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A friend and I have gotten into racing each other in various games. These are varying from short indie games like VVVVVV to longer console games like Metroid Prime.
We're now considering the idea of preparing and showing races to a stream audience. My questions to TL:
Is this something people would be interested in watching? Is there an audience for something like this, if done well?
What kind of production value would you like to see? What is important to a viewer?
+ Show Spoiler +Seeing each screen clearly?
Hearing each game's audio?
Hearing the banter between players?
Seeing the players as they play?
Would having commentators help? Someone to explain what's going on in the games and provide humor while the players focus?
We've been debating logistics, too, such as picture in picture vs two simultaneous streams, etc, but nothing has been decided, not even a date for this. We do know what games we want to do for our first run: VVVVVV, Braid, and Aquaria. We plan on doing a longer run of the Metroid Prime Trilogy once we figure out what we're doing and have the endurance lol.
So is this a good idea? What do people think? We're doing this for fun, but we thought it might be fun to let other people enjoy the experience, too.
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Each game should have audio and clear view of the screens. Banter is a must, cause it's way more fun to watch if you guys try to psyche eachother out, but only if it's in good taste. Seeing the players is cool, but I would say it's unnecessary in this case. Skip on the commentators. Horizontal Split Screen, or maybe try to stream both and using something like Warp Prism so we can still see both streams on one screen.
And you have to at least try and race through Mario Bros 3 
edit: Spelling
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Yes this is something that people already watch. They have steaming marathons and just beat a bunch of games for Charity I can't recall the name right now but you can look it up. I would watch it if you played good games
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Are you familiar with www.speedrunslive.com? They have speed runs you can set up and then the site shows the streams of all players involved in one handy window. They even award points to the top finishers. There are some sick sick speedrunners on that site.
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Also, the site SigmaoctanusIV is talking about is www.speeddemosarchive.com. You can click on "live streams" and it will show you (shocker!) the live streams of those affiliated with the site.
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Canada8031 Posts
Speeddemosarchive had a speedrunning marathon recently. Some of the runs they did were races. You can find those here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/marathon/schedule/
IMO, for speedrun races, the following things are important:
- A clear view of both players' screens
- Commentary of some sort is a must. There are thousands of games out there, and its literally impossible for people to be acquainted with the various breaks and tricks of each. Commentators help relay this knowledge. If you're going to skip over having a third-party commentator, at least explain what you're trying to achieve in the game as you do it.
- Try to get game audio through the stream if you can. It'll help fill dead air when nobody's talking.
- Seeing the players is a bonus, but isn't necessary. After all, for the majority of the run it'll consist of two guys sitting on a couch. =/
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www.speedrunslive.com is a pretty sweet site, hadn't heard of that one. Definitely wasn't aware that racing was a thing already, only knew about normal speed runs. Makes sense though ^^.
They have links to some nice looking tools which should help with a lot of the issues we are having.
Our concern is with skipping commentators there's no way to monitor the stream or anything, so if something goes wrong, we're staring blankly at our screens still. I suppose we can recruit someone to just watch the stream, though.
SigmaoctanusIV are you thinking of Speed Demos Archive's marathon they did a little while ago?
Edit: hah like 3 people beat me to the SDA run
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I've caught myself watching 1-2 of the Yoshi's Island speedruns that have been advertised on TL recently. I think its cool to bring back the old games, very nostalgic. The competitiveness between 2 players makes it that much more fun to watch~
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whoa a link to the past in 25 minuets!
That guy is a baller.
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EPT
