Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days. Every single cartridge and disc sold there was just that. Best case scenario in a flimsy plastic case that would disintegrate in a couple of years. Had to rawdog the shit out of those games. Pure trial and error and perseverance.
Stuck? Try every possible button combination in every location that makes any sense.
For example, couldn’t finish Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure on Mega Drive (Genesis) because I didn’t know you can jump off walls. Finished it earlier this year though 🙃
Not to brag, but my brother and I passed the garage test mission in Driver (PS1) as kids. Now that I think about it, I should put it on my resume.
Sorry, someone else had suggested that a manual that was necessary to knowing how the game works was some sort of way to try and prevent piracy. Which is just not sensible. Pirates gonna pirate.
They are right, it was used for that. Sometimes some key information for progress would be in the manual or on the box. Luckily it wasn’t super popular on consoles, due to the notion that it wasn’t as easy to pirate on consoles as it was on home computers, where you could just copy the floppy/CD.
Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days. Every single cartridge and disc sold there was just that. Best case scenario in a flimsy plastic case that would disintegrate in a couple of years. Had to rawdog the shit out of those games. Pure trial and error and perseverance.
Stuck? Try every possible button combination in every location that makes any sense.
For example, couldn’t finish Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure on Mega Drive (Genesis) because I didn’t know you can jump off walls. Finished it earlier this year though 🙃
Not to brag, but my brother and I passed the garage test mission in Driver (PS1) as kids. Now that I think about it, I should put it on my resume.
we were lucky if we or family members in the house could speak enough english to know what the fuck was even on screen.
Yeah, that was the case early on. But because of that problem we were very incentivized to learn English. Which we did pretty fast.
Which also proves the point that a manual isn’t preventing anything.
I’m not sure I understand. What point?
Sorry, someone else had suggested that a manual that was necessary to knowing how the game works was some sort of way to try and prevent piracy. Which is just not sensible. Pirates gonna pirate.
They are right, it was used for that. Sometimes some key information for progress would be in the manual or on the box. Luckily it wasn’t super popular on consoles, due to the notion that it wasn’t as easy to pirate on consoles as it was on home computers, where you could just copy the floppy/CD.
I think that was really more in the Atari days, right? Some of them have technical steps like jump switches.
I’m aware of some DOS games that did it. For example 1989 Prince of Persia had to enter the exact character (page, line, word) from the manual.
On PS1 you’d probably never complete Metal Gear Solid (1998), cause you need to call somebody on the codec, but the frequency was on the box cover.