Whatever happened to manuals?

Thecageyone

Games are still the same price without the manuals I find. I'd rather have it, for re-selling purposes mostly, hardly ever flicked through them, let alone fully read. But if you were selling used games, having a clean manual always helped get you an extra few quid.

imitation

Yeah, honestly I prefer a game with a optional tutorial to get you started. I much prefer to learn on the job myself, so I never had much interest in studying a 200 pagemanual. I used to love those manuals that had historical info in them or maybe a bit of story.

Another thing is manuals never really told you what you needed for complex games, often times they would be off the mark anyway, I guess because its a manual writer given some hurried notes by a programmer, it can't beat the experience guide you'd get off the net these days.

Thecageyone

You have to remember, manuals were getting slimmer and lacking in contents more and more over the years. At one time they were great! They'd have maps, full colour, the instructions were artistically presented, it was like a guide book for the game more so than a 'manual' - yawwwwwn ..

They used to use the old - saving paper, excuse, now it's - that plus more, they stick a pdf of the manual online, so it's out there ... just all text nothing fancy, they don't have to hire the artists to make the manual interesting or look nice, and of course, the savings onpaper, that only really benefits the company, not you.

And the game is the same price as it ever would have been ...

Jordan 199

Skerries wrote: »

what version did you have as I just checked mine and it doesn't have that as I thought it was the usual word 5 on page 6 sort of stuff?
Amiga btw

This is the one I have for the PC. Although there's a manual, you need the red sheet of paper to play the game.

Akrasia

I loved the manual for F-15 strike eagle II

It was class, gave loads of information about the different kinds of Maneuvers that fighter pilots use to get behind the enemy

I might just have a read of the manual and maybe not be a little bit less absolutely useless as a pilot on Battlefield 3

http://www.flightsimbooks.com/f15strikeeagle/

penev10

Thecageyone wrote: »

Games are still the same price without the manuals I find.

Game development costs have gone up exponentially though so the loss of the manual was surely to try and offset that fact.

Skerries

Jordan 191 wrote: »

This is the one I have for the PC. Although there's a manual, you need the red sheet of paper to play the game.

looks completely different to mine

excuse the condition of it as it got a lot of use and I think I was using it as a mouse mat at one stage

Agricola

Used to love reading the manual before you started into a game. I was never one to rush home and start playing like my life depended on it, even as a young lad. I'd often prefer to look at the box and read the manual the night before starting the game the following day.

Almost all the pc games I buy have no manual now. The fact so much is digital downloads doesnt help. Last one I remember reading and being very excited by, was the glorified slip of paper that comes with Red Dead Redemption on PS3. Reading about the things you could do, looking at the fold out map, thinking about all the exploring and random awesomeness you would soon discover was great.

imitation

Skerries wrote: »

looks completely different to mine

excuse the condition of it as it got a lot of use and I think I was using it as a mouse mat at one stage

Ahhh the memories, back when a straight up photo would do just fine for a game box !

In most cases I don't mind the absence of a manual but there are some games that really need one. I've been playing Defiance for the past week or so and on a number of occasions have had to alt+tab out of the game so I could google some pertinent information that in days gone by would have been contained in the manual.

Jordan 199

Skerries wrote: »

looks completely different to mine

excuse the condition of it as it got a lot of use and I think I was using it as a mouse mat at one stage

Yup, different packaging compared to mine. Car on the front of the box and manual is a Lotus 102.

um7y1h83ge06nx

Brilliant thread.

Standouts for me are the GTA games, Civ 2 and SNES era games.

I used to love reading the manuals on the drive home from a shopping trip, those were the days

Vojera

Mmmm, the smell of fresh game manual, that brings back memories!

I miss them. I miss that little extra info about the characters that had absolutely no relevance to the game but gave you an idea of what they were about.

I recently played GTA 1 on pc and damn did I miss that map. I used to have it spread out in front of me when playing on playstation. Pausing the game and tabbing to another window isn't quite the same

Zapp Brannigan

A whole three pages and no one mentioned the BG2 manual. That thing was a beast and I ended up reading that for a day and a half before I even installed them game!

check_six

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Games have been dumbed down to the point they are not needed anymore by and large. Still have my Falcon 4.0 manual from 1998, all 600+ pages of it.:D

Don't forget the huge map of the Korean pennisula that went with it!

The redone version of Falcon 4.0 (Allied Force) only has the huge manual as a pdf so learning how to do stuff like just firing up the engines from scratch involves jumping in and out of the game and referring back to the pdf and then trying to remember what you'd just read. A big pain.

It's not the same as having some warning light go off and leafing through the manual on your knee to work out if you are about to fall out of the sky/explode as you're still flying along.

Outkast_IRE

I Remember buying Caesar 3 back in the day. And it came with a book/manual that was about 200 pages long, covering every aspect and building in the game. It was class , happy memories

nesf

Outkast_IRE wrote: »

I Remember buying Caesar 3 back in the day. And it came with a book/manual that was about 200 pages long, covering every aspect and building in the game. It was class , happy memories

Unfortunately I went on to buy Caesar 4.

briany

It's not just manuals that have ceased to exist. It's other pack-in content, too, and it all added to the experience. It's moved somewhat to DLC or stuff on the disc, so it's not all bad but something of a loss from a collector's pov. Wish I still had my Killer Instinct soundtrack CD. :P

gizmo

Outkast_IRE wrote: »

I Remember buying Caesar 3 back in the day. And it came with a book/manual that was about 200 pages long, covering every aspect and building in the game. It was class , happy memories

Not for the guy who wrote the manual though...

penev10 wrote: »

Game development costs have gone up exponentially though so the loss of the manual was surely to try and offset that fact.

That's precisely the reason for their disappearance unfortunately.

Outkast_IRE

nesf wrote: »

Unfortunately I went on to buy Caesar 4.

I thought Pharoah was solid enough, caesar 4 was a bit meh, the only games out these days which remind me of it are Tropico. Tropico 4 being the highlight.

nesf

Outkast_IRE wrote: »

I thought Pharoah was solid enough, caesar 4 was a bit meh, the only games out these days which remind me of it are Tropico. Tropico 4 being the highlight.

I liked Pharaoh, but I've terribly neglected the Tropico series despite owning most of them.

Outkast_IRE

nesf wrote: »

I liked Pharaoh, but I've terribly neglected the Tropico series despite owning most of them.

Well tropico 3 is meh, tropico 4 is the game 3 should of been, its just improved in every aspect, well worth sinking some hours into.