The Continuing Annoyance Of Getting That Let’s Play Going

No Saturday Night Showcase or Jake & Leon this week (I will have an update tomorrow on what’s coming) because in addition to just a week of being pulled away from the computer (and next week will be the same annoyance) I was distracted with trying to finally move forward with that Let’s Play series I wanted to do 10 #$%$#%#$% YEARS AGO!!!!!! At least that’s when I posted the poll to choose between five different games to see what order I would put them in. The goal was to do a story based game play series, called BW Gameplay, that would focus on the story, after seeing so many story based playthroughs where the player talked over the dialog. As a story person, I really want to hear the story. Talk over the gameplay, even if you have to do a voiceover later rather than a live playthrough.

Then I got sick, then I got a computer that wouldn’t run the first game on the list, and long story short I finally got that working on an emulation of the Gamecube version. Today I wanted to see if any of the games would work. They did not.

1. Batman: Vengeance is the first game that was chosen in the poll…and then it wouldn’t run on the computer I had. It really doesn’t start on Windows 10, while the one I had was I think Windows 8. Maybe I could find a way to get that to run, but despite people online saying it’s possible, I could not get it to run on 10, and neither did my IT friend. (As in a friend of mine who has done IT for years.) This is the one I was able to emulate on a Gamecube emulator, and admittedly the video was better because it was less compressed.
2. 007: Nightfire is the second chosen game. I haven’t gotten far in the game before and was looking forward to finishing all of these games. This one also is too old to run on Windows 10 but I have gotten it to work on older games. I could try to find a console emulation of this as well, but I would rather play these games on the version I actually own, and Batman: Vengeance was bad enough.
3. Portal is the only game I’ve actually finished, but I wanted to explore the story again in review before finally playing the sequel. Admittedly this one not getting going could be the result of issues I was having with Steam, since the game won’t run without Steam. That bugged me when I got it. I bought it at a closing Circuit City for dirt cheap and was really looking forward to it…only to have to be forced to get a Steam account to play it. That’s still morally questionable, Valve, but here in 2024 game companies have done far worse. I got Steam sorted out but by then I stopped caring.
4. Transformers: War For Cybertron may or may not run. The fourth game chosen, when I tried to install it the installer just sat there doing nothing. Portal doing that already made me mad so I gave up. I got partway through the Autobot campaign and really do want to give this game another try to finish.
5. LA Noire tops the “block of five”, the games I wanted to open this let’s play series on. I didn’t even attempt to install it because of the same Steam issues. This will be interesting to play because the game has some swearing and I’m guessing some bloody murder scenes. As someone who likes to keep my content in the PG range I don’t know if I’ll be able to edit the videos. I wouldn’t be livestreaming any of them because you can’t talk to the chat and play at the same time. Plus I’m boring in livestream. This is the only game I have never played in this list and I would love to get to it, but it was the last one chosen by people who probably stopped waiting for it years ago. Again, 10 years have passed since I tried to start this. That’s the level of distractions I ‘ve had lately.

I think we have an old computer around here somewhere and I have copies of both Windows Vista and 8. That means if I can get the games running there, and a screen recorder that will record them, I can finally get this production going…or at least finally play and finish some of these games and have no worries about all the other old games I have to play. Hopefully next week’s Clutter Report will have an update on that plan. Given how this month has started, I’m not so convinced.