everything is fucking videos now. You get stuch at a very particular place? Prepare to sift through literally hours of video instead of, for example, just searching for the name of the place you’re in ingame
Nah, there’s a lot of text guides too. But the problem is that they’re often just copied from one source that somehow manages to get basic shit wrong every damn time. And videos definitely have their place, so many times I’ve first searched for a text guide and only got more confused. As long as the videos are short and to the point I always appreciate them. Found some great channels that way that have helped me through several games.
I used to print armored core walkthroughs and take them to my room. I think that’s why my parents let me have a computer in my room. So I could use a floppy to bring them over without printing
I remember the game grumps did a walkthrough of some sonic game and they were going through some guys 10+ year walkthrough that was really well done. It was hilarious some of the comments the walkthrough person wrote.
Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
I once tried writing a guide for Paper Mario, and it was then I realized how much effort, consultation, and typing all of these are. It’s in some ways not a surprise that walkthroughs are now just video playthroughs of the game (often involving someone backtracking 3 times as they figure out a puzzle) - that takes a lot less effort than conscious text recorded outside of a game.
I’ve never written a game FAQ but when I’ve done documentation for other things on a computer I’ve found that I prefer recording myself doing the task and then writing the guide while going back through the video. It’s too easy to skip steps otherwise.
Don’t go for a whole guide, pick something smaller like all the recipes or a map of Dry Dry Desert (two things I remember printing off back in the day!)
I remember finding online guides for the first time back in the days of dial up. It was incredible. So many games I had places where I was stuck and you just accepted that you have to figure it out or you just don’t continue the game.
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
unlike many printed guides, gamefaqs guides came out some time after game release, because average people didn’t have preview versions of the game to play
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.
I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.
Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.
I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.
But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.
I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.
It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.
I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3
if I’m stuck in a game (usually some 90’s point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.
I remember how useful the FFX-2 guide was. We didn’t have a computer at home when I was a kid, but I was able to head to the town library and print off the neat formatted text only guide.
I think I first played this in like 2005 or something. I was underage and didn’t have banking credentials yet, so I bought the licence by mailing a letter full of coins to the author. Back then a lifetime licence was a few dozen euros, but I bought the major version licence for like 15€. That version received updates for a couple of years, from what I remember. I never bought the lifetime licence, but re-bought a major version licence twice and then bought the game again when it launched on Steam. In the end buying the lifetime licence would’ve been cheaper, heh, but I don’t mind supporting the developers.
I still keep coming back to it every few years. There are other games in the same genre or very adjacent to it that are better as games – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the first to come to mind – but there are some things about URW that no other game really does, notably the whole realistic iron age survival thing (it’s a different genre altogether with less nuanced survival gameplay, but another iron age favourite of mine is Vintage Story, which is basically a Minecraft mod spun off into its own game).
The animal AI in particular is really good. The way you hunt in this game is a pretty good representation of cursorial hunting, which is basically just running after the animals until they tire – something humans are good at thanks to bipedalism. You only rarely manage to take down larger animal like elks (moose in American; the game calls them by their European name) in one strike, which means that you have to wound them and then jog after them until they collapse from exhaustion and blood loss. Or you can dig trap pits in chokepoints and corral them into them, another real hunting strategy used in iron age Finland. The tracking in the game is also very involved. You do it by following tracks displayed on the ground rather than a compass arrow, and you often have to track animals for very long distances and they will try to lose you by moving erratically.
Damn, now I kind of want to go back and play the game again.
I vaguly remember playing some version (I think a demo) of this in the 90’s. Crazy to see it’s still going. It’s on Steam. I should probably check it out again sometime.
Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.
Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.
I have never played Dwarf Fortress but I thought it had name recognition, I guess the average COD, Fortnite type player might not have heard of some niche game like that
…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.
There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.
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