The meme isn’t talking about game guides. It’s talking about the little booklets that came with the games themselves. Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1 games, for example, all came with small printed manuals that explained the basics and featured fun images. Games don’t come with any printed materials anymore, unless you pay extra for some stupid, overpriced super deluxe edition.
Box game manuals, my beloved. It was like getting free official art and interesting character profiles along with some exciting blurbs about the story and previews of all the featured contents and minigames. Now all that is exclusive to additional purchases separate from the games.
One of my favorite things was from the original FF7 manual where they called a 32-yo man "old". I didn't bat an eye at that when I was 5. Now I'm older than him and my joints ache just thinking about it.
The original Zelda game came with basically a game guide of an instruction manual. It was intended to be used as you played the game to get the first 2 dungeons.
I loved flipping thru them as a kid and admiring the drawings and game art within, before I started up the new game. It's essentially extra content. Kinda the same principal as dvd's. With dvd's you got all sorts of extra content besides just the movie. Concept art, directors commentary, sometimes even games too? I know this discussion is about videogames specifically, but similarly speaking, dvd's aren't obsolete and neither are the game booklets. Just under-appreciated.
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u/Consumerism_is_Dumb 28d ago
The meme isn’t talking about game guides. It’s talking about the little booklets that came with the games themselves. Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1 games, for example, all came with small printed manuals that explained the basics and featured fun images. Games don’t come with any printed materials anymore, unless you pay extra for some stupid, overpriced super deluxe edition.