MudMan

Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn’t line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.

Again, I’m not saying it didn’t have an impact. I’m saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it’s partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.

And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).

Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it’s hard to tell).

Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren’t residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It’d take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You’re two console gens off there. That’s a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you’d expect that process to have failed faster than that.

Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I’m more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.

In any case, it was what it was, and it’s more enshittified now. I’ve been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don’t want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.

It’s not a “even if some existed” thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector’s hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.

Even granting that “booming” is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn’t buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that’s what IGN was doing, and they’re the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.

I don’t know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn’t break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.

I’d say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now… well, who knows, it’s a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?

I mean… MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.

MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn’t have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.

Hm… I’m a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so… it evens out?

I probably didn’t start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.

“A spine” as opposed to… being afraid that you’re mean to me?

I mean, I’ve been around. I think I can picture worse than you can do by talking to me, going by our interaction so far.

Also, the idea of “meet me behind the gym” but with Nostr is just about the most hilarious thing I’ve read on social media. We live in the dumbest dystopia. OP may have been correct for the wrong reasons.

See, the irony of this comment is that projecting some entirely made up narrative onto the motivations of other people is exactly the sort of self-destructive self-righteousness that seems to be harming the OP in the first place.

FWIW, I had in no way considered the moderation policy of this “place”, whichever "place you’re referring to, at all.

But feel free to reach out to me privately to give me whatever reply you think I “deserve”. Which is also some chilling degree of self-righteousness, frankly. You’re not social media Batman doing justice by insulting people, along with the rest of world saving that’s not on you or the OP.

I’m not attacking the OP.

I’m arguing the sense of despair they feel is a consequence of an inflated sense of their own individuality and relevance.

The problem with being stuck in that spiral is that if you parse being told you’re not in charge of saving the world single-handedly as an attack you’re locking yourself from getting out of that spiral, and if you don’t break out of thinking you’re in charge of saving the world single-handedly you also get stuck in that spiral.

So hey, is it a harsh thing to hear? Probably. But also, if you go on the Internet to ask about it, maybe hearing it isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you as a result. It’s likely better than some pity party about how the world is going to end because everybody is evil, which is, frankly, probably a terrible thing to do to a person coming at you from that perspective.

It’s very cultural, and not necessarily a deliberate impossition, either. I definitely see the whole main character thing more in Americans and some northern Europeans.

You can err on the other side, too. People can feel powerless enough to never take action against their own oppression, ro to the point where they find their own corruption doesn’t matter because everybody does the same thing and their own principles will have no impact.

Both are disproportionate, though. You aren’t in charge of saving the world, but you do have some agency and a responsibility about how you use it. It does take some distance to have some perspective on the battles where you’re supposed to do your part even if you’re not winning them.

This is a remarkable amount of main character syndrome, frankly. It doesn’t read like excess empathy to me, it reads like privilege.

You’re not saving the world. You’ll never be saving the world. Your contribution either way is irrelevant. The big problems that you are frustrated about are about mass incentives, big numbers and geopolitics, not about people coming together for the common good because they care so much. It’s not naïveté, it’s arrogance. You get to vote on the big overall direction and, if you have the time, resources and disposition, to collaborate in activism with millions of others, assuming enough of them agree with you.

The small stuff? The “I could do this marginally better for mine or someone else’s sake”? That’s worth it. That you can do yourself. It still works on the same set of incentives and dynamics, but if it’s something you personally can do to make something marginally better for someone, then… you know… go ahead? It’s just much more valuable to do it in your own life than to get frustrated by someone else who you think should do it. Because, again, you aren’t that important. Nobody is waiting for your command or judgement unless you’re supposed to be giving it for some reason.

And let me be clear, I’m not mad about this. I’m not outraged at your worldview or anything. It’s just that, honestly, in good faith, I think this sense of despair at everybody else refusing to fix things by acting as a hive mind with your same set of values and priorities is not a problem of ethics as much as a problem of narcissism and an inflated sense of one’s own impact, and both that individual and their surroundings are better served by understanding the actual scale of their agency. Because… you know, that way you don’t get discouraged when it comes to doing the small things you can do on the large scale, like voting or protesting, and you don’t get angry about doing the big things you can do in the small scale, like not being an asshole or being too deflated to actually act in the spaces you control.

So no hard feelings but this is a get over yourself moment. In a constructive, positive, agency-filled, collaborative, collective action-driven way.

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

I can give that a whirl if it’s not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It’s not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn’t.

Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it’s swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn’t considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there’s a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it’s only surfaced in documentation, if that.

EDIT: Tried, didn’t help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it’s been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it’s too late and the timeout has expired unless you’re mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

I could just set a longer timeout, but I’d rather have a faster boot when I’m sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what’s a couple decades more.

Still dumb, though.

I don’t know about Gentoo, but as a serial dual booter I know this pain well.

I swear about two thirds of the time going through grub on every boot adds to the process are waiting for my monitor to figure itself out. Half the time it doesn’t get there on time at all.

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

Arguably they still can’t.

But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

The thing is in my memory it wasn’t that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs…

I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn’t think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don’t use but you’ve heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.