I still prefer these to seo optimized, ad riddled articles with videos that are somehow 8 minutes long to show a 5-10 second part of the game.
So many things are nearly impossible to google now
Yeah it's just like looking up a food recipe anymore. A lot of times, the guide isn't even correct. Google has encouraged the internet to just pump out hot garbage.
Go to the wikis. Ideally the non-fandom ones, but even those are bearable with ublock set up.
this extension is really nice to avoid fandom when possible.
mediawiki got it right the first time :P
Time for an open source one! lol
I used gamefaqs for the latest Square HD2D games like Triangle Strategy. It's actually awesome because it really completes the nostalgia and the games are kinda perfectly created for the type of guides, like the "Golden route" in that game. It's so cool people still make these guides
These often were solo written guides, too. Not wikis.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you've ever seen.
There actually were usually citations of usernames that you never heard of that provided corrections and niche secrets.
It was pretty neat.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you've ever seen.
Not my company 😂😭
Whoever was the guy that wrote the Breath of Fire 2 walkthrough I read when I was 12 was a godsend for me.
I was still learning English and his FAQ was so thorough and clear that I actually improved my vocabulary and grammar from using it.
I keep spectacular documentation on personal projects because there's no deadlines.
If I get hit by a bus, my office will collapse because I ain't got time to document shit.
I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.
I wonder if anyone has compiled a massive directory of these types of guides anywhere. It would be a shame to ever lose them for good.
When i was browsing the Gemini web one time, I ran across someone who had uploaded the whole archive to Gopher! I love the idea of real cyber punks keeping these precious old text files alive in the backwater sub-webs.
When you dust off an old game and go look for guides.
Then see one you wrote.
Thank you for your service. 🫡
I was just thinking "nah no way was it twenty years ago that I wrote mine", but no - fifteen years ago.
Time has flown. My faq has been lifted wholesale and improved upon in the main third party wikis for the game though. Happy days.
Back in 97 my older sister got a both babe job at E3 and got extra tickets for me and my mom to take me. This is back when it was strictly a trade conference and not really open to the public. I was waiting in line for a new Gameboy game when a dude overhead me rambling to my mom about the Brady guides I loved to read so much back then (my mom is a patient saint haha) when a dude in line interrupted me and told my mom about his website that had free guides for all the new games online. My mom was pretty excited about free guides and he handed her his card which I looked at eagerly, it was Jeff Veasey, the creator of gamefaqs.com.
I can't tell you how much of my parents toner i burnt through over the years printing from that website, it was probably cheaper to just buy the guides haha. Still one of my all time favorite sites.
Oh yeah that Gameboy game I was waiting to see was some new Japanese monster game called Pokemon.
Pokemon? Sounds interesting. What was it about?
I remember printing out a 100% guide for Ocarina of Time in the late 90s. IIRC, it came out to ~100 pages. Computer teacher was not happy, lol!
So many things are hard to find on Google now, like I'd type all of the relevant keywords but nothing actually relevant would come up except for some ancient GameFAQs document complete with the ASCII titles 😂
Ive had the best luck finding links in peoples old reddit posts, which ddg/ google do a decent job of finding
Much more detailed information that any "gaming site" produces now, that's for sure
I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.
Yeah, people were surprisingly good at ASCII art back in the day.
I remember in the eighth grade (1990) taking a keyboarding class (old typewriters) and we would be given assignments to do holiday-themed (turkeys, Santa Claus, Easter bunny, etc) ascii art as projects around the holidays. We were given paper instructions that would guide us on how to type out each line and with what characters. It was actually pretty fun.
I have fond memories of AbsoluteSteve’s FF7/8 guides, which were infinitely better than the official guides
Oh man. Thank you for reminding me of them. What an absolute boss he was for putting them together
I remember printing these out, too. They were usually hundreds of pages. And we still had a printer that used paper with the holes on the side. Shit took forever. Just grrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchch (printer sounds) all day.
We didn't have a printer so I would print them out at school or the library and bring them home lol
Me too!!! OMG brings back so many memories
I often do miss the internet of the old days.
Hosting a modern day gamefaqs would cost $500 per year or so.
I guess a wiki would be easier to offer version control, links and images for the author.
Maybe that would be $1000 a year.
A small vps should cost no more than $10/mo, and should be enough to run a text-based site (with compression) reasonably well. Obviously the gotcha will be bandwidth, but you could subsidize that with donations.
I have free hosting and free bandwidth essentially. Have any recommendations for a CMS dedicated to this?
Notepad++
I used to have a giant one of these walkthrough guides printed out for Might and Magic 7 when I was a kid. Those guides were great. I miss Acromage :(
Is there an archive for those old GameFAQs?
Yeah, it's called GameFAQs.
How else would we finish ogre battle with all the cool units?
Still one of the best SNES games to be made. I finally broke down and used a game genie on it for max rep that never went down. Was like playing on god mode.
I remember I used to print these guides out on Epson inkjet printers in the early 2000s and wondered why I never had any ink left to print my homework out
I once wrote such a guide for a BBS game. Must've been 30 years ago. Man, I wish I could find that again. But I just saw you can play the game online: https://legendreddragon.net/
I recently went back and played the PC CD-ROM DOS game Star Trek - The Next Generation: A Final Unity. The GameFAQs guide for it was originally written in 1995 and had a CompuServ email address. 😱 The ancient texts certainly got me out of a tough spot with a floating platform puzzle.
How was that game?
Without hyperbole it’s probably one of the best Star Trek games. Definitely in the Top 3. Full TNG voice cast, point-and-click adventure games are a good format for away missions and diplomacy, and it runs well in DOSBox!
I loved Dan Simpson's walkthrough for all the BioWare/Black Isle Studios games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc.
Made it through Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time on N64 because of these - I remember the Forest temple and Water temple being doozeys!
Tfw you know what to do, you just aren't co-ordinated or fast enough to do it.
Thank god you got Mercy on your side..
