You must log in or register to comment.
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
I mean major kudos for getting past the god dam level reliably. I think I beat it once on an emulator.
Yeah the difficulty of swimming was overrated. The technodrome was ridiculous.
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.
Yep I’d heard about that. Man those were some Wild West days.
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.
All of these comments and not a single shout-out to the original StarCraft manual. Back stories and histories of the three races that culminated in their eventual discovery of each other.
Old blizzard games had full sized books as manuals that had story & art! Starcraft, warcraft 2 & 3 (never owned a legit copy of 1 so I assume), Diablo 1, 2, & 3! Glory days.
Remember when games had a cool box, with a manual and full color booklet with the story and basics of the game, etc. Now they bring nothing, just a disc. Same with movies, a dvd used to have all these features, documentaries, Easter eggs, interactive menus and commentaries. Now you pay for a Blu ray and it brings nothing but the movie
Nowadays you don’t usually even get to own the game after purchase.
As a child with motion sickness brought on by reading in a moving vehicle. I still did this but then got too nauseous and had to lay down.
Also the car filled with cigarette smoke with the windows up didn’t help.
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.
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.
Back in the day we’d buy games based on the vaguest idea of what they actually are. My parents would take me to the store and we’d get anything that looks cool enough. Best we can do is read a little bit about it in a magazine.
Mom made me pick a game from the bargain bin. Deus ex? Weird cover. Eh I’ll try it
The box:
The game:
At least this one had screenshots on the back!
For a different platform entirely, but as a Spectrum owner I was used to that.
Looking at videos of other versions, it looks suspiciously like they outsourced the Spectrum version to somebody else, and only vaguely described it.
So immersive! Look at that spaceship!
That’s how I got “Rise of the robots”, never got more disappointed by a game ever! 😞
When games had manuals… Now I’m sad :(
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.
fuck, some of those games had gorgeous manuals.
Skyrim. Not too old though
I remember drooling over Might and Magic VI. That is clearly a manual born out of love for the thing you are doing…
ps: it is available online
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.
Yesterday I came across my old Icewind Dale box. The manual is 130 pages with tiny print.
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.
The manual for Diablo was awesome. Wing Commander III had two in that gorgeous box, a technical manual and a game manual.
