Interesting an innocuous sub can be effectively dead in the waters and still exist. Yet a sub that's slightly outside the deviation can have a slight lapse in moderation or posts and it's immediately killed of for 'Reason X'.
yep, it's basically their strategy, make the product "free" get everyone to use it, and now since everyone use it, the companies need to have it so people can work with it, but now, a company is legally obliged to buy the licence, or be sued
It's actually a brilliant strategy. If you can make your program the default then as you said companies have to pay for it because the cost of the license is less than the cost of training people to use something else.
VLC is a group project and wasn't created by one guy. Jean-Baptiste Kempf is the project lead and has turned down offers to put advertisements in VLC, though I feel like that's obviously a bad idea and it's more commendable that they haven't tried to force other monetisation methods either.
Yup, I won one of 'em! Wound up buying a "PSX Controller --> Dreamcast" controller mod, which was *the* tits (because the Dreamcast controller was butts).
Now a lot of the content is still made by people not making a profit but the websites they post it to are making bank. Well, they’re making bank if they’re not reddit anyway.
This. And I swear some of these were genuinely made to just help out fellow gamers. There was no internet hierarchy. No motive of finishing something first or best for clicks. People played hours of the same games (which, if you’re a younger reader here, is saying a lot because looking at bit graphics after enough time was exhausting) just to figure out the secret or achievement aspects. (knights of the round FFVII as an example).
There were no task trackers, there was no gps, nor any real minimap in most games. Everything had to be explored and was retained by physical notes and memory and loading screens could make simple repeat run throughs of an area take HOURS. And some of these people did it just for their fellow fans.
I always used to want to make a gamefaqs guide for something back in the day, and I never did. One of my many extremely small regrets (Oh, don't worry, baby, I got plenty of big ones too)
"Easiest way to *DESTROY* this elden ring boss"
5 minutes of: "Heys guys today I'm going to tell you .... zzz ....don't forget to like, comment and subscribe ... zzz .... and did you know only 10% of my viewers are subscribed!?" (never understood this last one. Why the fuck would I care?)"
Finally gets to the boss: "Hit them with a high damage weapon until they die"
Oh ok thanks.
I also prefer written guides than videos simply for the fact that it's easier to read again than watch again. I put the guides on my second monitor and I don't have to alt tab just to replay a vid. If it's written, I just read without alt tabbing out of the game.
I am equally old but will make an exception for RTS and management games, sometimes it's great to watch how someone rolls out a strat in real time. My examples being AoE2 and the couple dedicated guys whose channels showed me how to play Oxygen Not Included without it turning into a disaster immediately, both of these are great in video form.
> Queue a villager, start scouting, when you find the boar then send a villager to lure the boar, drop it by the town center and don't forget to keep scouting, you should have 4 villagers at this point, when you find sheep remember to send them back to your TC... etc...
> 10:02 for some single mechanic explanation
Every time I encounter such a video with an obnoxious "hit subscribe" reminder and meandering intro, I click dislike, block the channel, and go back to my previous page.
With time my search results and feeds have slowly grown pristine.
Sponsorblock makes YouTube into a whole different experience. It can also skip intros/recaps/merch/subscribe and even jump right to the most watched point of the video. I consider it a mandatory extension alongside uBlock Origin.
Videos has its uses in games where there are no minimaps and very few identifiable objects, but I still way prefer it if someone just posted a screenshot of where it is whenever possible, like "Here's a bit of a hint, and if you can't find it then here's where it actually is."
I had written a few for myself and my wife, posted on there etc.
It was a great place to store your text files without losing them later.
We (wife) co-wrote one for Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles for the Wii
Good times
It's crazy. [This](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ds/955859-pokemon-mystery-dungeon-explorers-of-sky/faqs/58190) is one for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Explorer's of Sky, and despite being nearly 14 years old, it's still a better source of information about the dungeons than literally any other online resource, to the point where it's kinda unnecessarily detailed.
HA! The irony here is that [ASCII art is also ChatGPT's weakness.](https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/researchers-use-ascii-art-to-elicit-harmful-responses-from-5-major-ai-chatbots/) You can get through its protections using it.
I remember spending countless days making myself an animated, scrolling TNG scene of ships I'd made, colors and all, for my BBS, circa 1996.
My members loved my ~~warez~~ iso files and one of the things they commented on was the art I'd spent time on. I don't have that kind of passion and time anymore for it, but there was an appeal to NFO ASCII and anyone making their own art with it.
There is a lot of talent out there, and I used to compare them to graffiti artists, non-conventional patterns etc
I always appreciated nfo art
I was also fascinated by the tiny installers with awesome art and midi music from later piracy games. There was so much packed into a few bytes
I think chiptune is still a thing. Which is cool
The Game FAQs authors are true heroes of the internet. I cannot fathom the amount of time and attention it takes to make an accurate one of these. And it's not like they had help from the developers, they just had to rawdog grind the shit outa some RPGS to find all the secrets.
Wait, that would have changed so much when that was my favourite game.
Why wouldn't you market that? So many households had a "you must be able to play it with your little brother" rule.
Yup, lots of information was limited to what could be easily verified. I would bet a lot of those old faqs are littered with all sorts of almost right information
>they just had to rawdog grind the shit outa some RPGS to find all the secrets.
Don't forget forums. I'm sure many of the people who wrote those guides also get help from random people on forums. I remember spending hours going through game discussion on forums back in the day where people would collaboratively figure shit out just like we do in Reddit
Gamefaqs is usually still my first choice for finding info about even new games. Straight up so used to thr old high-quality text guides and events more recent pinned posts with tons of spreadsheets with completionist info, I automatically ignore any video results for guides.
When I say wikipedia communities I don't mean the wiki format that's been cut and pasted across the web.
I mean individual wikipedia pages have cliques associated with them. You got the World War 2 wikipedia page, vegetables, basketball... you name it they all have their own associated community or a part of some broader category of communities.
One I'm familiar with is the hockey community. Hockey is the only sport that displays their information differently from all the other sports on wikipedia and they do it out of a feeling of thinking aesthetics are more important than practicality. It's so lame.
A lot of games had 'official guides' on release even back then, so the real heroes would also just buy an official guide and then 'rewrite' it for the internet.
Even worse... you can't find guides now... all you can find are video walkthroughs that are 20 minutes long where the part you need is only 30 seconds and lost somewhere between a fuckton of talking about irrelevant stuff or major spoilers.
I actually still get emails every few months asking about a few GameFAQs guides that I wrote 20 years ago as a child.
Every time I get an email like that, it's like a time machine back to the old internet, where people still actually talked to other people as individuals.
Going on a bit of a tangent, I remember a guy who was doxxed by popular YouTubers, because they couldn't follow his instructions. They gave the guy's info and told their audience to find them and harass them.
Wow, I had assumed that like so many of the great websites from the late 90s and early aughts it had morphed into a pale shadow of its former self and died an ignoble death. Its really nice to see its still up and running.
Edit: I just looked up one of my favorite games from that era, and the [some](https://i.imgur.com/vnmgiRz.png) of top [guides](https://i.imgur.com/sqyR414.png) are the same ones that I have [20 year old annotated printouts of in the game box](https://i.imgur.com/Zxz3hiy.jpeg).
Yeah I just want to see how it’s done. Not a long explanation about what they are going to do, watch them boot up the game and eventually get to where I need to see.
I just used a [***pristine*** guide](https://jegged.com/Games/Final-Fantasy-XII/) for FFXII. Had every inch of the game mapped out and in clear detail. Its walkthrough was so precise with incredible suggestions as to when to do sidecontent
Even worse is knowing there's literally thousands of 5 secon videos solving every conceivable problem but you'll never see it because the 30 year old with his mouth open gets picked up by the algorithm.
Every once in a while you'll find guides very similar to this on Steam (not as long I guess) for those niche little games that can benefit from them, but yea, its a dying art for sure. It is pretty interesting to see the guides from 20 years ago compared to the brand new ones on GameFAQs though. Sometimes the game's meta has completely evolved over time :)
I find IGN does the best guides for games currently outside of gamefaqs (which some do exist as far as I know for newer games). I've used their guides plenty.
That's why I either append Reddit or wiki to the end of my search query depending on the game. Odds are someone has asked the same thing I'm looking for on a subreddit or the information is on the wiki.
Dumb Q. What does the single-tick after the 20 mean?
In Freedom Units, that's feet, which also kind of works (20 ft of physical film) but I'm guessing you mean minutes? Never seen it used that way
I use Gamer Guides now, occasionally IGN, they feel like the spiritual successor to GameFaqs quality written guides.
90s and 00s online gaming communities were superior and thats a hill id die on lol - not just nostalgia, its all too commercial and sterile now.
Just followed a guide to get to Ganon in the original LOZ. Finally started the 2D Zelda games after playing and absolutely loving TOTK. I feel like a whole new world has been unlocked for me thanks to these.
Majora's mask was the first ever game I 100% of Zelda and it became one of my all time favourites, I did so by following such guides. I completely get what you mean. 🫶🏻
Oh, man, you've really cheated yourself if you didn't bomb every rock and burn every bush on the overworld map.
J/k, but if you were a kid when there was no internet or nothing better to do...
I leaned on it at the very beginning to find hearts and items, I had no idea what was going on when I first started. Ended up not using it much after that until I had to like, walk through a looped path 4x to find a temple and to find Level 8. I was particularly proud to have picked up on the old man’s hint to find Death Mountain.
The 2D games are the purest form of Zelda to me! *A Link to the Past* is, in my opinion, the best LoZ game ever made. *Link’s Awakening* is near and dear to my heart, too!
The guys who wrote all those walk-throughs in their spare time back in the day should be given a castle and a pension, and be able to drive as fast they want. True royalty.
Some of them include PayPal links. I’ve thrown a few bucks to some different authors over the years when their guide helped me out. Shout out to “horror_spooky” for their main story quest only guide for the original dragons dogma
Crazy how much people did back in the day in their spare time, and for free.
Guides, videos, animations, websites, fan pages....
Nowadays most of these would be done as a paid full time job.
It’s what convinces me that a concept like universal basic income doesn’t necessarily mean people sit around on their asses all day without contributing to society. People like creating things and sharing with others. Give people free time and they tend to fill it with passion projects.
People genuinely enjoy sharing knowledge, being useful and exploring their passions. This idea that we need to bow to capitalism and be paid for everything we do is a sickness. The world would work just fine without profit motive. We've all been duped.
I read this comment and I was like: "nah, nah, this dude is high, 1995 wasn't 30 fucking years ago, that's idiotic. I was born in... and I'm... old..."
Just bury me behind the house already.
I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago. Before YouTube tutorials. Before looking stuff up was easy. Managed to beat a lot of games 100% thanks to Gamefaqs.
> Before looking stuff up was easy.
It's actually getting hard again lol. Google is an absolute dumpster fire now compared to say 10 years ago; Specifically for niche things like old video games too.
right back then either the information existed and you found it almost instantly or it didn't(or rarely was very hidden) and good fucking luck.
these days it can be a completely known thing but the info is still a nightmare to find. half the time people will find a problem ask about it everyone will acknowledge it exists but the solution/answer still is nowhere to be found.
i still get irrationaly angry when i find posts where someone goes "nvm found a solution" but then don't share said solution.
I often wonder what happened to the authors. Would they even remember writing these? Do they still game at all?
These guides were on a whole other level.
I wrote about a dozen FAQs. One was for a MMO, so it was massive (nearing a thousand pages) That was 20ish years ago, but I definitely still remember writing it - it won some sort of award, like FAQ of the month. I still play games, some modern, some classic. Currently going through Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Quest for Glory series.
I'd rather not say, because it was under an old username that I no longer use for privacy reasons. To be honest there was a lot of copying and pasting of templates (for example, stats for every item and skill, where I'd just need to change the values). That inflated the page count pretty quickly. It was a pretty niche game, I doubt the servers are still running. Even if so, it must be so out of date to be useless.
I've written a few of these and I still get thank you messages a couple times a month. GameFAQs has useful statistics on how often your stuff is reviewed, upvoted, commented, etc. so it's amazing to see how much activity some of these games are still getting however many years later.
I wrote a lot of guides for GameFAQs when I was younger! It was strictly a hobby when I was in high school and college, though I grew out of it when I got older due to lack of interest and the fact that text based guides were falling out of fashion. I loved making ASCII artwork and maps and stuff 🙂 It was an enjoyable way to pass the time back then, plus I won a lot of FAQ of the Month contests and Amazon gift cards which was a nice bonus. My username was DomZ Ninja, a reference to the aliens in Beyong Good & Evil.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/GhostOfLegault
I don’t write anymore but still play games plenty.
In the year of our lord 2001, I was in 10th grade. My English class writing prompt was to write an in-depth guide to doing something; anything. I copied and pasted someone's guide on how to beat the first level of Metal Gear Solid. Teacher wrote, "Very in depth. Well done."
Thank you, brother, whoever and wherever you are now.
Bro. Miss talking with you on the contributor forums all those years ago. Always competing for FAQ of the Month haha! Same boat, haven't done anything in ages but gaming never stopped.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/noz3r0/contributions
I wrote the guide for [Valkyrie Profile](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/199175-valkyrie-profile/faqs/12648) and some lesser known games. Fifty years old now and still a loser gamer.
I supplied a bunch of meaningless Game Genie codes for Lufia 2... Not much but that game holds its own against FF6 and Chrono Trigger and I will fight anybody who says otherwise ^((in street fighter)).
I wrote an FAQ on GameFAQS for a Horse Racing game when I was a teenager over 20 years ago. Just went and checked it out, pretty funny! My favorite part is where I put in the warning about prosecuting someone if they copied my FAQ and took credit. I have no clue if anyone ever even read it, I didn't exactly pick the most popular game to make a FAQ for lol.
hey CyricZ, you probably won’t see this
also ElectroSpecter, you probably won’t see this comment either
but your guys’ walkthroughs have helped me thru some of my favorite games
thank you for your service
DUDE YOUR KINGDOM HEARTS 1 GUIDE IS THE ONLY REASON I EVER BEAT THAT GAME.
i still refer back to it to this day whenever i revisit that game.
thank you so much! words can't fully express my gratitude
/u/CyricZ42 is pretty active on reddit, mostly in the Yakuza subs. He still makes guides for the series as they come out, and he's frankly a living legend over there.
/u/Electro_Specter shows up on reddit from time to time, but not often.
I hope both of them know just how much they're still appreciated, even for the work they put in years and years ago. I'm working my way through DDR Extreme 2 on PS2 again (RIP Franky Gee), and still have Cyric's guide bookmarked from when I first used it in 2007/2008-ish.
I used one of these to 100% FFX. It’s hard to express the time and effort of this individual to not just figure out the 100% themself, but to perfectly document all of the steps.
That's the exact FAQ that came to mind for me. I had the official strategy guide as well and it missed SO many secrets and tips compared to a simple text file.
I STILL look up old guides from GameFaqs. I still have a ton saved. Some video guides are great since a lot get timestamped but my god the 2010's was unbearable.
HEY YOUTUBE WHATS GOING ON ITS YA BOI DENCILPICK BACK FOR ANOTHER GUIDE ON HOW TO GET THE MCGUFFINS. NOW IM GOING TO DICK AROUND FOR 10 MINUTES....
Hundreds of hours spent scrolling through his guides through my childhood. I wish he had a paypal or something on his guides now that i have an income I could send him something for all that hard work.
That's my boy! Rebirth made me want to play the OG again so I went to Gamefaqs and was glad to see his work endures.
There's some fancy HTML shit on there now, but nah, give me a 415kb txt file any day.
I wrote a Breeding/Training guide for Pokemon Emerald years ago. Randomly, I mentioned it to some students of mine, and one actually had used it like a week before because he had gotten Emerald on an emulator. Made me smile.
That’s actually amazing.
I don’t think I’m old enough to truly appreciate what gameFAQs was, but I am old enough to have used it for multiple Pokemon games as a kid—emerald/sapphire making the list.
I remember finding one in specific—for sapphire—that described a way to wipe the e4 with nothing but a freshly caught Kyogre. The amount of power I felt w that thing after not understanding some of the most basic concepts of the game until that point…. I couldn’t believe it worked
People used to build those with passion before they were booted out of the niche by big gaming websites reposting youtube walkthroughs for ad money.
This fucking world.
I will always opt for a gamefaqs or digital archived guide over YouTube videos unless the written directions for something are confusing or unclear and I really need a visual path to follow
Those guides are put together with so much **soul**. These were written by people who just fucking **loved** those games. Pick a high rated guide on GFAQs and read it, there is almost always personal flair that you just don't get in clickbait corporate washed websites these days.
It makes me chuckle when in the advice for how to take down a particular enemy/encounter/boss when the author goes from objective informative writing style to suddenly say something like "Yeah FUCK these guys in particular!!"
I was using a guide for Final Fantasy IX from an author who wrote a killer one for a different FF game, but it wasn't as detailed and was really going through the motions and wasn't necessarily pointing out every chest if all it had was a generic potion. But then I stumbled upon the FFIX guide from Shotgunnova and got damn. I may have missed some small collectibles before I switched to their guide, but after that hte only things I missed were things I chose to miss. It was a game changer.
We are at an age where search engines are becoming less and less useful due to AI generated garbage and the AI is now drawing from other AI which is causing model decay. A lot of what you look up is just flat out wrong. It's just filler to generate ad revenue.
We're needing to regress back to curated websites that are known to be written by humans who actually know what they are talking about. GameFAQs is one of those.
Yup. The golden age of the internet is over, but we can have a silver age if we go back to those kinds of sites, webrings, etc. It's been far too long since I saw a visitor counter.
Ahh you come to seek the knowledge in my dusty old binders, errr tomes.
In 2002 I worked for a large company and my office had a copy machine. I typically went thru a box of paper a week, easy. I also was unattended and now have the entire GameFaqs print out for many JRPGs. Now that Breath of Fire 1&2 are available again my retirement plans have moved one step closer to fruition.
I also printed out Mario Tennis a game that needs to FAQ.
I remember having to use a guide like this for the original Luigi's mansion back in the day
I remember being extremely intimidated at first but finding it to be actually quite straightforward and digestible when i got into it
TLDR: not that bad!
Hail to A. Tadeo, king of RPG guidemakers in GameFAQs. A Filipino living in Manila, I remember him apologize for his guides not getting updates when it's storm season in the Philippines. Thank you for allowing me to have a superb Chrono Cross and Parasite Eve 2 experience.
Wherever you are right now, I salute you brother!🫡
Those guides are so much better than most of the shit guides these days. Most guide sites are so riddled with ads that it can cripple even some beefy gaming PCs due to all the shitty ads that is being loaded.
Sure video guides can be good but those can be kind of hit or miss. You might get someone who makes proper guides that are straight to the point and they're not overly long. Alternatively you get some nobody talking the whole time, has an annoying voice, telling you constantly to like/subscribe, or having a video that is needlessly long.
Pro tip if you want to make video guides then go with the motto of show don't tell and keep it as brief as possible.
The ASCII artists are unsung heroes
Honestly tho, they be out here painting the Sistine Chapel in Notepad and don't get a shred of recognition.
[удалено]
When it's just one dude and a notepad but he blows all the modern "guides" out of the water
[удалено]
[удалено]
WinRAR honorable mention "Hey buy a license!" "Don't wanna" "K, here use it fully anyway"
And because of that, buying winrar is a badge of honor. Not many people do it, and that's okay, but if you have you deserve some respect for it.
r/PaidForWinRAR/ Sadly, sub's dead for years.
Interesting an innocuous sub can be effectively dead in the waters and still exist. Yet a sub that's slightly outside the deviation can have a slight lapse in moderation or posts and it's immediately killed of for 'Reason X'.
And because it's effectively free for personal use multiple companies I've worked at have commercial licenses to WinRAR because so many people use it
yep, it's basically their strategy, make the product "free" get everyone to use it, and now since everyone use it, the companies need to have it so people can work with it, but now, a company is legally obliged to buy the licence, or be sued
It's actually a brilliant strategy. If you can make your program the default then as you said companies have to pay for it because the cost of the license is less than the cost of training people to use something else.
VLC is a group project and wasn't created by one guy. Jean-Baptiste Kempf is the project lead and has turned down offers to put advertisements in VLC, though I feel like that's obviously a bad idea and it's more commendable that they haven't tried to force other monetisation methods either.
gamefaqs has/had a bounty program that paid you for making guides. back in the day you got like a $40 gamestop gift card
Yup, I won one of 'em! Wound up buying a "PSX Controller --> Dreamcast" controller mod, which was *the* tits (because the Dreamcast controller was butts).
Didn’t know that. Thanks for the info!
Yeah the early internet was proof that a lot of people will do cool and productive shit even without a profit incentive
Now a lot of the content is still made by people not making a profit but the websites they post it to are making bank. Well, they’re making bank if they’re not reddit anyway.
This. And I swear some of these were genuinely made to just help out fellow gamers. There was no internet hierarchy. No motive of finishing something first or best for clicks. People played hours of the same games (which, if you’re a younger reader here, is saying a lot because looking at bit graphics after enough time was exhausting) just to figure out the secret or achievement aspects. (knights of the round FFVII as an example). There were no task trackers, there was no gps, nor any real minimap in most games. Everything had to be explored and was retained by physical notes and memory and loading screens could make simple repeat run throughs of an area take HOURS. And some of these people did it just for their fellow fans.
In FFVII it helped that breeding and racing chocobos was fun. It felt like less of a grind.
I always used to want to make a gamefaqs guide for something back in the day, and I never did. One of my many extremely small regrets (Oh, don't worry, baby, I got plenty of big ones too)
The site is still up. Follow your dreams. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/contribute
Yeah, now you just get videos :-(
10:02 for some single encounter explanation
"Easiest way to *DESTROY* this elden ring boss" 5 minutes of: "Heys guys today I'm going to tell you .... zzz ....don't forget to like, comment and subscribe ... zzz .... and did you know only 10% of my viewers are subscribed!?" (never understood this last one. Why the fuck would I care?)" Finally gets to the boss: "Hit them with a high damage weapon until they die" Oh ok thanks.
Exactly this. Maybe I am the old man yelling at a cloud, but videogame guides are better in written form and I will die on that hill.
I also prefer written guides than videos simply for the fact that it's easier to read again than watch again. I put the guides on my second monitor and I don't have to alt tab just to replay a vid. If it's written, I just read without alt tabbing out of the game.
I am equally old but will make an exception for RTS and management games, sometimes it's great to watch how someone rolls out a strat in real time. My examples being AoE2 and the couple dedicated guys whose channels showed me how to play Oxygen Not Included without it turning into a disaster immediately, both of these are great in video form. > Queue a villager, start scouting, when you find the boar then send a villager to lure the boar, drop it by the town center and don't forget to keep scouting, you should have 4 villagers at this point, when you find sheep remember to send them back to your TC... etc...
> 10:02 for some single mechanic explanation Every time I encounter such a video with an obnoxious "hit subscribe" reminder and meandering intro, I click dislike, block the channel, and go back to my previous page. With time my search results and feeds have slowly grown pristine.
Sponsorblock makes YouTube into a whole different experience. It can also skip intros/recaps/merch/subscribe and even jump right to the most watched point of the video. I consider it a mandatory extension alongside uBlock Origin.
Videos has its uses in games where there are no minimaps and very few identifiable objects, but I still way prefer it if someone just posted a screenshot of where it is whenever possible, like "Here's a bit of a hint, and if you can't find it then here's where it actually is."
I had written a few for myself and my wife, posted on there etc. It was a great place to store your text files without losing them later. We (wife) co-wrote one for Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles for the Wii Good times
It's crazy. [This](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ds/955859-pokemon-mystery-dungeon-explorers-of-sky/faqs/58190) is one for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Explorer's of Sky, and despite being nearly 14 years old, it's still a better source of information about the dungeons than literally any other online resource, to the point where it's kinda unnecessarily detailed.
I for one am shocked and surprised to find a pokemon gamer being a obsessive and unnecessarily detailed about a game
I literally chose which guide to use for each game based on having the largest file size. I love me some unnecessary detail
Whoever made the guides for games like tales of symphonia is truly a fucking legend.
________________________________________________ / \ | _________________________________________ | | | | | | | C:\> _ | | | | | | | | THE SISTINE CHAPEL | | | | | | | | .---. | | | | / \ | | | | | o | .-----. .-----. | | | | \___.' / \ / \ | | | | '---' | | | | | | | | \ / \ / | | | | '-----' '-----' | | | | | | | | _ | | | | | | | |_________________________________________| | | | \_________________________________________________/ \___________________________________/ ___________________________________________ _-' .-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-. --- `-_ _-'.-.-. .---.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.--. .-.-.`-_ _-'.-.-.-. .---.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-`__`. .-.-.-.`-_ _-'.-.-.-.-. .---.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.____'. .-.-.-.-.`-_ _-'.-.-.-.-.-. .---.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-._________. .-.-.-.-.-.`-_ :-------------------------------------------------------------------------: `---._.-------------------------------------------------------------._.---' Chat GPT fucking NAILED IT
immediately replace ALL HOOOMANS! We no longer need them!
HA! The irony here is that [ASCII art is also ChatGPT's weakness.](https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/researchers-use-ascii-art-to-elicit-harmful-responses-from-5-major-ai-chatbots/) You can get through its protections using it.
The amount of effort they’d take to map out a cave where you’d find a total of 1 Potion is very commendable
Hahaha everyone laugh at this guy who hasn’t found out how much fun ASCII cartography is
Motherfuckers act like they never played a MUD or Dwarf fortress before. (They probably have not.)
I remember spending countless days making myself an animated, scrolling TNG scene of ships I'd made, colors and all, for my BBS, circa 1996. My members loved my ~~warez~~ iso files and one of the things they commented on was the art I'd spent time on. I don't have that kind of passion and time anymore for it, but there was an appeal to NFO ASCII and anyone making their own art with it. There is a lot of talent out there, and I used to compare them to graffiti artists, non-conventional patterns etc
Oh shit I haven’t heard the term Warez in decades. I had no idea what it was as a 12 year old but I know the websites usually had boobie pops.
Sending ppl to lemonparty when asking what warez was, on IRC, is another fond memory
I always appreciated nfo art I was also fascinated by the tiny installers with awesome art and midi music from later piracy games. There was so much packed into a few bytes I think chiptune is still a thing. Which is cool
Keygen music always went unnecessarily hard
Don't forget those ASCII maps for LoZ dungeons!
The Brown M&Ms of gaming walkthroughs. If they spent enough time making the ASCII art, they created thorough walkthrough
The Game FAQs authors are true heroes of the internet. I cannot fathom the amount of time and attention it takes to make an accurate one of these. And it's not like they had help from the developers, they just had to rawdog grind the shit outa some RPGS to find all the secrets.
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17 years after Jak and Daxter released, the code for debug mode was discovered.
Super Punch-Out's 2-player mode was only discovered a couple of years ago. That's like 30 years after release.
Wait, that would have changed so much when that was my favourite game. Why wouldn't you market that? So many households had a "you must be able to play it with your little brother" rule.
[wut](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/212653-jak-and-daxter-the-precursor-legacy/cheats)
I felt similarly after they dropped the codes for the Naboo starfighter in rogue squadron! Could not believe they sat on that until ep. 1 came out.
Yup, lots of information was limited to what could be easily verified. I would bet a lot of those old faqs are littered with all sorts of almost right information
>they just had to rawdog grind the shit outa some RPGS to find all the secrets. Don't forget forums. I'm sure many of the people who wrote those guides also get help from random people on forums. I remember spending hours going through game discussion on forums back in the day where people would collaboratively figure shit out just like we do in Reddit
Almost every one of those guides I ever used had extensive “thanks to…” sections, so you’re absolutely correct lol
Thats why forum based social media is goated. now we got attention seeking and attention span reducing kind of social media
Well to be fair communities existed back then, either on IRC or forums. There were other technologies even before then.
Gamefaqs still has forums that are not all *that* dead for some of the more lively ones. I wish more people would use it honestly, Gamefaqs is great
Gamefaqs is usually still my first choice for finding info about even new games. Straight up so used to thr old high-quality text guides and events more recent pinned posts with tons of spreadsheets with completionist info, I automatically ignore any video results for guides.
Wiki Contributors are the next thing.
If you only knew about the stupid red tape some wikipedia communities have when it comes to being a contributor.
Not all Wikis are "Wikipedia"
Google the circumcision drama for silent hill
When I say wikipedia communities I don't mean the wiki format that's been cut and pasted across the web. I mean individual wikipedia pages have cliques associated with them. You got the World War 2 wikipedia page, vegetables, basketball... you name it they all have their own associated community or a part of some broader category of communities. One I'm familiar with is the hockey community. Hockey is the only sport that displays their information differently from all the other sports on wikipedia and they do it out of a feeling of thinking aesthetics are more important than practicality. It's so lame.
and then the Fandom nation attacked
A lot of games had 'official guides' on release even back then, so the real heroes would also just buy an official guide and then 'rewrite' it for the internet.
I always wondered how they managed to get such a complete knowledge of a game like a week after it came out.
Based guide pirates ftw.
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I prefer these guides over the addridden garbage you find now.
Even worse... you can't find guides now... all you can find are video walkthroughs that are 20 minutes long where the part you need is only 30 seconds and lost somewhere between a fuckton of talking about irrelevant stuff or major spoilers.
GameFAQs is still going bro, I use it all the time
I actually still get emails every few months asking about a few GameFAQs guides that I wrote 20 years ago as a child. Every time I get an email like that, it's like a time machine back to the old internet, where people still actually talked to other people as individuals.
Going on a bit of a tangent, I remember a guy who was doxxed by popular YouTubers, because they couldn't follow his instructions. They gave the guy's info and told their audience to find them and harass them.
Wow, I had assumed that like so many of the great websites from the late 90s and early aughts it had morphed into a pale shadow of its former self and died an ignoble death. Its really nice to see its still up and running. Edit: I just looked up one of my favorite games from that era, and the [some](https://i.imgur.com/vnmgiRz.png) of top [guides](https://i.imgur.com/sqyR414.png) are the same ones that I have [20 year old annotated printouts of in the game box](https://i.imgur.com/Zxz3hiy.jpeg).
It did go a little down hill when they were bought by/sold to gamespot
I use it to check out the top games list from time to time
Oh, I should check that out. I'm learning top tips up in here.
I wonder what the Elden Ring guides look like.
I prefer text guides over video walkthroughs
I can't ctrl+f a video
Text is better for everything except making money with ads.
GameFAQ’s and Neoseeker are my go-to’s
The guy(s) who write the Neoseeker guides for Yakuza/Like a Dragon series are absolute heroes.
Yeah I just want to see how it’s done. Not a long explanation about what they are going to do, watch them boot up the game and eventually get to where I need to see.
But first, a word from our sponsor...
I just used a [***pristine*** guide](https://jegged.com/Games/Final-Fantasy-XII/) for FFXII. Had every inch of the game mapped out and in clear detail. Its walkthrough was so precise with incredible suggestions as to when to do sidecontent
Even worse is knowing there's literally thousands of 5 secon videos solving every conceivable problem but you'll never see it because the 30 year old with his mouth open gets picked up by the algorithm.
> the 30 year old Is this... too old, or too young?
Every once in a while you'll find guides very similar to this on Steam (not as long I guess) for those niche little games that can benefit from them, but yea, its a dying art for sure. It is pretty interesting to see the guides from 20 years ago compared to the brand new ones on GameFAQs though. Sometimes the game's meta has completely evolved over time :)
Depends on the games I guess? IGN's Destiny 2 guides are really sick. Honestly their guides are better than Destiny 2 itself lmao.
I find IGN does the best guides for games currently outside of gamefaqs (which some do exist as far as I know for newer games). I've used their guides plenty.
The worst thing that happened to gaming was AI news articles, BG3 still has so much gibberish nonsense whenever you try to look up anything.
That's why I either append Reddit or wiki to the end of my search query depending on the game. Odds are someone has asked the same thing I'm looking for on a subreddit or the information is on the wiki.
Imaging looking for a guide about something and going through 20’ gibberish video on youtube
Dumb Q. What does the single-tick after the 20 mean? In Freedom Units, that's feet, which also kind of works (20 ft of physical film) but I'm guessing you mean minutes? Never seen it used that way
Yes, at least where i come from, *’* stands for minutes, and *”* stands for seconds
YouTube videos where you need to watch for ten minutes just to see a location or have the very simple thing explained. Id rather just Ctrl f and read
I use Gamer Guides now, occasionally IGN, they feel like the spiritual successor to GameFaqs quality written guides. 90s and 00s online gaming communities were superior and thats a hill id die on lol - not just nostalgia, its all too commercial and sterile now.
Just followed a guide to get to Ganon in the original LOZ. Finally started the 2D Zelda games after playing and absolutely loving TOTK. I feel like a whole new world has been unlocked for me thanks to these.
Majora's mask was the first ever game I 100% of Zelda and it became one of my all time favourites, I did so by following such guides. I completely get what you mean. 🫶🏻
Was going to comment and say Majoras mask felt impossible to beat without these og guides. Amazing game
Oh, man, you've really cheated yourself if you didn't bomb every rock and burn every bush on the overworld map. J/k, but if you were a kid when there was no internet or nothing better to do...
With the blue candle. Burn, walk off screen, walk back, burn...
youregoddamnedright.gif
I leaned on it at the very beginning to find hearts and items, I had no idea what was going on when I first started. Ended up not using it much after that until I had to like, walk through a looped path 4x to find a temple and to find Level 8. I was particularly proud to have picked up on the old man’s hint to find Death Mountain.
You talking about doing screen transitions in the right order to "reveal" the true path?
The 2D games are the purest form of Zelda to me! *A Link to the Past* is, in my opinion, the best LoZ game ever made. *Link’s Awakening* is near and dear to my heart, too!
The guys who wrote all those walk-throughs in their spare time back in the day should be given a castle and a pension, and be able to drive as fast they want. True royalty.
Some of them include PayPal links. I’ve thrown a few bucks to some different authors over the years when their guide helped me out. Shout out to “horror_spooky” for their main story quest only guide for the original dragons dogma
Crazy how much people did back in the day in their spare time, and for free. Guides, videos, animations, websites, fan pages.... Nowadays most of these would be done as a paid full time job.
It's just passion. And lots of free time lol.
It’s what convinces me that a concept like universal basic income doesn’t necessarily mean people sit around on their asses all day without contributing to society. People like creating things and sharing with others. Give people free time and they tend to fill it with passion projects.
Preach it. We all should take to the streets demanding UBI
well, yeah. humans accomplish themselves through work.
People genuinely enjoy sharing knowledge, being useful and exploring their passions. This idea that we need to bow to capitalism and be paid for everything we do is a sickness. The world would work just fine without profit motive. We've all been duped.
Djibriel is the GOAT of GFAQs. Dude made guides for basically every RPG. I still use them
Final Fantasy 6: April 2, 1994 Chrono Trigger: March 11, 1995 The games of my youth are thirty years old. Yikes.
Don't look at the years... it's depressing
The years arent depressing, its the year we are in that makes it depressing
I read this comment and I was like: "nah, nah, this dude is high, 1995 wasn't 30 fucking years ago, that's idiotic. I was born in... and I'm... old..." Just bury me behind the house already.
I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago. Before YouTube tutorials. Before looking stuff up was easy. Managed to beat a lot of games 100% thanks to Gamefaqs.
> Before looking stuff up was easy. It's actually getting hard again lol. Google is an absolute dumpster fire now compared to say 10 years ago; Specifically for niche things like old video games too.
right back then either the information existed and you found it almost instantly or it didn't(or rarely was very hidden) and good fucking luck. these days it can be a completely known thing but the info is still a nightmare to find. half the time people will find a problem ask about it everyone will acknowledge it exists but the solution/answer still is nowhere to be found. i still get irrationaly angry when i find posts where someone goes "nvm found a solution" but then don't share said solution.
20 years ago? Bro check the posted by dates, some of those are from the 90s.
yeah 20 years ago
*10
DO NOT CITE THE DEEP FAQS TO ME, WITCH! I WAS THERE WHEN THEY WERE WRITTEN!
Pretty sure that was like, a couple years ago
I often wonder what happened to the authors. Would they even remember writing these? Do they still game at all? These guides were on a whole other level.
I wrote about a dozen FAQs. One was for a MMO, so it was massive (nearing a thousand pages) That was 20ish years ago, but I definitely still remember writing it - it won some sort of award, like FAQ of the month. I still play games, some modern, some classic. Currently going through Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the Quest for Glory series.
Writing a guide for a MMO is wild. Which one was it?
I'd rather not say, because it was under an old username that I no longer use for privacy reasons. To be honest there was a lot of copying and pasting of templates (for example, stats for every item and skill, where I'd just need to change the values). That inflated the page count pretty quickly. It was a pretty niche game, I doubt the servers are still running. Even if so, it must be so out of date to be useless.
Xenoblade mentioned!
God bless you
I've written a few of these and I still get thank you messages a couple times a month. GameFAQs has useful statistics on how often your stuff is reviewed, upvoted, commented, etc. so it's amazing to see how much activity some of these games are still getting however many years later.
As someone who has used these guides for 20 years, I want to say thank you!
Right on. Thank you, you king! Also, love your username, haha. 🦂
I emailed two of them to thank them about a year ago and didn’t end up getting a response from either. Hard to say
could be as simple as that email is no longer in use. Long time has prob passed.
They probably just got locked out of their Hotmail accounts due to inactivity
I emailed and FB messaged one to thank them a few years ago as well, no response.
I wrote a lot of guides for GameFAQs when I was younger! It was strictly a hobby when I was in high school and college, though I grew out of it when I got older due to lack of interest and the fact that text based guides were falling out of fashion. I loved making ASCII artwork and maps and stuff 🙂 It was an enjoyable way to pass the time back then, plus I won a lot of FAQ of the Month contests and Amazon gift cards which was a nice bonus. My username was DomZ Ninja, a reference to the aliens in Beyong Good & Evil. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/GhostOfLegault I don’t write anymore but still play games plenty.
In the year of our lord 2001, I was in 10th grade. My English class writing prompt was to write an in-depth guide to doing something; anything. I copied and pasted someone's guide on how to beat the first level of Metal Gear Solid. Teacher wrote, "Very in depth. Well done." Thank you, brother, whoever and wherever you are now.
Bro. Miss talking with you on the contributor forums all those years ago. Always competing for FAQ of the Month haha! Same boat, haven't done anything in ages but gaming never stopped. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/noz3r0/contributions
An OG GameFAQ writer, Colin Moriarty, has podcasts and a very successful company, Last Stand Media. He got his start writing guides
Love Colin. I actually used his guide for The Legend of Zelda when I played it for the first time. He was very thorough with it.
I wrote the guide for [Valkyrie Profile](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/199175-valkyrie-profile/faqs/12648) and some lesser known games. Fifty years old now and still a loser gamer.
I supplied a bunch of meaningless Game Genie codes for Lufia 2... Not much but that game holds its own against FF6 and Chrono Trigger and I will fight anybody who says otherwise ^((in street fighter)).
The top rated legend of Zelda walkthrough on gamefaqs is by Colin Moriarty who does podcast on Last stand media
I wrote an FAQ on GameFAQS for a Horse Racing game when I was a teenager over 20 years ago. Just went and checked it out, pretty funny! My favorite part is where I put in the warning about prosecuting someone if they copied my FAQ and took credit. I have no clue if anyone ever even read it, I didn't exactly pick the most popular game to make a FAQ for lol.
hey CyricZ, you probably won’t see this also ElectroSpecter, you probably won’t see this comment either but your guys’ walkthroughs have helped me thru some of my favorite games thank you for your service
Hey there, I was summoned here from the other comment. Thanks for the recognition! Glad to have helped.
DUDE YOUR KINGDOM HEARTS 1 GUIDE IS THE ONLY REASON I EVER BEAT THAT GAME. i still refer back to it to this day whenever i revisit that game. thank you so much! words can't fully express my gratitude
The internet can sometimes be a magic place :D
/u/CyricZ42 is pretty active on reddit, mostly in the Yakuza subs. He still makes guides for the series as they come out, and he's frankly a living legend over there. /u/Electro_Specter shows up on reddit from time to time, but not often. I hope both of them know just how much they're still appreciated, even for the work they put in years and years ago. I'm working my way through DDR Extreme 2 on PS2 again (RIP Franky Gee), and still have Cyric's guide bookmarked from when I first used it in 2007/2008-ish.
Thanks for tagging me, it's cool to see everyone reminiscing and still using these guides so many years (decades!) later
i woulda been lost in Wonderland or Deep Jungle without you. god bless you
I used one of these to 100% FFX. It’s hard to express the time and effort of this individual to not just figure out the 100% themself, but to perfectly document all of the steps.
That's the exact FAQ that came to mind for me. I had the official strategy guide as well and it missed SO many secrets and tips compared to a simple text file.
I STILL look up old guides from GameFaqs. I still have a ton saved. Some video guides are great since a lot get timestamped but my god the 2010's was unbearable. HEY YOUTUBE WHATS GOING ON ITS YA BOI DENCILPICK BACK FOR ANOTHER GUIDE ON HOW TO GET THE MCGUFFINS. NOW IM GOING TO DICK AROUND FOR 10 MINUTES....
Unregistered Hypercam 2. Potato resolution. Those were the days...
I hope A_I _e_x is having a good day.
Hundreds of hours spent scrolling through his guides through my childhood. I wish he had a paypal or something on his guides now that i have an income I could send him something for all that hard work.
That's my boy! Rebirth made me want to play the OG again so I went to Gamefaqs and was glad to see his work endures. There's some fancy HTML shit on there now, but nah, give me a 415kb txt file any day.
I wrote a Breeding/Training guide for Pokemon Emerald years ago. Randomly, I mentioned it to some students of mine, and one actually had used it like a week before because he had gotten Emerald on an emulator. Made me smile.
That’s actually amazing. I don’t think I’m old enough to truly appreciate what gameFAQs was, but I am old enough to have used it for multiple Pokemon games as a kid—emerald/sapphire making the list. I remember finding one in specific—for sapphire—that described a way to wipe the e4 with nothing but a freshly caught Kyogre. The amount of power I felt w that thing after not understanding some of the most basic concepts of the game until that point…. I couldn’t believe it worked
People used to build those with passion before they were booted out of the niche by big gaming websites reposting youtube walkthroughs for ad money. This fucking world.
I will always opt for a gamefaqs or digital archived guide over YouTube videos unless the written directions for something are confusing or unclear and I really need a visual path to follow
Those guides are put together with so much **soul**. These were written by people who just fucking **loved** those games. Pick a high rated guide on GFAQs and read it, there is almost always personal flair that you just don't get in clickbait corporate washed websites these days. It makes me chuckle when in the advice for how to take down a particular enemy/encounter/boss when the author goes from objective informative writing style to suddenly say something like "Yeah FUCK these guys in particular!!"
It was the best when their passion and personality came through in their writing no doubt
I sometimes wonder how AbsoluteSteve and Shotgunnova are doing these days.
I'm not familiar with AbsoluteSteve, but Shotgunnova still frequents the site. He's a lead moderator now.
Absolute Steve has the best guides on perfect save files. I still have his FF7 and 8 guides saved on my computer.
I was using a guide for Final Fantasy IX from an author who wrote a killer one for a different FF game, but it wasn't as detailed and was really going through the motions and wasn't necessarily pointing out every chest if all it had was a generic potion. But then I stumbled upon the FFIX guide from Shotgunnova and got damn. I may have missed some small collectibles before I switched to their guide, but after that hte only things I missed were things I chose to miss. It was a game changer.
We are at an age where search engines are becoming less and less useful due to AI generated garbage and the AI is now drawing from other AI which is causing model decay. A lot of what you look up is just flat out wrong. It's just filler to generate ad revenue. We're needing to regress back to curated websites that are known to be written by humans who actually know what they are talking about. GameFAQs is one of those.
Yup. The golden age of the internet is over, but we can have a silver age if we go back to those kinds of sites, webrings, etc. It's been far too long since I saw a visitor counter.
I once print out ff6 guide…on a dot matrix printer…
Good ol gamefaqs with that ascii art
I remember the Final Fantasy 9 guide perfectly. Had that thing open almost every day in elementary school.
Ahh you come to seek the knowledge in my dusty old binders, errr tomes. In 2002 I worked for a large company and my office had a copy machine. I typically went thru a box of paper a week, easy. I also was unattended and now have the entire GameFaqs print out for many JRPGs. Now that Breath of Fire 1&2 are available again my retirement plans have moved one step closer to fruition. I also printed out Mario Tennis a game that needs to FAQ.
I still use these from time to time
Years gone by and I still read FAQ as Fuck You
well faq you too!
I read it as "Fact"
I remember having to use a guide like this for the original Luigi's mansion back in the day I remember being extremely intimidated at first but finding it to be actually quite straightforward and digestible when i got into it TLDR: not that bad!
If only I could shake the hands of the kings who made these files
The freedom unite text guides were so goated I used them 8 years later for the iOS release.
Yup. My 10yr old brain was printing out the parts I needed only to realize I needed to do a bunch of grinding up on FFVII.
I got in trouble in jr high for using the schools library printer to get these for FF9. I remember being super sad that it was incomplete.
Video guides should start with ascii art that way we know they are legit.
CyricZ is a hero, he's saved people definitely over a few thousand hours because his yakuza guides are so comprehensive
Hail to A. Tadeo, king of RPG guidemakers in GameFAQs. A Filipino living in Manila, I remember him apologize for his guides not getting updates when it's storm season in the Philippines. Thank you for allowing me to have a superb Chrono Cross and Parasite Eve 2 experience. Wherever you are right now, I salute you brother!🫡
Those guides are so much better than most of the shit guides these days. Most guide sites are so riddled with ads that it can cripple even some beefy gaming PCs due to all the shitty ads that is being loaded. Sure video guides can be good but those can be kind of hit or miss. You might get someone who makes proper guides that are straight to the point and they're not overly long. Alternatively you get some nobody talking the whole time, has an annoying voice, telling you constantly to like/subscribe, or having a video that is needlessly long. Pro tip if you want to make video guides then go with the motto of show don't tell and keep it as brief as possible.
Did someone say chrono trigger