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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.
…get home play the game, take a bathroom break… bring the box and manual to the bathroom to read it more.
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.
I still have some of my game booklets from NES, Genesis/Master System, and N64. I always kept them in bags as a kid so they’re nice and crisp.
So hot.
I have a distinct memory of this with Pokemon black then soul silver (in that order)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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! 😞
Best memory of this is reading through the Morrowind manual while my mom did her shit.
Came here for the Morrowind crowd. Love that game so much
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.
I know I did this for damn near every game i got as a kid, but I distinctly remember in middle school doing this in the back of my step-fathers pickup truck with a copy of Skyrim on PC. It had just come out the night before and I was shocked Walmart still had any copies.
That box art and the art in the booklet included in the case (and the art behind the discs) for FFVII is so good
I can remember saving my allowance for however long I had to, to be able to get the game I wanted, and then riding my bike to Walmart, or the used game store, or wherever it was, and then riding home with a stupid grin on face. I feel bad for kids who will grow up to be adults who won’t have memories like that.
In fairness, kids these days will have all sorts of formative memories unfathomable to previous generations
Yes, good and/or bad and/or otherwise. It’s gonna get weird.
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
Fallout was the last great game manual. Fallout 2 was great compared to everything else but Fallout the original was something unique and epic.
Fallout was the last great game manual.
Nah man. MechCommander came in 1998 and that game manual was a friggin book, with full color pictures of each mech.
Star Wars Rebellion’s manual was also a book. Amazingly detailed.
Morrowind’s wasn’t a book, but it was still pretty great. Gave enough information that I was able to make a TI calculator program to generate accurate stats based on character creation choices.
Not saying there aren’t others, but these are great examples that came after Fallout. And maybe they aren’t at the same level as Fallout, but still great.
Morrowind’s physical map was amazingly fun, since you needed it to plot a fast travel course.
