Game manuals and maps
Jun. 16th, 2009 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAs I may have noted before, my parents refused to buy me a NES when I was growing up. I saved my allowance and birthday money and bought an SNES myself, then bought a used NES and a bunch of games from Funcoland sometime during high school. The NES games I bought used didn’t typically come with manuals, but the controls were usually straightforward and I had a subscription to Nintendo Power, so it usually wasn’t a big deal. Similarly, when I discovered emulators in college (which lead to a bit of gorging on games I’d only read about as a kid, and discovering that many of them weren’t nearly as fun as I’d imagined), I was able to find fan sites and FAQs that filled in anything I wasn’t able to figure out myself.
Then I started thinking to myself how difficult even the NES version of Ultima must have been without some kind of help—I mean, it’s a slog even with an FAQ handy, so unless you had the Nintendo Power article telling you where everything was (which I did), you’d have to find it all yourself through trial and error.
Then I found a scanned copy of the manual online, which included a full map (more detailed than the “feelie” map that came with the computer game), a full weapons list, a full spell list, an explanation of the systems and stores, suggestions for the quest, instructions on how to get a ship, etc. Similarly, the manual for Final Fantasy walks you halfway through the game, and the manual for Dragon Warrior III walked through pretty much the entire game (including the fake ending!).
Which made it much easier to understand people playing the games in the first place. I was imagining loading in Ultima: Quest of the Avatar with no knowledge of it—no manual, spoilers, cheats or FAQs. Just you and the game. You pick a class essentially at random, Lord British tells you about the quest, gives you 400 gold, and tosses you out into a random town. You wander around to other towns, you talk to people. If you’re lucky, you pick up some random party members. You can buy better equipment, but how much better it is is entirely unknown—you only know it’s better because it costs more. Eventually, monsters will kill you, or you’ll poison yourself in a swamp and run out of health, or you’ll have figured out how to cast cure spells but then they’ll inexplicably stop working (because you’re out of reagents, not that you know you need them). That’s the game’s only mercy: No game overs. Lord British revives you and, while you lose all of your money, you always get the 400 starting gold back. You keep all items, experience and progress. So, fine, you gain levels and talk to people. NPCs tell you about the moongates, but you have to map them out yourself. You’d need to write down the spell formulas and make your own maps. But perhaps most importantly, you’d need to actually learn what the virtues were from the NPCs you talk to and then guess if you were doing them right.
I’m not sure if this was the original intention of the designers of these games—that you puzzle out everything for yourself—or that the feelies/manuals were just a game memory saving device. Modern games virtually always include tutorials and lots of exposition, so whether this was a space-saving measure is questionable. Then again, they use the phrase “NES Hard” for a reason, and perhaps it was executive meddling that put so much info into the manual.
Then I started thinking to myself how difficult even the NES version of Ultima must have been without some kind of help—I mean, it’s a slog even with an FAQ handy, so unless you had the Nintendo Power article telling you where everything was (which I did), you’d have to find it all yourself through trial and error.
Then I found a scanned copy of the manual online, which included a full map (more detailed than the “feelie” map that came with the computer game), a full weapons list, a full spell list, an explanation of the systems and stores, suggestions for the quest, instructions on how to get a ship, etc. Similarly, the manual for Final Fantasy walks you halfway through the game, and the manual for Dragon Warrior III walked through pretty much the entire game (including the fake ending!).
Which made it much easier to understand people playing the games in the first place. I was imagining loading in Ultima: Quest of the Avatar with no knowledge of it—no manual, spoilers, cheats or FAQs. Just you and the game. You pick a class essentially at random, Lord British tells you about the quest, gives you 400 gold, and tosses you out into a random town. You wander around to other towns, you talk to people. If you’re lucky, you pick up some random party members. You can buy better equipment, but how much better it is is entirely unknown—you only know it’s better because it costs more. Eventually, monsters will kill you, or you’ll poison yourself in a swamp and run out of health, or you’ll have figured out how to cast cure spells but then they’ll inexplicably stop working (because you’re out of reagents, not that you know you need them). That’s the game’s only mercy: No game overs. Lord British revives you and, while you lose all of your money, you always get the 400 starting gold back. You keep all items, experience and progress. So, fine, you gain levels and talk to people. NPCs tell you about the moongates, but you have to map them out yourself. You’d need to write down the spell formulas and make your own maps. But perhaps most importantly, you’d need to actually learn what the virtues were from the NPCs you talk to and then guess if you were doing them right.
I’m not sure if this was the original intention of the designers of these games—that you puzzle out everything for yourself—or that the feelies/manuals were just a game memory saving device. Modern games virtually always include tutorials and lots of exposition, so whether this was a space-saving measure is questionable. Then again, they use the phrase “NES Hard” for a reason, and perhaps it was executive meddling that put so much info into the manual.
