Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, both by Lucasarts, for sheer historical detail.
For humor… Anything by Infocom.
Sure is! I had a copy for my C64 but it went missing during one of my moves. I wanted to get back into it and found a PC copy on eBay and got that. Yeah, I could have played it as abandonware but I needed the system maps.
Ino wrote:
Stinkpalm wrote:
spit take
Including Fallout: Tactics? You are surely shitting me. The crappy manual was only my first great disappointment with Fallout: Tactics. They didn’t even try.l
Anything from Infocom, where the manual was part of the game.
Slightly off-topic, but I liked how in Space Quest IV, your hero had to travel through time and get a copy of the Space Quest IV Hint Book in order to complete the game.
fallout 
FYI,the ‘no mutants allowed’ website reported last month that another fallout game is being planned, but not until Interplay and Black Isle finish some obligations related to other games.
My favorite manuals?
gTA3: a couple of easter eggs, fit the game nicely, and listed the surprising list of voice actors.
pirates!:
Wasteland: The single best one ever! This was the precursor to Fallout. It came with two manuals. The user’s manual was just instructions for the game. The second book, the ‘paragraph book’ was the cool one. Every so often, the game would tell you to look up a paragraph by number. If you have the right paragraph, you get the password to enter the casino or the code to disarm the bomb. If you guess wrong, you lose the game, often with hilarious results. If you read the paragraph book straight through, you see two very distinct sets of paragraphs. The legit set leads you through a war between wasteland rangers and evil cyborgs. The fake set has the rangers going to Mars, fighting in a Martian revolution, and crash landing a spacecraft. There are also warnings to only read the paragraphs mentioned in the game, and a few Bard’s Tale references.
ACtually still have Space Rogue in my closet, was a fun game.
Keef the Theif, the manual was in keeping with the rest of the game.
Ed Asner angry!! Ed Asner Smash!!
I checked my Space Rouge box and it does indeed have the cut-out spacecrafts. Except they’re on a separate card and not a part of the manual.
TVS, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wasteland team was inspired by the paragraph books that Victory Games used in their solo board games. Ambush! was released circa 1983 and had a UFO reference in the paragraph book, along with some other weirdness.
Microprose games used to come with terrific manuals. M1 Tank Platoon was a really thick, informative one, IIRC.
X-Beyond the Frontier 's manual only told you how to fly the ship and nothing else, though this may seem a bit weak, it meant meeting other races, finding out what ship add-ons they sell, etc., was a learning experience, rather than just ‘I wonder when I’ll meet the Argons?’.
Gran Turismo 2 's manual told you exactly how to tune real-life cars, aswell as how to perform loads of tricks (most of which were impossible in the actual game).
Another nod to Fallout and Pirates! for entertaining manuals.
I have a crappy war game called Enemy Nations that came with a fairly useless manual. However, in the part about net play, they go on to talk about how some service or another was going to give them their own number but then they found out that EN would be playable over another service as well so they took the assigned number away and now you have to seek a random port. It cracks me up that they would whine about how mean some service was to them in their manual.
Oh, anyone remember Hacker, I remember it when it came out for the C=64. There was no manual, just instructions on how to load the game, the rest you had to learn as you played.
Logon
Password failed.
Logon
Password failed.
Logon
Password failed.
Loging off in 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…A@!%QG$AG@!$%GASG
I like Arcanum’s manual, especially the monograph at the end, “On the Races of Arcanum”. Sierra’s recent city building games (Caesar III, Pharoah, and Zeus) also have pretty good manuals. I also enjoyed the short story in the “Mind Forever Voyaging” manual, that sets the scene and your mission.