The Sims 2 on Console
I’ve finally reached a point in my production where I feel confident. Confident about a number of aspects of the creative process: concept, filming, writing scripts, editing, even thumbnails. I haven’t felt this way about many of my past projects, because who’s actually good at anything when they first start out? The first two years on Youtube are what I’m dubbing the experimental phase. There’s hardly any examples of Youtubers who come out of the gate with straight bangers. I think it’s normal to feel embarrassed about the integrity of your past work. For me, it might not be totally normal to obsess over it so much, but that obsession pushes me to create bigger and better projects.
This ‘The Sims’ series is what I’m most proud of at the moment. There’s not many people who can be successful on Youtube uploading Let’s Plays anymore, besides, obviously, a select few. People crave a certain type of content, and favor the longer videos nowadays. I noticed that the specific games I’ve been playing didn’t have a ton of full-game playthroughs. There’s a lot of videos from several years ago that play the first hour or so of the game, which is a little more reminiscent of the style people craved at the time. Don’t get me wrong, full play-throughs existed, and they were done very well. I wanted to contribute in a slightly different way. A lot of people have never played the older ‘The Sims’ games, and the console versions are especially overlooked. I want these videos to not only be fun to watch, but give the viewer the experience of almost having played the game themselves. I do struggle embedding humor into my videos at times, which is something I feel that I’m getting better at. I don’t want it to feel like I’m reading off of a script. But the script format has helped me immensely by toning down the rambling, something I struggled with when I did more Let’s Play style videos. Also, I can avoid my incessant use of “like, um, and”.
This video, and most of my other ‘The Sims’ console videos, let’s be real, gave me a lot of tech issues. I swear to God, no matter how much you think you’ve got everything dialed in, making a Youtube video is always going to be an uphill battle with tech. I’m a magnet for technical difficulties. Originally, I planned on recording the gameplay for ‘The Sims 2 on Console’ with my PS2. It took me a while to get everything I needed for the PS2 to capture card setup, but I bought all the accessories and set it up for recording. When I sat down to record my ‘The Sims 2’ gameplay, everything when to shit. Well, I did get through about 4 hours of gameplay just fine. Then, the cheap HDMI adapter broke. No worries, I can run to a game store to get another one. I got it connected only for the picture quality to be crunchy and awful, and most definitely not match the gameplay I had already recorded. There was some time to spare, so I ordered another one online for next-day delivery, only for it to break after about an hour of recording. FML. So, I had to go the emulator route, and completely restart my gameplay from the beginning, which always pisses me off. There’s a ton of positives to using the emulator to record, like the picture quality is insane, obviously, the loading screens are shorter, and general lag is cut way down. But I want to be able to record videos on the consoles that they are intended to be played on and not have technical difficulties every step of the way! Here’s my solution for the future: have a metric ass-load of HDMI converters on deck. Well, and set aside some pennies to buy specific consoles with HDMI ports. Fuck, man- technology will be the death of me. But there’s always something to be learned.
