u/ScalesGhost

You love Joe, but hate all his opinions? This is the video for you! A compilation of Joe reading *other people's* opinions on the Life is Strange games. Silences and tangents are cut out, so it's roughly one hour of hyper-compressed Bad Takes.

This is a small follow up to the video I posted yesterday, because a few people in the youtube comments indicated interest in a Supercut like this. I do not plan to spam the subreddit with Mid-Effort compilations like this every day.

My next video will be compiling all of Joe's Micro Reviews on Stream Games he has done since the end of 2022. It'll still take a while.

Lastly, I am still holding out for a Cairn playthrough.

This is a compilation of Joe sharing his thoughts on every single Life is Strange game after completing it.

Hi, it's me again, the guy who released the 10 Hour Dark Souls Hypercut a few weeks ago (viewable here). This is part of a larger project to compile every single Joseph Anderson Micro-Review (so the stream segments where he talks about a game after beating it) into one video.

Q: What value does this video provide?

A: This is by far and away the best way to get Joe's thoughts on every Life is Strange game. Not only does it save you the time to actually look for every single last stream of each game and *then* look for the section where he reviews it, no, I have also edited each segment to cut out long silences (which are abundant, since these reviews come after 6+ hour stream sessions), remove Donation-Readouts which have nothing to do with the games, including other tangents, I have adjusted volume to be universally pleasant between all games (some were WAY louder than others) and more!

Q: What is the best Life is Strange Game?

A: Before the Storm is the best one. It is, undeniably, YA-Slop (and so is the first one). However, video games as a medium have *so little* YA material, that it, somehow, becomes YA-Gem. Yes, I played it when I was 15. The second best is Life is Strange 1. I also played Captain Spirit, which I liked, and Life is Strange 2 Episode 1, which I *also* liked. I watched Joe play the entirety of Double Exposure and Reunion, which both looked AWFUL.

Q: Anything else you want to say?

A: I am *still* holding out for Joe to stream Cairn. It's peak.

https://preview.redd.it/n9kj6hz2v9eh1.png?width=1334&format=png&auto=webp&s=3e07a932e64b9500aa39b4e084ad33ec65b23c0f

my opinion of Forgotten City has considerably improved with this second stream, the writing got much better. Looking forward to the finale!

I've noticed this on Nyaa dot Si, very often, if you search for a series and sort by Most Seeders (which is very useful since 1. popularity correlates with quality 2. more seeders means faster download), very often the top result will have relative huge file sizes, like 2GB per 25 minute episode.

And so the obvious answer for why they are still popular is, the image quality must be better, since they're less compressed, right? But I've compared them with versions that have like 250MB per episode, and I really cannot tell the difference. The 250MB episodes look identical to the 2GB ones.

I've thought up a few possibilities:

1. I am blind, the huge uploads *do* look better (I'm on 1080p so that might also be a factor)

2. There isn't a Noticeable difference, but the types of people who torrent nowadays disproportionately care about archiving, preferring less compression even if it isn't Actually That Noticeable

3. When a new show comes out, compressing properly takes time, so the uploaders who *don't* compress that much are on the site faster, get seeds faster, and since a lot of people often just go for the one with the most seeds (I know I do), there's a huge First Mover Advantage even if the download is large.

or maybe it's something completely different? I'm curious.

Q: What is this?

A: This is Supercut of all videos Joe has made about FromSoft games. The videos included are the 5 DS1 videos, the 3 DS2 videos, the 3 Bloodborne vids, the 3 DS3 vids, and the 2 Elden Ring vids. It is 10 hours long.

Q: Why is this useful?

A: I really like having Joe's videos in the background while doing something else. And going through his whole journey with this one series, is something that appeals to me. However, until now, that experience has been more difficult than it as to be. In order to rectify this, several changes have been made to the videos. All in all, they amount to hundreds, maybe close to a thousand edits, from cuts to audio adjustments to filters to transitions etc..

Here are some specific ones:

- adjusted audio volume within videos (e.g. sometimes gameplay sections interspersing joe talking were much louder / quieter than his voice, when it seems like they shouldn't have been). this happened most often in the early videos, i must've made dozens of adjustments to the Dark Souls 1 ones.

- removed some weird sounds in the Dark Souls 1 videos

- cut out some commentary-less gameplay sections that serve no purpose when the video is running in the background. e.g. extensive visual demonstrations of bad hitboxes with zero commentary. there's still plenty of that, but now he's talking over it.

- cut out some silences that go on too long when the video is used as background material

- intros and outros are often removed / adjusted

- removed area title card sections from the ds1, bloodborne video and ds3 videos

- the bloodborne video has quite a few 1-3 second segments where joe is just wailing on an enemy with no commentary, those are removed, same with Dark Souls 3

- removed one really weird cut in the DS3 video

- made the DS1 vids a bit louder. made the ds2 vids much quieter. holy shit those are loud. every video should be equally loud, so you don't ever have to adjust your volume.

So, tsumari, in other words, this is Joseph Anderson On Dark Souls, optimized for background listening. I feel like optimizing it for that didn't really take anything away from the Watching experience, though. If you wanted to Binge Watch all the Dark Souls Videos, I think this is the best place, because you don't need to click between them, and because you don't need to adjust audio in between videos.

My goal with this video is to deliver a Coffee Like Experience: When you first watch it, you won't really notice a difference, but when you go back to binging the Dark Souls Vids the old fashioned way, you'll almost gag.

Q: This is content stealing.

A: I mean, yeah, it is. I feel like at least *some* of me is in this Hypercut, it took a surprising amount of work, but yeah. I will unlist it from youtube if joe requests.

Q: Why is it called "Hypercut?"

A: Well, the first time I really came into contact with the word "Supercut" was in relation to Joe's streams, which basically just summarize him playing one single game, right? Like, the "Hypnospace Outlaw Supercut" for example, that's one game. Ok, so, if we're doing multiple games, e.g. DS1-DS3, that would now be one level above that, right? So, like, Ultracut. And since we're not only doing that series, but also including Bloodborne Elden Ring, we need to go even further beyond, to Hypercut.

Really I just like how the word sounds, though. This whole idea popped into my head while showering and I just really needed to get out of me.

Q: How long did this take?

A: Longer than it had to. I think I started about 2 weeks ago? I didn't work on it every day. I had to make a LOT of edits to the early videos, the audio there really is a mess, and there's a lot of clips that don't really have any use / are just empty gameplay when you listen to the videos. They don't really improve the watching experience either. Here's some screenshots from my timeline:

https://preview.redd.it/ddmcm34a9p9h1.png?width=883&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab4c17d05646401d8343ed5efe8d50d7bdea6430

https://preview.redd.it/9bw30ufb9p9h1.png?width=1184&format=png&auto=webp&s=738fc9d775981ffc5fdba4fb9d8b1880f2db8ec3

Q: Anything else you have to say?

A: I hope this video provides at least some value to at least some people. I had fun making it, that's for sure. Found new appreciation for Joe's editing style.

Furthermore, Joe, please play Cairn. It's Peak.

happy pride everyone

View Poll

Was wondering whether we have any idea how big the population of the world is. It has to be above hundred million, purely logistically, but do we have anything more concrete?

Posting this because a lot of people in chat have been asking about it.

I just finished the game, liked it. 8/10. But I don't think it would make for a good stream game, since it really basically is just Worse Disco Elysium, with a lot of bits from that game recycled almost 1 to 1. Would make for a miserable chat experience too imo, since it'd inevitably devolve into arguments about the ethics of playing the game at all, after what went down at the studio.

If Joe (or chat) happens to be thirsting for a Disco-Like, I recommend Esoteric Ebb. It's distinct enough that it's not *just* Worse Disco Elysium.

Me personally, I'm holding out for Cairn

In my opinion, there are 2 distinct ways to traverse the mountain area in Death Stranding 2.

1. You can just go as the crow flies, straight to your destination, through the snow, down into the valleys, up out of the valleys, only making a curve when you have to avoid untraversable terrain like a steep mountain.

2. You can climb a nearby peak, and then follow the narrow rocky path to the next peak, and then so on and so on until you arrive at the peak nearest to your destination, and only then descend.

Now, it seems obvious to me that players are supposed to do 2 at least some of the time. the peaks are obviously designed to be climbed (even though I dislike the climbing system and wish it worked differently). The game even starts with a section where you traverse narrow rock paths like this.

However, is 2 actually faster than 1? I am interested in your opinions.

Note: The parameters are No Vehicles, no Floating Carries, No Hoverboard, Moderate Load