Forum Let's Plays

[DoctorDizzy]

Anyone else remember let's plays on forums? The Let's Play Archive has a lot of archives of them, most being from the Something Awful forms.

I'm a text > video person, and I kind of prefer these to video let's plays?? Less talking and more reading, you know?? I've kinda been wanting to do one of these, but I also don't really want to accidentally break any rules on either forum I'd wanna do this in. (GBATemp and here being those forums.)

Do you guys remember these? Do you prefer them over their video counterparts? How would you guys do something similar on a personal website?

[Memory]

I had no idea these were a thing!

[Grimlock]

i've always heard about forum lets plays but i'd never check them out. i'd hear stuff about the somethingawful (if i'm remembering right) danganronpa one where people paid for ads that spoiled people on the plot lol. i definitely prefer video lets plays for the background noise at least and experiencing games i wouldn't play otherwise in a visual way is nice

[shevek]

I kind of find the site a bit hard to navigate for some reason, so I don't really understand what they are. Is it like liveblogging when you play a game? I know something like that from Tumblr.

[bugholder's epiphany]

I kind of find the site a bit hard to navigate for some reason, so I don't really understand what they are. Is it like liveblogging when you play a game? I know something like that from Tumblr.

Pretty much. Sometimes its like reading a nice lil' text walkthrough of a video game with funny comments and jokes peppering it. They're pretty good and can be pretty fun reads!

One of my favorites has to be the Dwarf Fortress play-through that brought us Boatmurdered

[Yukari]

First time I experienced The World Ends With You and Dangan Ronpa was via forum let’s plays!

I’m doing something like this for my Umineko playthrough, but I’ve been calling it a ‘liveblog’. Here it is for reference. I don't really summarize the game... it's more like, "here are scenes that stood out to me, and here's how I personally connected to them".

[BlazingCobaltX]

I also experienced the first Danganronpa through a text Let's Play, and I gotta say that it's still one of my favourite experiences. It was just so convenient to read on my phone in bed.

There's another Let's Play that I've been meaning to check out for a long time, but it was paywalled for a long time: Machi. Unfortunately, I now see that the LP was never finished.

[KittyTheKat]

I played Myst for the first time today, and it made me think of doing a post or two about it in the style of a forum LP on my site 

There's another Let's Play that I've been meaning to check out for a long time, but it was paywalled for a long time: Machi.

This looks really cool! I've heard only a bit about sound novels like that, but I'd really like to play one sometime. I like visual novels like Zero Escape and Persona so I think I'd enjoy it.

[BlazingCobaltX]

This looks really cool! I've heard only a bit about sound novels like that, but I'd really like to play one sometime. I like visual novels like Zero Escape and Persona so I think I'd enjoy it.

If you haven't yet, definitely try 428: Shibuya Scramble. It is a spiritual successor to the sound novel genre, and it's in English.

[bugholder's epiphany]

Looked through my bookmarks and found three lets plays I enjoyed and had read in the past. They range from being rather informative to being silly to being like writing the game as if it were a text story or something.

https://lparchive.org/Mega-Man-X-Command-Mission/
https://lparchive.org/Sims-3/
https://lparchive.org/Grand-Theft-Auto-San-Andreas-(Screenshot)/

[gub]

It's not necessarily a forum Let's Play but this Sims playthrough/soap opera is one of my favorite video gameplay reads of all time. I still go back to it all the time to read through because it has some really dry comedy. It's central enough to my personality that I reference it without thinking all the time in day-to-day life.

I remember reading a few others back in the day. The Sims is one of the few communities that still seems to do text-based Let's Play, but most people do a lot of editing/dressing up screenshots as a story medium as opposed to straight gameplay for a linear game. I know of a handful of dreamwidth users that do Elder Scrolls games post-by-post style still. I also prefer text as the medium for gameplay and tutorials, especially the old-time IGN text guides for old games that are full of misinformation and usually unfinished :P