So many things are hard to find on Google now, like I’d type all of the relevant keywords but nothing actually relevant would come up except for some ancient GameFAQs document complete with the ASCII titles 😂
Ive had the best luck finding links in peoples old reddit posts, which ddg/ google do a decent job of finding
I still prefer these to seo optimized, ad riddled articles with videos that are somehow 8 minutes long to show a 5-10 second part of the game.
Go to the wikis. Ideally the non-fandom ones, but even those are bearable with ublock set up.
this extension is really nice to avoid fandom when possible.
mediawiki got it right the first time :P
I used gamefaqs for the latest Square HD2D games like Triangle Strategy. It’s actually awesome because it really completes the nostalgia and the games are kinda perfectly created for the type of guides, like the “Golden route” in that game. It’s so cool people still make these guides
So many things are nearly impossible to google now
Right? These are still what I seek out first. Give me plain text and an simple search function any day of the week
Yeah it’s just like looking up a food recipe anymore. A lot of times, the guide isn’t even correct. Google has encouraged the internet to just pump out hot garbage.
Cool site, shame there’s several outstanding PRs not accepted. Seems the maintainer went dark with the project :(
Time for an open source one! lol
Tfw you know what to do, you just aren’t co-ordinated or fast enough to do it.
When you dust off an old game and go look for guides.
Then see one you wrote.
Thank you for your service. 🫡
I was just thinking “nah no way was it twenty years ago that I wrote mine”, but no - fifteen years ago.
Time has flown. My faq has been lifted wholesale and improved upon in the main third party wikis for the game though. Happy days.
I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.
I remember in the eighth grade (1990) taking a keyboarding class (old typewriters) and we would be given assignments to do holiday-themed (turkeys, Santa Claus, Easter bunny, etc) ascii art as projects around the holidays. We were given paper instructions that would guide us on how to type out each line and with what characters. It was actually pretty fun.
Yeah, people were surprisingly good at ASCII art back in the day.
deleted by creator
One of the guides pictured in the meme was last updated in October of 2001. Pretty close.
I deleted this when I rechecked the wording 6 hours before you replied how did you even know what I said
I guess my instance didn’t remove it fast enough.
Yeah I thought it meant the games not the guides then re-read and deleted lol
I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.
I wonder if anyone has compiled a massive directory of these types of guides anywhere. It would be a shame to ever lose them for good.
When i was browsing the Gemini web one time, I ran across someone who had uploaded the whole archive to Gopher! I love the idea of real cyber punks keeping these precious old text files alive in the backwater sub-webs.
How else would we finish ogre battle with all the cool units?
Still one of the best SNES games to be made. I finally broke down and used a game genie on it for max rep that never went down. Was like playing on god mode.
I often do miss the internet of the old days.
Hosting a modern day gamefaqs would cost $500 per year or so.
I guess a wiki would be easier to offer version control, links and images for the author.
Maybe that would be $1000 a year.
A small vps should cost no more than $10/mo, and should be enough to run a text-based site (with compression) reasonably well. Obviously the gotcha will be bandwidth, but you could subsidize that with donations.
I’m accounting for a domain name and sufficient bandwidth.
I figure 10 TB per month should be enough.
The $500 is a conservative estimate.
You could try hosting it at home on an old laptop and see how it goes
That’s 100% more bandwidth than not doing it at all
I have free hosting and free bandwidth essentially. Have any recommendations for a CMS dedicated to this?
Notepad++
Made it through Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time on N64 because of these - I remember the Forest temple and Water temple being doozeys!
I remember I used to print these guides out on Epson inkjet printers in the early 2000s and wondered why I never had any ink left to print my homework out
I remember printing these out, too. They were usually hundreds of pages. And we still had a printer that used paper with the holes on the side. Shit took forever. Just grrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchch (printer sounds) all day.
Me too!!! OMG brings back so many memories
We didn’t have a printer so I would print them out at school or the library and bring them home lol
These often were solo written guides, too. Not wikis.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you’ve ever seen.
Whoever was the guy that wrote the Breath of Fire 2 walkthrough I read when I was 12 was a godsend for me.
I was still learning English and his FAQ was so thorough and clear that I actually improved my vocabulary and grammar from using it.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you’ve ever seen.
Not my company 😂😭
I keep spectacular documentation on personal projects because there’s no deadlines.
If I get hit by a bus, my office will collapse because I ain’t got time to document shit.
There actually were usually citations of usernames that you never heard of that provided corrections and niche secrets.
It was pretty neat.
Much more detailed information that any “gaming site” produces now, that’s for sure
I loved Dan Simpson’s walkthrough for all the BioWare/Black Isle Studios games like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc.
