Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I think my favorite single moment, a personal anecdote, relating to video game manuals is from Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego for Windows 95. Which came with a full copy of the 1995 World Almanac. I was about 8 or 9 at the time. One of the clues was “I heard he was leaving Lesotho by car.” I went, “Wait, is that the little nation in the middle of South Africa?” I looked it up in the book, it was, and I won that round of the game based on that clue.

    I think my overall favorite video game manual has to be the one from A Link to the Past. A lot of manuals had maybe a prologue or backstory in the manual, A Link to the Past has like three, including the creation myth of the in-game religion. Go read ALttP’s manual and tell me it hasn’t been the design document of the entire series since.

    One more: For some reason, Illusion of Gaia for the SNES includes a full walkthrough right in the manual. They just outright spoil the entire game in the manual. Not sure why they did that.




  • Fun Fact: DS9 was a ripoff of Babylon 5. Literally and directly. JMS pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount, who rejected it, so he went and pitched it to TNN about the time Paramount started up a new Star Trek show about a space station nominally run by humans from Earth that’s involved in conflict and diplomatic intrigue with a wormhole nearby.