Video game manuals - why bother including them?

Cafe Society
1

I haven’t played video games in ages, but the free PS2 I scavenged from my father’s house and the $20 greatest hits series got me back into it.

One thing that irks me are the game manuals. Back in my day, they used to have big, colorful pictures, helpful hints, special moves and even back stories. I remember sitting down and actually reading some of them.

Now they hardly have instructions. Page 3 shows a picture of the Playstation controller, with the buttons labeled. Not the buttons used in the game, like X for punch, Square for select, etc., but which one is the X button, which one is R2 - as if the controller isn’t already labeled. The actual controls for the game are elsewhere.

The rest of the manual is filled with credits and legalese. It’s not even in color. These rival the inserts that come with DVDs - utterly useless.

I understand that this is probably so they will sell more official strategy guides at $10-20 a pop. What I don’t understand is why they even bother including them.

2

Some (but very few) companies still do manuals in full color- Nintendo does, for instance. However, since the Wii is sold in three different countries in North America, Nintendo’s manuals are now shorter in text than they used to be, since the text is written in English, French, and Spanish. I can’t really think of the last video game manual that I really thought was keen. It is a dying art, in a way.

3

You still get some good ones in PC games. Civ IV’s was meaty.

4

I still have my manual for Mechcommander, circa 1998. 184 A5 pages of backstory, colour, and photo-papered geek stuff. Yum.

It seems like a lot of games will still do fancy stuff - but you have to fork out an extra £15 or so to get the Limited Edition version.

5

Lots of electronics have an inadequate (or no) manual now. The iPod, e.g.

6

Of all the video games I have at hand right now, the only one where the manual isn’t in full colour is X-Men Legends. And even that has some fairly detailed information on gameplay. The SquareEnix games include controls, different modes of gameplay, and character bios - about what they included back in the NES days, except lacking a world-map. Namco’s are in colour with detailed information on gameplay. X-Men is the only one at hand that isn’t SquareEnix or Namco, actually…

7

I remember the good ol’ days of PC game manuals. I loved those things! The manual for Fallout was an absolute classic: a spiral-bound reference guide to all the elements of the game, complete with detailed back story, location data, and even a recipe section.

The manuals for the old Ultima games were great, too. In fact, most of the games included more than one manual. You got one for the game stuff, controls, etc., then another one that was a ‘traveller’s guide’ to the game world. For those old RPGs, the manual was more than just a gameplay guide, it was often part of the immersion, and set the tone for the game before you even started playing.

When the quality in game manuals started dropping off, I was kind of annoyed at first. I liked collecting the manuals and maps. Especially the maps-- RPG gamers used to balk if they were anything but full color on canvas! But all that stuff was expensive to produce, and as the games themselves became more sophisticated it was harder to justify all that when the most of the gameplay information could just be included in the in-game help and tooltips.

Much later I came back to my collection and realized that while some classic examples of old manuals were great, most of the ones I have in my collection were cheesy, badly written page filler. And the drawings were kinda crap, too. I used to think the drawings in the Warcraft 2 manual were awesome, but when I looked again a couple years ago they looked more like something I might expect to see in Napoleon Dynamite’s sketchbook.

Incidentally, I was so righteously against the packaging of games in smaller boxes. I loved the big, colorful game boxes of old, and didn’t like the idea of getting just a little DVD case really irked me. Then I moved to a different country and had to whittle down my earthly possessions to two suitcases’ worth. And now? Screw the DVD case, just stick that disc in a CD wallet and I’m good.

So now I tend to agree with Gentle Robot. Why bother with the manual at all? Save the printing costs, just give me the disc. Though they may have some legal obligation to have something there, it’s just silly and kinda useless. I just want the media I paid for, the package only takes up space.

8

Some of them are getting to be “atmosphere pieces”, you might say - Bully has a nice little booklet, but it isn’t really about playing the game at all. It’s more like a student handbook, kind of gets you in the mood of the game.

9

Not all the Nintendo manuals are in colour - I bought Sonic for the Wii yesterday and the manual was in black & white. A lot of the DS manuals are black & white also.

I thought this thread was going to be about why are manuals included no one uses them!

By no one I mean me :wink:

10

Sonic is made by Sega, not Nintendo. Of the 6 Wii games I have, the only two that have color manuals are the two made by Nintendo. The DS games I have are a little more balanced- three companies (Nintendo, Capcom, and Atlus) have color manuals, and one (Majesco), has black and white.

11

I remember the manual for the first Flight Simulator for the Commodore 64. The game itself came on an assuming 5 1/4’’ or two and was very limited by just the computing power. However, you got at least one and maybe two big honking manuals teaching the game as well as the theory of flight just like a real flight instruction manual.

Fast forward to 2007. Flight Simulator is going strong and the current release is so impressive that no existing hardware could run it to its full potential. In the box, you get some DVD’s and a few installation instructions.

There wasn’t even a list of controls anywhere and Flight Simulator has a very high number of commands. I had to just guess and cobble stuff together for a weeks before some guy got just as tired of it and put a command list into a Word document for people to download and print. I can understand cost concerns but that is ridiculous.

12

Well… though dopers such as we would always read the manuals, it seems some gamers don’t. At another forum there was a thread on headsmack kinda moments while playing a game. (I went halfway through the game before I realized I could equip two weapons, &c.) The majority of those posts basically boiled down to not reading the manual.
I’ve seen a move to the in-game tutorial, which may be to get around the people who just aren’t gonna read the manual. Just wait until you just download all your games, then instead of the legalese being tucked away in the manual, you have to press A a thousand times just to wade through it all to the title screen.
Hopefully not.

13

Because if there’s one thing worse than useless manuals, it’s useless manuals in PDF format?

14

Paper manuals simply aren’t feasible now. By the time you finish unpacking the box and reading the book there’s already two patches released invalidating half of the material. It’s the internet’s fault, really. Manuals haven’t completely died, they’ve just changed mediums. Classier games will include electronic encyclopedias accessible from the main menu. It doesn’t beat the spiral bound Fallout compendium, but there you have it.

What I absolutely can’t stand are forced tutorials that are all the rage now. Molyneux I’m looking at you.

“Greetings commander! Move your mouse cursor to the left edge of the screen to scroll it left. Try it now! Good job, commander! Verily thou art a quick learner! To move the map to the right…”

Gah! They all assume you’ve never played a game before. At least offer us a skip button!

15

My son got me “American Conquest – Divided Nation”; supposed to be a Civil War game where you fight different battles of the Civil War. I cannot make heads nor tales of the voluminous instruction book. I had the book open, tried to walk through a brief skirmish – the game refused to respond to anything I was doing. Nothing in the manual tells how to get units to move in a specific direction or what happens if they should. And from what I can tell, I can only play the Confederate role. I can’t put the Negro troops into action at The Crater, I can’t anticipate Jackson’s movements at Chancellorsville, I can only play the Confederate role. I eventually uninstalled it (takes up 2.4 GB on my hard drive) and it sets on my shelf looking nice.

16

I decided one day to play Halo on “Legendary”, the highest difficulty setting. Evidently, one of the bonuses of this, aside from the Sergeant’s lines being far more entertaining, is that the tutorial is forcibly skipped. Basically, right when it would normally start, the ship shakes from being hit by something and he sends you promptly on your way.

I miss the manuals in the old Origin games, particularly Wing Commander. One of the trademarks of the WC series was that the manual was in the form of a ship’s newsletter distributed to the pilots, which included various atmosphere-building things like discussions on recently-dead squadron mates, current-events elsewhere in the galaxy, interviews with various important figures on the ship, discussions of combat tactics, and even movie reviews (all of movies which sounded suspiciously like other games published by Origin, including System Shock and BioForge). The actual instructions in terms of installing and playing the game tended to be on a cheat sheet type setup, such as WC3 where all the actual instructions were on a folded up laminated sheet reminiscent of a diner menu.

Nowadays, gameplay has improved to where much of that can be included in-game, though I too favor seperate gameplay tutorials, such as Half Life’s Hazard Course, to forced in-game tutorials, such as the entire first mission of Halo. Star Trek: Bridge Commander gets a freebie on this one, just because the tutorial was being given by freaking Captain Jean Luc Picard, so you’d damn well listen to what he has to say about fighting a Romulan Warbird.