Game manuals and maps

As 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.

( But what if I couldn't? )