Longplay
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A longplay is a play-through of a computer or video game, created with the intent of completing it as fully as possible, mainly for the purposes of nostalgia, preservation, and possibly as a walkthrough. Unlike hectic speedruns, there is no time constraint aside from those imposed by bandwidth/filesize concerns.[1] Indeed, videos of Dune II and Wings exist which last nine hours.[2][3]
The defining characteristic of a longplay is that few shortcuts, if any, are taken to finish the game. Dull moments may be ultimately edited out of the final video, and sidequests may be ignored, but in general every task necessary to reach the end is to be recorded, including cutscenes.[4]
The Something Awful "Let's Play..." videos present on many video hosting sites might loosely qualify as longplays, though their persistent commentaries make them unsuitable as a digital museum piece.
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[edit] Creation
Games may be recorded in several ways, screencast software, a feature built-in to an emulator, or via a video capture device connected to a console or another computer.
External guides have mentioned these emulators for Amiga and Commodore 64 games.
WinUAE can directly save to avi[5], but it is best used for initial lossless recording prior to editing and reencoding with external tools.[6]
WinVice has proprietary History files which can reconstruct a gaming session with substantial filesize savings over traditional video codecs. The downside is that such files require the exact same version of WinVice to view them.[7]
[edit] Neologism Status
'Speedrun' and 'Game replay' emerged in recent years as a subset of 'Play-through' and gained popularity by being entertaining and competitive while needing only minutes of video. Video sharing websites accelerated their acceptance. Advances in consumer recording equipment, codecs, hard drive space, and internet services were necessary before complete games could reasonably be saved and shared.
Outside of the communities specializing in the practice, 'Longplay' is relatively unknown, though understood from context. The ambiguous umbrella term play-through is widely used instead.[8]
[edit] References
- ^ RAG-Longplay Announcement. Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved on March 3, 2008.
- ^ Example-Dune 2 Longplay. Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved on February 13, 2008.
- ^ Example-Wings Longplay. Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved on March 3, 2008.
- ^ C64-Longplays Guide. C64-Longplays. Retrieved on February 13, 2008.
- ^ RAG Recording-Basic Way. Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved on February 13, 2008.
- ^ RAG Recording-Recommended Way. Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved on February 13, 2008.
- ^ C64-Longplays Tutorial. C64-Longplays. Retrieved on February 13, 2008.
- ^ Google Video-Play-throughs. Google. Retrieved on March 3, 2008.
