this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Yeah, and old games were just well designed with no handholding and absolutely didn't include full bullet pointed tutorials for the first hour in the manual as a matter of course.
Younger me would have been blown away that reading would help me beat games in the future.
For the record, I have a small library now but when I first started playing NES-N64 games, I absolutely hated reading and never would have cracked open the manuals.
What did you do during the ten minutes it took to load tape games? Or the ten minutes it took to install them from floppy? Or...
Oh, wait, NES/N64, huh? You were into rich kid games.
So what did you do while you were getting driven back from the shop by your valet or whatever you guys had at the time?
All joking aside, I bet there was some divide between console and computer players on that front. I had binders of technical documentation from flight sims and entire novellas that came in RPG and adventure game boxes. The "here's how to play through the first chunk of the game" tutorials were just one format for that stuff, but perhaps the most platform-agnostic of them.
And, of course, there were walkthroughs and guides in gaming magazines. Getting stuck and waiting for the next monthly issue hoping they'd cover the game was a subtle form of monetization for games journalists even then. "Pivot to guides" has happened before.
Lmao no I grew up in the 90s, and we only got cheap secondhand n64 games. The apartments I grew up in were in the middle of trailer parks, but they all owned the land their trailers were on so I'll leave it up to the reader to determine who was more bougie.
My dad was the one who wanted the consoles and he isn't tech savvy, so until I got my own money, it was always "plug and play" things, none of those new-fangled computers until Windows ME.
And hilariously, I got an old macintosh in the mid 2000s and had fun figuring everything out by trial and error based off what I knew of computers at the time. Even had the x wing game on several floppies.
I would have loved having a computer when you had to actually know how it works to use it.
I remember waiting for next month's issue of different gaming magazines... I never bothered knowing which magazine it was, I just waited for my dad to return from the store with whichever one he wanted that day.
Honestly I miss in-depth game guides with the two pages of ASCII art at the top.
The GameFAQs era will become a bit of a lost age between the print magazine guides and the "IGN became a guide site so slowly we barely even noticed" period.
I wonder if there will ever be some specific nostalgia for it or it was just too short and grungy for anybody to care.
GameFAQs etc. need to be archived in a public database and incorporated into stuff like RetroArch.
GoG has decent manual integration. Steam has decent guide integration.
I think it's a good idea on paper, but at some point having it in an overlay or whatever seems less functional than just bringing it up on a phone or a second screen, you know?
Stop. Please! I can only get SO erect!