I loved Dan Simpson’s walkthrough for all the BioWare/Black Isle Studios games like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc.
How else would we finish ogre battle with all the cool units?
Still one of the best SNES games to be made. I finally broke down and used a game genie on it for max rep that never went down. Was like playing on god mode.
Is there an archive for those old GameFAQs?
Yeah, it’s called GameFAQs.
Dingojellybean at hellokitty dot com
The true hero of the day
Edit:
Version Last - Everything complete…all endings revealed, lists and bestiary are up. Also a format change that’s easier to read. (11/23/00)
Minor Update - Luca’s mother bit was finally revised…after all these years of neglect from it. Numerous readers added this…sorry I couldn’t get to it sooner. (10/06/01)
Man jellybean don’t be so hard on yourself
These often were solo written guides, too. Not wikis.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you’ve ever seen.
I keep spectacular documentation on personal projects because there’s no deadlines.
If I get hit by a bus, my office will collapse because I ain’t got time to document shit.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you’ve ever seen.
Not my company 😂😭
Whoever was the guy that wrote the Breath of Fire 2 walkthrough I read when I was 12 was a godsend for me.
I was still learning English and his FAQ was so thorough and clear that I actually improved my vocabulary and grammar from using it.
There actually were usually citations of usernames that you never heard of that provided corrections and niche secrets.
It was pretty neat.
I still prefer these to seo optimized, ad riddled articles with videos that are somehow 8 minutes long to show a 5-10 second part of the game.
Time for an open source one! lol
So many things are nearly impossible to google now
Go to the wikis. Ideally the non-fandom ones, but even those are bearable with unlock set up.
this extension is really nice to avoid fandom when possible.
mediawiki got it right the first time :P
Yeah it’s just like looking up a food recipe anymore. A lot of times, the guide isn’t even correct. Google has encouraged the internet to just pump out hot garbage.
Cool site, shame there’s several outstanding PRs not accepted. Seems the maintainer went dark with the project :(
Right? These are still what I seek out first. Give me plain text and an simple search function any day of the week
So many things are hard to find on Google now, like I’d type all of the relevant keywords but nothing actually relevant would come up except for some ancient GameFAQs document complete with the ASCII titles 😂
Ive had the best luck finding links in peoples old reddit posts, which ddg/ google do a decent job of finding
Much more detailed information that any “gaming site” produces now, that’s for sure
I remember I used to print these guides out on Epson inkjet printers in the early 2000s and wondered why I never had any ink left to print my homework out
I used to have a giant one of these walkthrough guides printed out for Might and Magic 7 when I was a kid. Those guides were great. I miss Acromage :(
I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.
I wonder if anyone has compiled a massive directory of these types of guides anywhere. It would be a shame to ever lose them for good.
When i was browsing the Gemini web one time, I ran across someone who had uploaded the whole archive to Gopher! I love the idea of real cyber punks keeping these precious old text files alive in the backwater sub-webs.
I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.
I remember in the eighth grade (1990) taking a keyboarding class (old typewriters) and we would be given assignments to do holiday-themed (turkeys, Santa Claus, Easter bunny, etc) ascii art as projects around the holidays. We were given paper instructions that would guide us on how to type out each line and with what characters. It was actually pretty fun.
Yeah, people were surprisingly good at ASCII art back in the day.
Thank god you got Mercy on your side…
When you dust off an old game and go look for guides.
Then see one you wrote.
Thank you for your service. 🫡
I was just thinking “nah no way was it twenty years ago that I wrote mine”, but no - fifteen years ago.
Time has flown. My faq has been lifted wholesale and improved upon in the main third party wikis for the game though. Happy days.
I recently went back and played the PC CD-ROM DOS game Star Trek - The Next Generation: A Final Unity. The GameFAQs guide for it was originally written in 1995 and had a CompuServ email address. 😱 The ancient texts certainly got me out of a tough spot with a floating platform puzzle.
How was that game?
Without hyperbole it’s probably one of the best Star Trek games. Definitely in the Top 3. Full TNG voice cast, point-and-click adventure games are a good format for away missions and diplomacy, and it runs well in DOSBox!
Made it through Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time on N64 because of these - I remember the Forest temple and Water temple being doozeys!
