[:plant:] Note to self: Write notes in the note section (General Discussion quality thread)

Do you guys remember video game instruction manuals? Do you? Do you remember things?! I think they still make them, but that may just be a rumour. This thread is about the NOTES section they contained, sometimes called MEMO! Did anyone ever seriously use them? Here are two examples of these so called instruction manuals, randomly plucked from a time when forced in-game tutorials didn't exist!



Oh, oh my. Sometimes these were very handy when a game didn't contain a car battery to save your progress and overly confusing developer cruelty joke passwords were needed. "You've reached level two, password: PINK CIRCLE, ANIMATED BAT, 8, CAN OF LEMONADE, PINK CIRCLE, BARKING DOG, PURPLE CIRCLE, HOUSE ON FIRE, 3, MOUTH ULCER" Or maybe, for like, Zelda, you could write down secrets about how Dodongo dislikes smoke. I rarely used them though. I'd just grab a piece of paper instead of walking over to the shelf, picking out the game, opening the box, digging out the manu-oh hell the next level has started now!

Some of these were huge, Kung Fu for example dedicates five pages. FIVE PAGES. The whole game is about trying to avoid enemies sneaking up behind you and shoving their hands up your arse (this causes your health to drop at a rapid rate). There's really not much to Kung Fu. What are you supposed to write in there?



I mean, this isn't even really accurate.

Do you have any amazing emotional stories to share regarding this very important thread about blank pages? Did you buy a second hand game one day, flick through the manual to discover someone had drawn a naked women that looked more like a can of peas than anything? Maybe it was just supposed to be a can of peas, and you're horrible for twisting it into something else. That could improve the purchase by AT LEAST 23%.



But why do new games bother? It's not the 1800's anymore. Nobody's going to write down important areas or such to visit, other than GameFAQs.com. Yeah they still sort of make sense for portable games due to the Wikipedia fact that a portable game is portable, but what if you carry your games around in a carrying case? You're stuffed. Forever. I mean, Excite Truck gives me two pages. It's a fucking arcade racer. "USE BOOST TO GO FASTER"? "TRY AND WIN THE RACES"? I think we should send a letter to these publishers and get them shut down for wasting paper. Thousands of letters.

Most amazing jew boots

Quote:

... how Dodongos dislike bombs. CAN'T WAIT TO ____ DODONGOS

Fixed. For science!

There's nowhere I can't reach.

It made some twisted sense to have notes pages back in the 80s, I guess. If you write your notes on a random piece of paper, you'd be more likely to misplace it or have your parents throw it in the trash than you would your instruction manual. That said, I never wrote in them.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I remember renting a copy of Mega Man X3 for SNES and the instruction manual had a password written in the notes that gave me all of the X Armor and had all of the bosses beat. Saved me the trouble of finding the stuff myself.

I never wrote anything in them, though.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I think I once wrote some cheats down in the notes section. But most often I wonder what's up with it. Unless you have to write down door codes or something, it's a waste of space.

How ya doing, buddy?

I used index cards to write down passwords, and kept them all in a recipe box. I always kept the packaging, instruction manuals, etc. in pristine condition, so that precluded the possibility of writing in the memo section.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Cheat codes, duh.

And also reminders that you need to beat the game in order to win.

FELIPE NO

It probably made more sense with games like Faxanadu and its/their super secret CIA password system. Remember, you hacked the NES before you hacked the gibson.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

The most ever written down in the Notes section of an instruction manual of mine was a "Happy Birthday!" note written in a StarFox manual.

Other than that, I haven't even bothered using the Notes section for anything. I use scraps of paper, note cards, the back of my hand, whatever I can find that'll make a suitable place to remember super secret passwords and whatnot.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I only used the notes section for DOOM 64 and that was to jot down passwords before I purchased a memory card. Other than that, they're pretty useless to me.

How ya doing, buddy?

Wow, I can't believe people used the notes section at all. I thought it was just like, tradition to have that in there.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Didn't some PC RPG's used to come with paper for mapping? I can't remember which ones I'm thinking of... At any rate, thank god for auto-mapping, which makes "notes" sections of manuals pointless. However, I can see a need to write down puzzle clues in adventure games or horror/survival games.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

The only games I ever used the momo section of a manual for were the Resident Evil games. I would write the answers to the puzzles or strategies to keep in mind to make the game easier to get through. They were handy things but now I just have a lab notebook that I keep these types of notes in now so I don't miss them too much.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I won't buy used games if people write shit all over the manuals. It degrades the quality.

I've never bothered to write anything in any manual, ever, although I've seen a few rentals with stuff like fatalities and codes written in them. I'll just look them up on gamefaqs usually though.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

The notes sections made perfect sense back in the day when you didn't have save games. I can't be the only one who remembers writing down rather long strings of letters and/or numbers so I could come back into a game at the level I'd got to. That said, I don't think I ever wrote them down in the notes section of the manual.

FELIPE NO

I remember lending my Super Star Wars games to a friend and getting the manual back with level codes in it. I wasn't all that annoyed considering those games were pretty fucking hard. They were pretty useful for skipping shitty seemingly impossible levels.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I bet the origin of the notes section in a manual can be traced back to some stupid press order by Atari or something for the home release of Pong, and some poor newly hired manual writer dude having to fill up 16 pages about this game. "I already wrote about your line and the enemy line and the ball and the numbers, and there's still four pages to fill! Oh God, oh God, I'm never going to make the deadline! I'm so dead!... Unless... YES, THAT'S IT! BRILLIANT!"

Anyway, I do remember using it for Megaman 2, but other than that I usually just used a sheet of paper instead, because it's much easier to lose those. That's a big advantage.

How ya doing, buddy?