Let's Play | Alice: Madness Returns

Americans try to figure out savepoints and ultimately just get bigger.

Awards
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Console Port (ARPG), 1920x1200, 30FPS

Seg 1 encoded at 2011-12-05


  • This LP would have never been released, never even finished, if not for the immense efforts I took post-production to recover it. As I detail during the recordings, I started recording this about half a year prior to the video release (during summer), during a period in which I had built an external drive to use as eSata. Unfortunately, as experience and research would prove, windows 7 doesn't really like eSata drives, or certain chipsets don't... or something. But the ultimate result was that the drive would randomly turn itself off. Whether or not this was responsible for some of the issues I had in Alice is still unknown, because another issue cropped up I only discovered after I was finished recording.
  • My mic was dying. It was a flexible kind of mic, and it seems after the many years of abuse the neck finally started to become damaged and the wiring was losing connectivity. The end result was that the mic essentially "powered off" randomly. As one would expect, to suddenly lose the mic is not a good thing, and several portions of the game, including the entire last level, had no mic audio. Fraps would also randomly stop recording outright, perhaps because the mic was vanishing. If fraps had continued to not record it is possible the rerecordings may not have been necessary, since I would have eventually noticed why it was doing that. Alas, many hours of video still made it out with no mic audio. At other times during gameplay fraps would just repeatedly stop recording, prompting me to restart the entire game since interns don't know how to support alt-tabbing in 2011.
  • In the lesser portion of no audio I decided to do a cast over post-production, and then I replayed the entire last level later on (to show the game to HKS). Not the most ideal of circumstances, but the game and cast otherwise were decent enough that I felt it was worth saving them. This was recorded shortly before I fell into the pit of lard that was Black Sun's final months, so the exhaustion is creeping up on me and I am weary during these casts, just enough to make me very irritable.

 

Segment 1

Download - 2.3gb

2:03 hours, x264/AAC

 

I take my time to smell the flowers and make sure my recording environment is set up. This was recorded during summer, so my massive industrial-scale fan is on. I wanted to avoid the fan turbulence hitting the mic, but this never becomes an issue in the recording due to my efforts. Start using real physics engines, Epic, you lazy sellouts.

 

Also I seem to have forgotten what the autosave looks like. I was expecting a system similar to GoW; save points with death-based checkpoints. But there's only the autosave.

 

Segment 2

Download - 2.5gb

2:17 hours, x264/AAC

It isn't long before I encounter two of the most severe issues in Alice - bad checkpoint design and the horrible locking system.

 

Segment 3

Download - 2.2gb

2:29 hours, x264/AAC

Segment of rage. I encounter some incredibly difficult fights and am still not 100% accustomed to this game yet. I could have used the clockwork bomb to make those fights a bit easier. But, you know me.

 

Segment 4

Download - 890mb

55 minutes, x264/AAC

Short segment separating us from the broken bit.

 

Segment 5

Download - 2.4gb

1:49 hours, x264/AAC

This segment is one of the ones that suffered severe damage due to the aforementioned issues with the mic. Fraps corrupted several portions of video here and the early portions of the video are a bit straggly. I got mad.

At around 7:00 a stray pepper hit the bottle. :3

 

Segment 6

Download - 2.2gb

1:49 hours, x264/AAC

Physical exhaustion, CTS, and software issues wear me thin. This segment suffered damage around 50:00ish, during cinematics and such. I had gone through these many times, recording them and inspecting objects in their entirety, but those videos were corrupted/lost and I grew impatient having to constantly restart and re-record. The most important cinematic I made sure to record every time, though. Even today, mkvmerge didn't want to mux the video properly and two of the newest versions of the app spat out broken files. It's possible the very encodes are slightly wonky due to the mangled fraps files.

 

Also, I am 99.69% sure that the being unable to access the menu is a serious bug either in the game or logitch junk.

 

Segment 7

Download - 2.18gb

2:09 hours, x264/AAC

For some reason, in the area before the Daimyo Wasp (22:00-ish) I get a save at the fish chain but when I die I respawn at the ledge before it and nothing past that ledge, e.g. between the ledge and the chain, is actually saved. So those save points aren't even accurate to when you see them. Faggots.


40:00 lol @ "32 piece", learn to read

 

Segment 8

Download - 2.3gb

2:30 hours, x264/AAC

At 41:40ish I am certain that the Daimyo's line attack linetraced down the wall and killed me and that's where the loadscreen came from.

 

Segment 9

Download - 1.5gb

1:24 hours, x264/AAC

During verification I discovered the recording of one of the cinematics was heavily damaged and missing around 30-40 seconds of video, so I opted to re-record that portion on the spot. Luckily this was not a very large portion.

 

Segment 10

Download - 1.75gb

1:49 hours, x264/AAC

The audio quality for my re-recording turned out to be significantly worse than I had expected. This is likely a result of the same issues that gave the Supcom 2 LP some difficulty (same sitting, really). So the mic had at least a small chance of picking up HKS I used the Omni setting, but this doesn't bode well for ambient sound, as the new mic had a habit of absorbing every impact on the keyboard like a mortar shell. I applied the same EQ settings I used on Supcom 2 to correct this. It's not perfect, but it's better than re-recording yet again.
I miss several Snouts on behalf of the giant fan blocking out all audio (The recording hears them because of direct record).

 

Segment 11

Download - 640mb

37 minutes, x264/AAC

Just to fuck it up one last time, there's an echo. So I re-recorded the major area of this to get rid of it. mkvmerge gave me some weird warning about private codec data not matching.

 

NOTE - This segment has confirmed issues with Chrome and VLC. I will NOT be fixing it. Use a real player.

 


Review

Download - 18mb MP3