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Read the Guild Wars Factions manual over and over, because I got it before the official release and couldn’t play. 2 years later I could easily solve a lore puzzle in-game with the knowledge I got from reading the manual. Totally worth it.
It was Guild Wars Eye of the North for me. I got it just before going in family holidays.
I spent two weeks looking at it.
The manual for Diablo was awesome. Wing Commander III had two in that gorgeous box, a technical manual and a game manual.
Once I got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for my birthday, I just so happened to do something (don’t remember what) to get grounded from TV/Nintendo for a month. I read that manual so many times over the next month. Not sure I ever actually beat that game.
Don’t worry, no one beat that game.
(Obviously now sixteen people will come in and tell me they beat the game but I will take this chance to mention that the PC port was literally unbeatable without cheating or modifying the game due to a mapping bug.)
Never beat the og NES. Always died at the technodrone and them damn pink bugs.
I got so good at the swimming section i could do it without touching the seaweed once tho beat that
Yeah the difficulty of swimming was overrated. The technodrome was ridiculous.
I mean major kudos for getting past the god dam level reliably. I think I beat it once on an emulator.
If we’re talking Turtles in Time? Hell no. Same goes for getting the proper ending in Streets of Rage 2 on hard mode. Still my favorite soundtrack of that era.
Oh no, I’m talking the NES game. It was a hateful thing.
It was truly cursed. God forbid you had the DOS port which was actually unbeatable due to an impossible jump.
The PEGI16 when you were 12 was the most thrilling part
I grew up in a fun American Christian household so I wasn’t allowed to play games beyond my mandated age range until my dad became too much of an alcoholic to give a shit.
Goldeneye? Had to play it over at a friend’s house.
Starcraft? I made sure to never play as or against Zerg if there was any chance my parents were awake, as they died far too bloody deaths.
My dad gave me G Police on PC, he found it at a garage sale or something, apparently did not check the rating schema, and took it away when curse words were used in the intro cinematic.
He did not hide it well, I found the CD and played the game a week later with headphones and I just told him it was different game, which worked.
But uh, Passion of the Christ? That was fine, despite basically being a gratuitous snuff film.
Oh well, could have been worse: Our neighbors were even more extreme, leading me to getting chewed out by their mom for introducing them to Pokemon cards. Pokemon evolve, you see, therefore they are of Satan.
Pokemon evolve, you see
Hear that, Mindy? Stupid bitch.
You should play Tunic if you miss old school game pamphlets. All of the tutorials are given in the form of artwork that looks exactly like what you’d find in an NES game. The entire game is a love letter to that era of gaming.
Such a great game. I’m actually being really indecisive about games to play, and now I want to play that.
I need to finish it some day! It does such a great job of capturing the feeling of starting a new adventure. It’s one of the few games where I don’t feel the need to look up a guide when I get stuck, because the game makes me want to learn how to progress through each area. An absolute masterclass in game design, IMO.
“Meryl…”
Probably my most-memorable manual of all time. This era was next-level with the manuals. With Police Quest 2 (pictured), you couldn’t access the game without the manual, as it’d show you a mugshot and you had to match the picture to the name in the manual:
Back when DRM was fun
I dunno, it could be annoying. I played an indy 500 game that asked history questions from the manual and was a pain to find the page with the answer.
And I remember a Mickey game where you needed to find a specific pose in black ink on a dark brown paper. Poor contrast was meant to defeat photocopiers but also made it a pain for human eyes.
That was me reading the manual for the PS2 version of Sonic Zero Gravity my friend gave me
I didn’t have a ps2 lmao
I remember when games had swag. I still have a cloth map from one of my games.
Lunar silver star story?
One of the Ultima series of games.
Some do, they just charge you like $300 for that version now.
I still have the guide that came with Earthbound. I read that thing through so many times as a kid. I think my parents bought it new on clearance because it didn’t sell and I was having a rough year.
Still remember the night I got it. It was a nice summer night, there was a block party on our street. My parents wanted to stay later than usual but let me go home to play. The adults were only one house over, but it felt like growing up getting to be home alone.
That opening sequence felt like it could have been my life in a different reality. It took a few years for me to finally beat it , but it felt like growing up with the characters in a way.
I feel the guidebook had a lot to do with my memories. It was so cool how it was presented as newspapers from towns along the way and it being a tangible object added to the immersion. Seriously a great gaming experience I can’t ever replicate.
I miss when games were physical and I actually owned them.
I miss being able to hold them in my hands, to examine the cover, to read the back.
I miss being able to crack it open and smell that plasti-ink-chemical smell that had been sealed inside from the factory with the shrinkwrap.
and yes, I absolutely miss having manuals to read.
Bitch
Buying a game during a trip to another town, being away from your computer for a week, and spending the entire week just fondling the game box, reading it, reading the papers that came inside, doing game foreplay.
I only did that once. It was R-Type.
I got it back home and it wouldn’t load. My parents were not in the mood to drive all the way back for the sake of £2.99 of my pocket money.
I eventually palmed it off on Toys R Us when I noticed their receipts just said “Game”. I got another copy. That wouldn’t load either.
A week… My family took 4 week vacations every summer. Of course I had to buy a game the first week. Those manuals and gaming magazines during summer got a lot of attention.
Sweet memories.
I was a young adult when I bought falcon 3.0. I was two days from home and spent the car ride reading that book that came with it. It quickly ended up on the shelf above the toilet and I spent a many evacuations looking through it. I have never before or since bought a game with a larger manual.
I remember doing that for HoMM3. I brought it with me from home when I stayed with my grandparents for a few weeks one summer. It wouldn’t install on their PC so I just read the manual cover to cover forever.
Yesterday I came across my old Icewind Dale box. The manual is 130 pages.
I had also put the Forgotten Realms Archive manual in there, which is 368 pages - but to be fair that’s for all 12 games.
When games had manuals… Now I’m sad :(
Those were the days
