong 64 on real hardware and the framerate is not the part of that game that I hated. 20fps and above is what I consider “playable”. Not great, mind you, but playable.

As such, I never really understood people who were like “ALL GAMES HAVE TO BE 60FPS”. Like… not really. It would be nice, I guess, but depending on the game, 24fps is not unacceptable. That’s probably what Ocarina N64 runs at.

Sure, yes, okay, there are some games that absolutely cannot be played at low framerates. I know this for a fact - the capture card I have can only display at 30fps, and I’ve occasionally tried to play something like Burnout Paradise or F-Zero GX on it and while it’s possible, both of those games move so incredibly fast that 60fps is basically necessary. Case in point. All I do in that video is make the dumbest mistakes, because I’m recording at 30fps. It probably doesn’t help that I was also playing in 480i as opposed to 720p, but I don’t have $200+ for better capture gear.

But, like, Gears of War? Gears of War would technically benefit from being 60fps, but it’s not a requirement. Works just fine at 30.

People who want 60fps in everything just because they’re chasing technology are kind of like the weirdo audiophiles who think FLAC is the only music format worth supporting.

Makes absolute sense. Nintendo’s been getting exclusive Sonic games for a while now. Sonic Advance 1-3, Sonic Battle, Sonic Rush, Secret Rings, Black Knight and Colors were all Nintendo exclusive (preemptive defense: yes, a couple Sonic Advance games eventually came to mobile platforms years later).

Sonic games on Nintendo platforms probably still sell way better than they do elsewhere, because Nintendo platforms are Sonic’s key demographic now. You like colorful platformers? You own a Nintendo console. Period.

Sega more than likely has plans for a separate Sonic game for everybody else, and chances are, Nintendo’s going to get that one, too. In addition to all of their exclusive games, they also ended up getting Sonic Unleashed (Wii) and Sonic Generations (3DS).

There is nothing out of the ordinary going on here.

Well, I think coming at this being all mad that the other shoe is finally dropping is a bit cynical - there’s a lot of negativity going around about Let’s Players in general that I think is kind of undeserved.

To me, it’s just more that Let’s Playing being a “profession” is a little too easy. When something grows that quickly and that much money starts being thrown around, it just won’t last. One way or another, something was going to come along and make things harder for everyone involved. That’s just the way the world works.

When you have so many people producing so much content, of course the signal-to-noise ratio is going to greatly favor noise.

The big deal is that “commentary” is becoming kind of an important thing on the internet, I guess. Guys like Total Biscuit got their start as Starcraft commentators. People are starting to cheer for guys like UltraDavid in the same way they do with sportscasters like Bob Costas. Some people thought they had careers in video game commentary.

And some of them still do! Day[9] is probably going to keep going. TotalBiscuit is going to keep doing Starcraft.

The problem is that it was too easy to start up a Youtube Channel and start doing commentary over anything. What’s happening now is more like that stuff being regulated. It wouldn’t surprise me if there might be a way in the future to make money off of Let’s Play, but it’ll be a much more difficult, selective process. It’ll involve direct partnerships with publishers, there’ll be a hiring process, so on and so forth.

I don’t actually know what I’m saying anymore, though. I feel like I kind of lost the point I was trying to make and am just firing random thoughts out in to the aether!

Well, it’s the last level in the game, and is basically the game designers going “Hahaha, screw you, here’s a level type we know you hate.” It’s making you eat broccoli and you don’t want to.

Poking around a bit, it appears that the air bubbles in Scrap Brain Zone Act 3 behave differently than the other air bubbles in the game. Level skipping to Labyrinth Zone Act 1, the first bubbles object you encounter spits out one large air bubble every 3-4 seconds all the way up until the moment you die.

The first bubbles object in Scrap Brain Zone Act 3, however, is more like every 15-20 seconds. In other words, if you’re in a countdown, there’s a significant chance you aren’t going to get air in time. It is pertinent that you stop at every air refill you can, even if you don’t need it. Most bubbles will provide you with one large air bubble shortly after they come on screen, regardless of timing.

“Stop at every bubble station” is just good advice for underwater levels in general, I feel. I’ve always thought they provided an interesting challenge - Superman has to face his kryptonite sooner or later, and in the grand scheme of things, underwater portions of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 make up maybe 10% of their overall games. It’s not until you get to Sonic 3 where things get a little odd, given the fact that almost every stage in Sonic 3 has a little bit of water in it for some reason. But by then you have the water shield, so it’s not really a problem, I guess.

But yeah. Underwater levels in Sonic games are part of a balanced breakfast, y’all.