Instruction Manuals

I usually browse through an instruction manual, cause i'll get a grasp of what's to come before it hits so i know what to be expecting. But usually, it's to see the artwork and the extra bits of story/misc info that i have an affinity for. Most of this practice is backed by my taste in anti-generic games that really elude to no parallel gameplay elsewhere.
I'm sure that the older games had a bit more of a reason with the Life=score@50000x1.5N sorts of formulas, so reading the scoring of points of enemies would help, the different techniques such as power jumping (as seen in Super Mario Bros. 2) that had long been forgot in this day and age... not to mention the amazing passwords they'd "accidentally" leave in the in-game screenshots of the password screen overviews (tee hee). so basically it's to see if there's anything that the game is likely to not tell, however little of it there may be...

Jam it back in, in the dark.