Longplay

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.cite web|title=RAG-Longplay Announcement|url=http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/news2/article.php?storyid=6|publisher=Recorded Amiga Games|accessdate=March 3|accessyear=2008] Indeed, videos of Dune II and Wings exist which last nine hours.cite web|title=Example-Dune 2 Longplay|url=http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=132|publisher=Recorded Amiga Games|accessdate=February 13|accessyear=2008] cite web|title=Example-Wings Longplay|url=http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=508|publisher=Recorded Amiga Games|accessdate=March 3|accessyear=2008]

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.cite web|title=C64-Longplays Guide|url=http://www.c64-longplays.de/guide.html|publisher=C64-Longplays|accessdate=February 13|accessyear=2008]

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 avicite web|title=RAG Recording-Basic Way|url=http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=7|publisher=Recorded Amiga Games|accessdate=February 13|accessyear=2008] , but it is best used for initial lossless recording prior to editing and reencoding with external tools.cite web|title=RAG Recording-Recommended Way|url=http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=94&forum=1|publisher=Recorded Amiga Games|accessdate=February 13|accessyear=2008]

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.cite web|title=C64-Longplays Tutorial|url=http://www.c64-longplays.de/tutorial.html|publisher=C64-Longplays|accessdate=February 13|accessyear=2008]

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.cite web|title=Google Video-Play-throughs|url=http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=play-through|publisher=Google|accessdate=March 3|accessyear=2008]

References

External links

* [http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/modules/news2/ Recorded Amiga Games]
* [http://www.archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive Archive.org's C64 Game Video Archive]
* [http://www.c64-longplays.de/ C64-Longplays]
* [http://www.archive.org/details/game_replays Archive.org's Videogame Replays]
* [http://longplays.net/ World of Longplays - Longplays of everything.]