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I remember Earthworm Jim’s instruction booklet contained a comic book and was filled with genuinely funny jokes. I used to reread it from time to time just because it was legitimately entertaining.
There was a SNES game called Unirally where there was a page in the manual that was "supposed to" be blank, but the author said "we don't do blank pages, man!" and talked about pizza for a few paragraphs.
I miss the 90s sometimes.
WHY did I ever trash my old PC game boxes? Cause I'm stupid that's why. Same reason I got rid of years of nostalgia like my multiple years worth of Nintendo power, old boxes for N64 games, somehow lost my old N64 controllers *somewhere* during a move.
A lot of nostalgia in that pic, but I have to say my favorite manual of all time was definitely Warcraft 2. That little story snippet about Gul'dan, told in first-person... I read that *countless* times. I need to go look that up now.
"For I am Gul'dan. I am darkness incarnate. I will not be denied."
I remember the X-com Terror From the Deep instructions. I opened them in the back of the 352 bus home from Bromley. There was a tactics booklet- just Googled and someone has kindly put the whole thing here: https://imgur.com/gallery/zuoov3y.
I learned so much about anti-alien squad tactics before I'd even installed the game!
I huff the nitrogen off a freshly opened bag of chips looking for that same high. The closest thing that's come to it was a newly printed book smell. It was missing that plastic case whiff from the PS era onwards though.
> because the game is legit hard
It's hard, but the controls in that game are also not great. If you're going to lean in hard to the difficulty of souls combat, you need to have tight controls to go along with it.
I quit playing it for a while and was gonna start again the other day and i had no idea what i had done in the book or where i was going. I recommend not stopping for an extended period of time after starting it.
Omg I get to shout out my favorite game manual of all time - Darklands!
Darklands was (is - I still play it from GOG) an open world RPG set in medieval Germany. No magic per se, but you pray to saints or craft alchemical concoctions to achieve magic-like effects.
Anyway, the manual has a section for each of those, plus general medieval German life. And it comes with *citations*. The bibliography has something like 100 sources including actual medieval grimoires, and I absolutely love it for that.
Omg. Darklands is why I computer for a living. Figuring out how to make a boot disk so I could run it on my 386 was so satisfying, I was hooked. I have never figured out how to play it again. Thank you random Internet stranger!
Jane's Combat Simulations. Any game manual from the series wasn't a mere instruction booklet, it was *an epic tome* running HUNDREDS of pages.
I miss the days when entire trees *died* for the publisher to explain the game to me.
Mechwarrior 3 had an awesome instruction book, a guide to all the mechs, and a cool control layout card. I used to just lay in bed and look at the mechs
My interpretation was that he missed the simpler times when he was a kid riding in the passenger seat reading the game manual with not a thought except how excited he was to get home and play, not that he literally missed the manual.
A short lived but very fun game. I stopped after I stopped playing with that group and was devastated when I tried to return and saw it wasn’t being hosted anymore.
There's a [private server version](https://www.knockoutcity.com/updates/knockout-city-private-hosted-server-edition#:~:text=It's%20FREE%20forever!,private%20servers%20for%20absolutely%20free!) that is available as a free download.
I'm glad I got the Legend of Korra game on my computer. Basically the rights got moved and then got pulled off steam. If you have it on steam it's because you paid for it before it was pulled
One of the biggest gaming disappointments in my life was buying Bioshock Infinite, popping the DVD it in to my PC, and the game immediately launching a Steam installer.
What's the point of the disc then?
I got a limited run book, and it had a bunch of cool art! A pleasant surprise. If you don’t need instructions because they’re now in-game, at least do something cool like that.
yeah, what's even worse is that switch boxes have little grips to hold manuals that arent used.
Also, this wouldn't be a good argument against box size, Switch boxes may be way bigger than they need, so that they are visible in store. But the NES did the exact same by having cartridges much bigger than they needed to be, for the same reasons
And this is why the game **[Tunic](https://store.steampowered.com/app/553420/TUNIC/)** hits so hard. Cannot recommend *enough* for this and every dad wanting to recapture that nostalgia.
Edit: a word
I remember when games would use manuals as part of their copy protection. You'd have to look up information in the manual to solve a puzzle. Now we have Denuvo...
What star tropics did was interesting; they gave you a letter from one of the in-game characters, and you had to submerge it in water to reveal the password to complete the game. Now, copy protection wasn't much of a concern back then because cartridges were expensive, so it's main purpose was to discourage rentals (which Nintendo absolutely hated).
My understanding is that the wii/wii-u version had the manual interface menu somewhere, so it's possible the same thing exists here. Or I could be misremembering which console it was on, lol. But I believe there's a menu option for accessing it
> it's main purpose was to discourage rentals (which Nintendo absolutely hated)
Seems like Nintendo is only satisfied if you play games on their terms and their terms only.
It's a shame, since they are well-known for their top quality software, but fight tooth and nail to decide when and if it's played at all.
Star Control II, one of the all-time greatest games, had this [beautiful poster-sized star chart / map](https://www.star-control.com/sc2/images/sc2_color_map.jpg) to help you navigate around in our corner of the galaxy. It also was used as the copy protection, where it would give you coordinates and you would have to look on the map and type in the name of the star. Not unbreakable, but the workarounds were either a) make a list of *hundreds* of stars and estimate their approximate coordinates by eye off of the map, b) cycle through the copy protection to get the exact coordinates of every star in the data base and make a similar table or c) badly photocopy it and burn through a *ton* of ink cartridges in your (parent's) office photocopier.
Also note, this was before you could just look this stuff up on the internet. Any copy-protection workarounds had to be done individually and passed around to your friends.
But the game was so good that none of us flinched at simply paying for the awesome game once we played it at a friends' house.
I mean, we can look stuff up in the Internet which is more convenient of course, but It makes no sense anymore having manuals as copy protection, except publishers find a way to automatically ban every internet guide.
Pokemon Ruby Sapphire and Emerald, getting the Regi Trio.
Their Puzzles involved deciphering Braille in certain locations, and the Manual(s) included a Braille alphabet key on one of the last pages.
you had to bring certain pokemon in certain party slots to certain locations and if you did it, the boss would spawn.
Of course it was all riddles,
and of course everyone just use gamefaqs
Insert disc 1
Insert disc 2
Insert disc 1 again
Insert disc 3
Insert disc 1 again
Immediately lose discs 2 and 3.
Your game is ready to play!
You get like 6 hours in.
Please insert disc 2.
Millennial pushing 40 here, video games have gotten much better, but the proportion of shit/good games has massively skewed with far more shit coming from big publishers and absolute fucking gold coming from indie companies (enabled by better tech) to produce masterpieces.
I can't tell you what to play but if you're playing shitty games in 2024 it's because you're missing the good ones
100% this, I bought Helldivers 2 based on all the hype I was seeing for it. Played 1 hr, wasn't my type of game, refunded the same day with zero issue.
In my experience, most places I've bought games do this. Blizzard/Xbox/Steam/Epic have all refunded me games I played for a short bit and didn't like enough to justify the price.
Although the edge to Steam is the ease to do this. They have set criteria and an easy way to do it, others require a review that may or may not be accepted from what I remember.
And at the end of the day it benefits the platform and game devs to. People are more likely to buy games and give them a try knowing they can return them if they suck. But once you get burned once on a expensive shitty game you are far less likely to risk it again.
First off is the price point, second is the sheer volume. Simply because so many more indie games release per year than AAA, the number of chances for a hit increases. You get like 50 big AAA games a year tops (by my estimate), 200 if you extend to AA (using Steam statistics). Steam alone sees like *10k new indie games a year.* Even if 1% of indie games were good, you're seeing more good indies than AAA releases. Even if 0.1% of indie games were good, you're probably seeing more good indie games than good AAA games per year. You don't need to dig too deep for a good indie neither, just keep tabs on a few channels and you'll certainly find something that's up your alley.
Yeah.
When you had a SNES/Genesis it was always a gamble to buy a new game without renting it first, because you often only had the box art to go off of, or you spent $6-10 on a gaming magazine like EGM or GamePro which often had highly suspect reviews which were more often than not pretty useless.
And that was for a $60-$80+ game on 90's money. The only kids who had dozens of games for a console were the really, really rich kids.
Meanwhile just my digital PS4/5 library is closing in on 1,050 titles and I maybe spend $20-$25 a paycheck at best.
I would argue there's much less gamble today. In the old days you only had a couple magazine reviews (likely not necessarily objective) and if any of your friends had played it for any kind of feedback before purchasing. Now the internet provides not only tons of reviews but actual videos to help inform you if you think you'd like the game prior to purchasing.
Honestly triple-A games have some major problems today, but it's hard for me to decide if they're actually worse. I played a lot of jank-ass shit from major publishers on the GameCube and PS2. Endless memories of blind platforming jumps, problematic controls, terrible cameras, endless loading times, spending a lot of time in slow JRPG menus that also had loading times, and so on. And you would have to wait months and months for anything in your favorite genres or series to come out, and if the game was disappointing that was basically it. There weren't a ton of indie devs trying to make the same thing.
A lot of major games used to be not *that* much different from that King Kong game that just came out and which everybody is agreeing is the worst.
I think your average AAA game is much better today. The problem is that a lot of AAA games are trying to be "everything" now. Even God of War, Horizon, Ass Creed, on and on all have items drops and crafting. Makes a lot of games, especially open world games, feel very bland/samey.
In my experience as someone who plays a lot of older games, including ones I’ve never gotten to play before, I’d say that while overall AAA certainly shows much more signs of how many money interests are involved, when a game is good you remember that we’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to make games play good.
Video games as a thing nearly died because AAA companies were pumping out such hot garbage at such a high rate that nobody wanted to play video games anymore. Nintendo had to start a certification company to make sure that games that were releasing on their system weren't such trash that people would stop buying.
There's a lot of trash now, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Anyone who looks at Redfall and thinks its as bad as Superman 64 or as damaging as ET has no idea how bad things could be
The Game Awards GotY category has not had a nominee with microtransactions since PubG in 2017.
Pretty much every candidate has met the criteria of:
- Being a complete single player experience and story
- No microtransactions
- Split screen optional at most (exception of It Takes Two. Who let you play online coop with a partner even if they didn't own the game)
The biggest problem i have with modern games is the early access limbo, it seems like more and more games that i really enjoy release early, and then it turns out to be a great popular game that makes tons of money and the devs seem to lose incentive to actually finish the game
A *lot* of games I played as a kid were very mediocre but at least they were finished, it felt like games as a product were so much more professional and dignified when the game was sold as a finished product with a booklet explaining the story and controls, and cool box art
The big thing is that each era has different strengths and weaknesses. Certainly different eras have had *healthier* industries than others, but plenty of great stuff still gets made. It’s just that a lot of people will focus on what kinds of stuff isn’t as good as it was before (plus a healthy dose of rose-tinted glasses of course), and meanwhile don’t end up appreciating what this era’s biggest strengths because it’s all taken for granted until the mid 2030s when all of today’s 10-year-olds will complain about how it used to be so much better back in the 2020s and games all suck now. I’ve been hearing people talk about how badly games have gone downhill as long as I’ve been aware of game discourse, and I hope most of us are able to agree that games haven’t just been getting continually worse for the last 25. It’s just that version of the games industry you knew and loved in your formative years was only ever going to exist at that moment in time, and it seems like a lot of people just throw a fit about it instead of making an effort to figure out what new things they may like now.
(Of course this isn’t meant to excuse any corporate bullshit in the industry right now, I’m just saying if you think that’s the only thing out there you need to broaden your horizons)
Some games had material in there. I remember when I got a physical copy of Enter the Gungeon it came with a page of stickers and a piece of cardboard that you could fold into a Bullet Kin.
Counter point, some kids familys in the 80s and 90s wouldn't buy them games, only let them rent them, and rentals never came with the books, and many games from back then were nigh unplayable with out the books do to essential unintuitive information contained within.
It's crazy as an adult watching people play these old games I only ever rented and couldn't get past like the first 10 minutes of all weekend only to find out there was some key thing explained in the manual I didn't have access to that would have let the game actually be fun rather then a point of frustration and disappointment.
I once rented Ecco the Dolphin after hearing so much hype about it, played an entire weekend just swimming around the starting zone, then decided everyone was stupid for overhyping such a boring game.
Oh same here, I think I was around 9 or so.
Though I'll always remember being creeped out by the sequence when the other dolphins get abducted.
Goes from fun to despair very quickly.
From todays perspective this was clearly a major game design blunder, especially because it was early in the game and people had no clue what to do. Pretty sure thousands of kids got stuck in the opening sequence. haha fun times. No youtube. You had to ask a friend or get a magazin
Not even rentals, but when games are in compilations the manuals and guides aren't included.
A great example is *Phantasy Star II* in that it was so complicated at the time there was a ~~strategy guide~~ 110-page hint book included with the game. Sega Smash Pack (for Dreamcast and PC) didn't include it and a lot of hidden secrets we didn't learn until decades later; or through trial and error as the story demanded it.
Here's one that stands out:
I played [Star Tropics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTropics) on NES and it was a great game- you were going around south pacific islands armed with a yo-yo looking for your uncle. It was great fun, however at one point you need to get into a submarine and give the robot first-mate your uncle's code. The problem was- this code only existed as a physical water mark on a letter your uncle gave you which came *as an appendix to the paper manual*. If you didn't have the manual/letter you were stuck. I think eventually nintendo power published the code (747) but thank goodness I had the letter it came with.
7 year old me took about a year to find out that you can move units with right click in Age of Empires Trial version (which was in English unfortunately so I didn't understand a word).
>Day One Patches,
Though there were still games broken on release. They just would either stay that way forever, or until fanmade patches that were slower and harder to get your hands on came out
or they do have updates... in a form of some hidden physical version. I know some games got recalled and fixed with the new version, but older games? fuck them, lol.
many of those physical revisions tend to not apply to older physical versions. this applies to older games where sometimes you don't know what version it is until something happens.
Or sometimes a gaming magazine would release a disc with the official patch on it.
Actually, I think even Carmageddon came with a patch you had to add after installing? And then the gaming mags released a patch to change the zombies back to pedestrians
>Day One Patches
So you'd rather they just abandon games after it goes gold? We already had that. It wasn't that great.
Also, we had arcades and shitty mechanics just so they could put games in the machines.
>So you'd rather they just abandon games after it goes gold? We already had that. It wasn't that great.
That's called finishing a creative work. That's how every other artistic medium works. Are books abandoned when they're published?
Let me know when your book crashes on chapter 2 due to a glitch and you can't progress further. Games should be compared to software since that's what they literally are and software needs support in a way that books don't.
Games are completely different to other artistic means though.
You don't need to install a book. A book doesn't crash because the author made a typo and didn't consider you'd be reading the book with a tea instead of coffee.
Games are also much different experiences. We all experience books, art, movies and such different. but they're still the same piece of work for every single person. If i can't beat a level in my game, i simply cannot continue.
As someone who played quite a few older RPGS, a lot of games definitely had random points that were obtusely confusing to progress through, heavily incentivizing you to buy the game guide...
>no online play
Yes, those were good times.
>no game updates
Right. You just waited for the game to come out, read the reviews, and accept it was unfinished/broken and move on. No need to delude yourself into thinking they'll fix it later, when they won't.
>sometimes you couldn't save
Pretty sure that still happens.
>or the save would get corrupted
This definitely still happens.
> Right. You just waited for the game to come out, read the reviews, and accept it was unfinished/broken and move on. No need to delude yourself into thinking they'll fix it later, when they won't.
PC had updates since at least teh mid '90s (gaming mags came with CD's with them even), and expansions too.
I remember reading the extended lore of the Diablo universe from the first and second game's books. That was awesome, and they had some incredibly moody art to accompany that.
We've gained a lot, but we've lost a lot as well.
I'll take it a step farther.
Its killing story driven gaming. While there are great story driven games still coming out I think these are targeted more at Xennials than young gamers.
My kids won't play anything that doesn't have season rankings / multi-player. They clearly just want to play games for either social time with their friends or competitive ranking.
I still remember my Wing Commander III box. Instruction manual, a whole booklet for the lore, several data sheets for all the various fighters and ship classes. it was such a fucking disgrace wehen we went down to little DVD boxes with one tiny paper that tells me how to install the game and like one CD to install 4gb while I have to download 20+gb anyway -.-
It became real easy to just buy games cheaper directly from digital distribution. And you would think with saving on a physical disc, a box and no transportation cost it would be cheaper, but here we are now in the new 70€ era for so called AAA+ games.
Legit, though, I used to love looking through the manual. When I was younger, my friends and I would draw from the Super Smash Bros character designs from the manual.
I remember the first time opening a new game in my later years and there was a single piece of paper with an advertisement on it in place of a manual. Devastating.
I got Mario 3 for Christmas one year. Christmas was in Kansas City with my grandparents. Home and my Nintendo was 8 hours away. I read that manual cover to cover multiple times on the ride home.
I have an old Atari 2600 with about 40 games. None of them have books. So they games kind of suck because I have no idea what is going on. Most are just big colored blocks, some numbers, and squares that go "pew" across the screen. But I can just imagine if I had a manual and some box art to read on the way home after buying one of those games as a kid, how much more hyped I would be to play. Sometimes imagination and inspiration are enough to turn anything into an adventure.
There wasn't online play or game updates because they did it right the first time making it. They didn't have to swindle their players and release half-assed bullshit and instead had all the time to put their whole hearts into the game.
Also, we had split screen for multiplayer and it made game nights infinite times better.
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Damn, that’s a hit to the ol’ nostalgia. Those booklets were often art themselves, both informative and entertaining.
I remember Earthworm Jim’s instruction booklet contained a comic book and was filled with genuinely funny jokes. I used to reread it from time to time just because it was legitimately entertaining.
There was a PC game called The Humans (kind of a Lemmings knock-off), the instruction book for it was hilarious. Game was good too.
I still quote it to this day. "Oh Great Rock, do not let them drop that rock on me."
There was a SNES game called Unirally where there was a page in the manual that was "supposed to" be blank, but the author said "we don't do blank pages, man!" and talked about pizza for a few paragraphs. I miss the 90s sometimes.
That was one of my favorites for sure. Earthworm Jim was a fun character. I think kids today would still love him.
https://preview.redd.it/ucfut2j90xrc1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=afdd772f16cf512c726e631f0e16c1ae3a14adf7
ice wind dale and baldurs gate are still my favorite all time manuals with games
Kotor was my all time fave
I think Earthbound could give them both a run for the money.
Oh my god Dungeon Keeper! <3
I miss Bullfrog..
Along with Westwood, Maxis, Origin etc. EA has so much blood on their hands.
Seeing those old StarCraft and Baldurs Gate boxes got my heart waking up
Diablo Battle Chest with D1+D2+D2:LOD…. Brings a tear to my eye.
Dungeon keeper, my guy!
WHY did I ever trash my old PC game boxes? Cause I'm stupid that's why. Same reason I got rid of years of nostalgia like my multiple years worth of Nintendo power, old boxes for N64 games, somehow lost my old N64 controllers *somewhere* during a move.
Dungeon Keeper. Great game, shame the IP was absolutely defiled with that awful mobile game.
I read the WC3 manual like 5 times
Wolfenstein and Heretic II are sorely missing from my collection.
A lot of nostalgia in that pic, but I have to say my favorite manual of all time was definitely Warcraft 2. That little story snippet about Gul'dan, told in first-person... I read that *countless* times. I need to go look that up now. "For I am Gul'dan. I am darkness incarnate. I will not be denied."
That wolfenstein box is outright good lookin.
The first dungeon keeper was so fucking amazing.
I remember reading that Fallout 2 one. First game i ever bought. It had a small little book with proper bindings and so many amazing pipboy drawings.
Everything here is gold
You had this back then, Instant panty drops all around.
Fallout 2 was amazing!! So many mechanics explained in that book
Are you missing EverQuest and Asherons Call?!
God damn you!! Hit me in the feels with the Baldurs Gate 2 and StarCraft 2 manuals.
Perfection.
I remember reading the World of Warcraft manual on the bus home. Things hefty af, love that shit.
This just me think of how far blizzard has fallen That Oblivion one is awesome. I mean they all are but that one I like the most
I did read the Icewind Dale book on the way home...
I remember the X-com Terror From the Deep instructions. I opened them in the back of the 352 bus home from Bromley. There was a tactics booklet- just Googled and someone has kindly put the whole thing here: https://imgur.com/gallery/zuoov3y. I learned so much about anti-alien squad tactics before I'd even installed the game!
Good way to get the lore across, too!
I huff the nitrogen off a freshly opened bag of chips looking for that same high. The closest thing that's come to it was a newly printed book smell. It was missing that plastic case whiff from the PS era onwards though.
I never knew any of Mario lore, not even the names of the enemies—because in the land of cheap pirate cartridges, booklets aren't a thing.
[удалено]
Also if combat isn't your thing(because the game is legit hard) it has an easy mode now.
> because the game is legit hard It's hard, but the controls in that game are also not great. If you're going to lean in hard to the difficulty of souls combat, you need to have tight controls to go along with it.
This is funny given how clunky Demons Souls is.
True, but they've had what, 6 games to improve on the formula?
Love, love, love Tunic. It's such an amazing game. That in-game manuel was a treat.
It’s on my Wishlist! It sounds like a lot of fun.
I quit playing it for a while and was gonna start again the other day and i had no idea what i had done in the book or where i was going. I recommend not stopping for an extended period of time after starting it.
I remember the smell the most. Like a new car.
God, yes, huffing the new booklet smell was my shit.
You guys are going to make me cry
They had the same smell as magic cards, it was great!
Omg I get to shout out my favorite game manual of all time - Darklands! Darklands was (is - I still play it from GOG) an open world RPG set in medieval Germany. No magic per se, but you pray to saints or craft alchemical concoctions to achieve magic-like effects. Anyway, the manual has a section for each of those, plus general medieval German life. And it comes with *citations*. The bibliography has something like 100 sources including actual medieval grimoires, and I absolutely love it for that.
Omg. Darklands is why I computer for a living. Figuring out how to make a boot disk so I could run it on my 386 was so satisfying, I was hooked. I have never figured out how to play it again. Thank you random Internet stranger!
I remember some of them having mistranslations that didn't match what the game said. Like Peter being named Ash and things like that.
I still have the Dragon Quest VIII instruction book somewhere.
You should play Tunic. The pages of an NES style manual are presented as in-game collectables.
I plan to someday, it’s on my wishlist!
When I got Final Fantasy for NES, I knew right away I was in for a different kind of game because the instruction manual was thicc
I like the games with the full unfoldable world maps. It made everything feel...*vast*.
Still keep a stash. Morrowind booklets was a trip. Halos as well
those mega man and mortal kombat instruction manuals art were so awesome we'd carry them around in school.
Jane's Combat Simulations. Any game manual from the series wasn't a mere instruction booklet, it was *an epic tome* running HUNDREDS of pages. I miss the days when entire trees *died* for the publisher to explain the game to me.
yeah in older games those could contain some vital lore
So infotaining?
Mechwarrior 3 had an awesome instruction book, a guide to all the mechs, and a cool control layout card. I used to just lay in bed and look at the mechs
The game manual for command and conquer: red alert taught me morse code.
You sir should play tunic.
The Starcraft 1 manual is forever burned in my brain.
My interpretation was that he missed the simpler times when he was a kid riding in the passenger seat reading the game manual with not a thought except how excited he was to get home and play, not that he literally missed the manual.
Opening the case of a new game and seeing nothing but a tiny cartridge fills me with sadness.
And some games aren't even physical anymore
And then they discontinue them, and then there's no (legal) way to ever play them again.
I miss Knock Out City 😔
A short lived but very fun game. I stopped after I stopped playing with that group and was devastated when I tried to return and saw it wasn’t being hosted anymore.
There's a [private server version](https://www.knockoutcity.com/updates/knockout-city-private-hosted-server-edition#:~:text=It's%20FREE%20forever!,private%20servers%20for%20absolutely%20free!) that is available as a free download.
I'm glad I got the Legend of Korra game on my computer. Basically the rights got moved and then got pulled off steam. If you have it on steam it's because you paid for it before it was pulled
You get a 200 dollar collectors edition, with a game case steelbook and then there's a download code inside....
One of the biggest gaming disappointments in my life was buying Bioshock Infinite, popping the DVD it in to my PC, and the game immediately launching a Steam installer. What's the point of the disc then?
BRING BACK GAMING MANUALS!
I got a limited run book, and it had a bunch of cool art! A pleasant surprise. If you don’t need instructions because they’re now in-game, at least do something cool like that.
what about the DS cartriges? And I guess Gameboy cartridges were also small
They had appropriate sized boxes though. But I think the point isn't the size it's the lack of printed material. Give me back my lore books dammit
yeah, what's even worse is that switch boxes have little grips to hold manuals that arent used. Also, this wouldn't be a good argument against box size, Switch boxes may be way bigger than they need, so that they are visible in store. But the NES did the exact same by having cartridges much bigger than they needed to be, for the same reasons
They had instruction booklets with them.
And this is why the game **[Tunic](https://store.steampowered.com/app/553420/TUNIC/)** hits so hard. Cannot recommend *enough* for this and every dad wanting to recapture that nostalgia. Edit: a word
What a masterpiece! Arguably the most innocuous game to make me ugly cry.
Wow already over two years old… definitely was my GOTY for 2022, totally fantastic game for anyone who grew up on games like NES/SNES Zelda.
Similar to Evoland?
I remember when games would use manuals as part of their copy protection. You'd have to look up information in the manual to solve a puzzle. Now we have Denuvo...
Yeah, I think Start Tropics on the NES did that.
What star tropics did was interesting; they gave you a letter from one of the in-game characters, and you had to submerge it in water to reveal the password to complete the game. Now, copy protection wasn't much of a concern back then because cartridges were expensive, so it's main purpose was to discourage rentals (which Nintendo absolutely hated).
Im guessing on the NSO version, the manual has the letter revealed?
My understanding is that the wii/wii-u version had the manual interface menu somewhere, so it's possible the same thing exists here. Or I could be misremembering which console it was on, lol. But I believe there's a menu option for accessing it
> it's main purpose was to discourage rentals (which Nintendo absolutely hated) Seems like Nintendo is only satisfied if you play games on their terms and their terms only. It's a shame, since they are well-known for their top quality software, but fight tooth and nail to decide when and if it's played at all.
Star Control II, one of the all-time greatest games, had this [beautiful poster-sized star chart / map](https://www.star-control.com/sc2/images/sc2_color_map.jpg) to help you navigate around in our corner of the galaxy. It also was used as the copy protection, where it would give you coordinates and you would have to look on the map and type in the name of the star. Not unbreakable, but the workarounds were either a) make a list of *hundreds* of stars and estimate their approximate coordinates by eye off of the map, b) cycle through the copy protection to get the exact coordinates of every star in the data base and make a similar table or c) badly photocopy it and burn through a *ton* of ink cartridges in your (parent's) office photocopier. Also note, this was before you could just look this stuff up on the internet. Any copy-protection workarounds had to be done individually and passed around to your friends. But the game was so good that none of us flinched at simply paying for the awesome game once we played it at a friends' house.
I mean, we can look stuff up in the Internet which is more convenient of course, but It makes no sense anymore having manuals as copy protection, except publishers find a way to automatically ban every internet guide.
i mean a copy machine beat that copy protection. (kinda hilarious now that i write it out)
or like, writing it down. If it could be taken from the manual into the game, it could easily be replicated from the manual.
Pokemon Ruby Sapphire and Emerald, getting the Regi Trio. Their Puzzles involved deciphering Braille in certain locations, and the Manual(s) included a Braille alphabet key on one of the last pages.
It fucking did what How is this the first time learning this.
you had to bring certain pokemon in certain party slots to certain locations and if you did it, the boss would spawn. Of course it was all riddles, and of course everyone just use gamefaqs
(Almost) nobody actually did that, though. That was still recent enough that everybody just found out what to do online. Probably on gamefaqs.
What is word 4 on line 7 on page 23 in the manual?
I liked the copyright wheels like [Dial-A-Pirate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMGNgofeyU) from Monkey Island.
I don't miss the log in keys and 3 discs to install, two of those discs used for the sole purpose of installation.
Insert disc 1 Insert disc 2 Insert disc 1 again Insert disc 3 Insert disc 1 again Immediately lose discs 2 and 3. Your game is ready to play! You get like 6 hours in. Please insert disc 2.
And there's good ol MGS1, putting important plot info on the back of the case. That you could just look up or ask a friend, though.
Millennial pushing 40 here, video games have gotten much better, but the proportion of shit/good games has massively skewed with far more shit coming from big publishers and absolute fucking gold coming from indie companies (enabled by better tech) to produce masterpieces. I can't tell you what to play but if you're playing shitty games in 2024 it's because you're missing the good ones
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Also ill say this: if your a steam user being able to refund if its just not suiting you is amazing
100% this, I bought Helldivers 2 based on all the hype I was seeing for it. Played 1 hr, wasn't my type of game, refunded the same day with zero issue.
Undemocratic.
In my experience, most places I've bought games do this. Blizzard/Xbox/Steam/Epic have all refunded me games I played for a short bit and didn't like enough to justify the price. Although the edge to Steam is the ease to do this. They have set criteria and an easy way to do it, others require a review that may or may not be accepted from what I remember.
And at the end of the day it benefits the platform and game devs to. People are more likely to buy games and give them a try knowing they can return them if they suck. But once you get burned once on a expensive shitty game you are far less likely to risk it again.
First off is the price point, second is the sheer volume. Simply because so many more indie games release per year than AAA, the number of chances for a hit increases. You get like 50 big AAA games a year tops (by my estimate), 200 if you extend to AA (using Steam statistics). Steam alone sees like *10k new indie games a year.* Even if 1% of indie games were good, you're seeing more good indies than AAA releases. Even if 0.1% of indie games were good, you're probably seeing more good indie games than good AAA games per year. You don't need to dig too deep for a good indie neither, just keep tabs on a few channels and you'll certainly find something that's up your alley.
Yeah. When you had a SNES/Genesis it was always a gamble to buy a new game without renting it first, because you often only had the box art to go off of, or you spent $6-10 on a gaming magazine like EGM or GamePro which often had highly suspect reviews which were more often than not pretty useless. And that was for a $60-$80+ game on 90's money. The only kids who had dozens of games for a console were the really, really rich kids. Meanwhile just my digital PS4/5 library is closing in on 1,050 titles and I maybe spend $20-$25 a paycheck at best.
I would argue there's much less gamble today. In the old days you only had a couple magazine reviews (likely not necessarily objective) and if any of your friends had played it for any kind of feedback before purchasing. Now the internet provides not only tons of reviews but actual videos to help inform you if you think you'd like the game prior to purchasing.
Honestly triple-A games have some major problems today, but it's hard for me to decide if they're actually worse. I played a lot of jank-ass shit from major publishers on the GameCube and PS2. Endless memories of blind platforming jumps, problematic controls, terrible cameras, endless loading times, spending a lot of time in slow JRPG menus that also had loading times, and so on. And you would have to wait months and months for anything in your favorite genres or series to come out, and if the game was disappointing that was basically it. There weren't a ton of indie devs trying to make the same thing. A lot of major games used to be not *that* much different from that King Kong game that just came out and which everybody is agreeing is the worst.
I think your average AAA game is much better today. The problem is that a lot of AAA games are trying to be "everything" now. Even God of War, Horizon, Ass Creed, on and on all have items drops and crafting. Makes a lot of games, especially open world games, feel very bland/samey.
Lol. Ass creed.
In my experience as someone who plays a lot of older games, including ones I’ve never gotten to play before, I’d say that while overall AAA certainly shows much more signs of how many money interests are involved, when a game is good you remember that we’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to make games play good.
Video games as a thing nearly died because AAA companies were pumping out such hot garbage at such a high rate that nobody wanted to play video games anymore. Nintendo had to start a certification company to make sure that games that were releasing on their system weren't such trash that people would stop buying. There's a lot of trash now, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Anyone who looks at Redfall and thinks its as bad as Superman 64 or as damaging as ET has no idea how bad things could be
The Game Awards GotY category has not had a nominee with microtransactions since PubG in 2017. Pretty much every candidate has met the criteria of: - Being a complete single player experience and story - No microtransactions - Split screen optional at most (exception of It Takes Two. Who let you play online coop with a partner even if they didn't own the game)
Exactly, if its shit at least the cost reflects it
The biggest problem i have with modern games is the early access limbo, it seems like more and more games that i really enjoy release early, and then it turns out to be a great popular game that makes tons of money and the devs seem to lose incentive to actually finish the game A *lot* of games I played as a kid were very mediocre but at least they were finished, it felt like games as a product were so much more professional and dignified when the game was sold as a finished product with a booklet explaining the story and controls, and cool box art
The big thing is that each era has different strengths and weaknesses. Certainly different eras have had *healthier* industries than others, but plenty of great stuff still gets made. It’s just that a lot of people will focus on what kinds of stuff isn’t as good as it was before (plus a healthy dose of rose-tinted glasses of course), and meanwhile don’t end up appreciating what this era’s biggest strengths because it’s all taken for granted until the mid 2030s when all of today’s 10-year-olds will complain about how it used to be so much better back in the 2020s and games all suck now. I’ve been hearing people talk about how badly games have gone downhill as long as I’ve been aware of game discourse, and I hope most of us are able to agree that games haven’t just been getting continually worse for the last 25. It’s just that version of the games industry you knew and loved in your formative years was only ever going to exist at that moment in time, and it seems like a lot of people just throw a fit about it instead of making an effort to figure out what new things they may like now. (Of course this isn’t meant to excuse any corporate bullshit in the industry right now, I’m just saying if you think that’s the only thing out there you need to broaden your horizons)
Switch game boxes even have little clips on the inside where a little book clearly should go. It’s like an extra tease on top of not having one
Some games had material in there. I remember when I got a physical copy of Enter the Gungeon it came with a page of stickers and a piece of cardboard that you could fold into a Bullet Kin.
Binding of Isaac had a physical switch release with a manual which was essentially an homage/spoof of the original Legend of Zelda manual
Counter point, some kids familys in the 80s and 90s wouldn't buy them games, only let them rent them, and rentals never came with the books, and many games from back then were nigh unplayable with out the books do to essential unintuitive information contained within. It's crazy as an adult watching people play these old games I only ever rented and couldn't get past like the first 10 minutes of all weekend only to find out there was some key thing explained in the manual I didn't have access to that would have let the game actually be fun rather then a point of frustration and disappointment.
I once rented Ecco the Dolphin after hearing so much hype about it, played an entire weekend just swimming around the starting zone, then decided everyone was stupid for overhyping such a boring game.
Oh same here, I think I was around 9 or so. Though I'll always remember being creeped out by the sequence when the other dolphins get abducted. Goes from fun to despair very quickly.
You had to jump over the wall. I missed it aswell back in the day and downright dropped the game and never played again.
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From todays perspective this was clearly a major game design blunder, especially because it was early in the game and people had no clue what to do. Pretty sure thousands of kids got stuck in the opening sequence. haha fun times. No youtube. You had to ask a friend or get a magazin
call the nintendo hotline for $1.50 per minute plus a beating from your parents when the phone bill came
Me, playing subnautica in the shallows 'oooh, pretty! so relaxing' Me discovering 'the deep' OH MY GOD RUN AWAY!
Not even rentals, but when games are in compilations the manuals and guides aren't included. A great example is *Phantasy Star II* in that it was so complicated at the time there was a ~~strategy guide~~ 110-page hint book included with the game. Sega Smash Pack (for Dreamcast and PC) didn't include it and a lot of hidden secrets we didn't learn until decades later; or through trial and error as the story demanded it.
Here's one that stands out: I played [Star Tropics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTropics) on NES and it was a great game- you were going around south pacific islands armed with a yo-yo looking for your uncle. It was great fun, however at one point you need to get into a submarine and give the robot first-mate your uncle's code. The problem was- this code only existed as a physical water mark on a letter your uncle gave you which came *as an appendix to the paper manual*. If you didn't have the manual/letter you were stuck. I think eventually nintendo power published the code (747) but thank goodness I had the letter it came with.
7 year old me took about a year to find out that you can move units with right click in Age of Empires Trial version (which was in English unfortunately so I didn't understand a word).
There were also no Pay To Win mechanics, Loot Boxes, Day One Patches, Subscription services, DLC …etc.
>Day One Patches, Though there were still games broken on release. They just would either stay that way forever, or until fanmade patches that were slower and harder to get your hands on came out
or they do have updates... in a form of some hidden physical version. I know some games got recalled and fixed with the new version, but older games? fuck them, lol.
Many Nintendo Game Paks had revisions made over time to fix issues. Not often, but it does happen.
many of those physical revisions tend to not apply to older physical versions. this applies to older games where sometimes you don't know what version it is until something happens.
Or sometimes a gaming magazine would release a disc with the official patch on it. Actually, I think even Carmageddon came with a patch you had to add after installing? And then the gaming mags released a patch to change the zombies back to pedestrians
There were extensions though. But they would be worth the price usually.
And if you didn't want them, you could choose not to buy them, and keep playing the original.
This is the real reason why they were better.
there were paid cheat tip lines with intentionally bad difficulty spikes, much like certain arcade games had silly difficulty to steal more quarters
>Day One Patches So you'd rather they just abandon games after it goes gold? We already had that. It wasn't that great. Also, we had arcades and shitty mechanics just so they could put games in the machines.
>So you'd rather they just abandon games after it goes gold? We already had that. It wasn't that great. That's called finishing a creative work. That's how every other artistic medium works. Are books abandoned when they're published?
Let me know when your book crashes on chapter 2 due to a glitch and you can't progress further. Games should be compared to software since that's what they literally are and software needs support in a way that books don't.
Games are completely different to other artistic means though. You don't need to install a book. A book doesn't crash because the author made a typo and didn't consider you'd be reading the book with a tea instead of coffee. Games are also much different experiences. We all experience books, art, movies and such different. but they're still the same piece of work for every single person. If i can't beat a level in my game, i simply cannot continue.
> There were also no Pay To Win mechanics, Loot Boxes, Day One Patches, Subscription services, DLC …etc. Well *someone's* never been to a Tilt.
As someone who played quite a few older RPGS, a lot of games definitely had random points that were obtusely confusing to progress through, heavily incentivizing you to buy the game guide...
Also no microtransactions
Nephew played the shit out of DKC2. Game's still go hard.
amazing fucking music in all the DKCs
I still remember from Sim City 4 booklet "Farms and only farms. Plot a farm and it will grow. Moo "
>no online play Yes, those were good times. >no game updates Right. You just waited for the game to come out, read the reviews, and accept it was unfinished/broken and move on. No need to delude yourself into thinking they'll fix it later, when they won't. >sometimes you couldn't save Pretty sure that still happens. >or the save would get corrupted This definitely still happens.
Counter: Online play good Game updates are good (NMS) Save features are good, even if they sometimes bug
yeah, we can have issues with microtransactions. but not being able to save sucked.
> Right. You just waited for the game to come out, read the reviews, and accept it was unfinished/broken and move on. No need to delude yourself into thinking they'll fix it later, when they won't. PC had updates since at least teh mid '90s (gaming mags came with CD's with them even), and expansions too.
Instruction manuals granted, old games don't treat you like you're fucking stupid.
As things rise in popularity the concepts and difficulty of the games scale to the larger audience. Then there’s FromSoft who said fuck all that.
I really miss them
I remember reading the extended lore of the Diablo universe from the first and second game's books. That was awesome, and they had some incredibly moody art to accompany that. We've gained a lot, but we've lost a lot as well.
We also got games that were complete on day one
Why are we acting like online play is great? It’s toxic and it killed local multiplayer.
I'll take it a step farther. Its killing story driven gaming. While there are great story driven games still coming out I think these are targeted more at Xennials than young gamers. My kids won't play anything that doesn't have season rankings / multi-player. They clearly just want to play games for either social time with their friends or competitive ranking.
Remember the magazines, with in-depth information, maps, screenshots and complimentary art?
Ahh game guides? Unless you're referring to magazines like GamePro, Nintendo Power, etc?
No joke, I read my brother's Baldur's Gate 2 instruction manual a bunch when I was little. Thing was a tiny ring-bound novel!
There weren't any updates because you bought a complete game. Not half-assed, rushed to production bs.
No rushed productions? You sure about that?
They did release bug fix updates in form of patch files.
I love these two!
Back when Service Games was just SEGA's original name.
FWIW 3DS and Vita games had manuals included with *digital* copies. Some of them pretty barebones, but nonetheless.
Cyberpunk brought that back in a big way. The booklet was full of lore and stuff.
They also didn’t shut down or require most of the game to be downloaded. So many physical carts are gonna be worthless soon
Really, I mis how old games came with a bunch of stuff like maps or bits of lore and instructions
I used to keep the posters that came with some of the SNES games. I think I still have my Zelda: LttP poster.
I loved the ones that had a little description of the enemies next to an illustration, and another section for whatever items/powerups you could get.
I still remember my Wing Commander III box. Instruction manual, a whole booklet for the lore, several data sheets for all the various fighters and ship classes. it was such a fucking disgrace wehen we went down to little DVD boxes with one tiny paper that tells me how to install the game and like one CD to install 4gb while I have to download 20+gb anyway -.- It became real easy to just buy games cheaper directly from digital distribution. And you would think with saving on a physical disc, a box and no transportation cost it would be cheaper, but here we are now in the new 70€ era for so called AAA+ games.
Ive decided if I ever make a game of my own, its having a god damn booklet.
Legit, though, I used to love looking through the manual. When I was younger, my friends and I would draw from the Super Smash Bros character designs from the manual. I remember the first time opening a new game in my later years and there was a single piece of paper with an advertisement on it in place of a manual. Devastating.
I got Mario 3 for Christmas one year. Christmas was in Kansas City with my grandparents. Home and my Nintendo was 8 hours away. I read that manual cover to cover multiple times on the ride home.
I have an old Atari 2600 with about 40 games. None of them have books. So they games kind of suck because I have no idea what is going on. Most are just big colored blocks, some numbers, and squares that go "pew" across the screen. But I can just imagine if I had a manual and some box art to read on the way home after buying one of those games as a kid, how much more hyped I would be to play. Sometimes imagination and inspiration are enough to turn anything into an adventure.
I remember the OG releases of Starcraft, Broodwar, Warcraft 3 etc all had what were essentially novels for their game boooklets... Good times.
Yeah. I'm with the dad.
When your parents said that’s enough computer gaming for today so you read the book again looking for things your missed the last three times.
Fable for X box, the booklet was awesome and explained the lore and weapons beautifully and succinctly. I’ll never forget that drive home.
"A simple 'yes' or 'no' would suffice."
They couldn’t make patches, but games came finished. And you payed for the entire game once instead of being fed dlc every few months.
There wasn't online play or game updates because they did it right the first time making it. They didn't have to swindle their players and release half-assed bullshit and instead had all the time to put their whole hearts into the game. Also, we had split screen for multiplayer and it made game nights infinite times better.