Tag: manuals

Almost Something on Game Rentals and Instruction Manuals

In a 12-minute video on Youtube, the channel Almost Something discusses Nintendo’s lawsuit against Blockbuster Video over photocopying game manuals. First off, here it is:

The lawsuit was really about Nintendo trying to stamp out the game rental business in the US, which they were largely successful at in Japan. Cartridge manufacturers were genuinely frightened of rentals cutting into their profits, and resorted to measures like increasing the difficulty of games in the US market to prevent players from completing games on a single rental and losing out on sales. Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America called game rental “…nothing less than commercial rape.” While the Software Publishers Alliance (SPA) managed to get legislation passed that outlawed the rental of computer software, video games were separately defined and rental allowed to continue.

They sought out any legal means they could to make game rentals less attractive. Manuals were one way to do this. While rental stores couldn’t easily copy the games in order rent our more copies, it was fairly easy to make a good-enough reproduction of a manual using a copy machine. Nintendo sued Blockbuster over the practice, which was eventually settled out of court, but Blockbuster sent a letter to the four stores they had who were accused of the practice telling them to stop.

If you were around at that time, you might remember that for a time rented games would sometimes come with their own small makeshift manuals, sometimes taking the form of an adhesive sheet stuck to the plastic case. It seems these were a small industry that saw the lack of durable instructions provided with games as a little economic niche they could take advantage of.

The lack of manuals supplied with games may have been the reason for a weird quirk on one of Nintendo’s games. The game Startropics has one infamous place where the game asks the player to enter a code from materials supplied with the game. There was a sheet of paper that came with boxed retail copies of the game, an Infocom-style “feelie,” that if soaked in water revealed a code (747) that had to be entered into the game at one point to continue. The code wasn’t revealed anywhere in the game, so players without the sheet couldn’t progress.

The sheet, with the code revealed. (Image from imgur.) The code is discussed in more detail on gaming.stackexchange.com.

Interestingly, while the WiiU Virtual Console version of Startropics has an online manual that reveals the code, the Switch online version has no manual, and leaves players stranded there unless they look up the answer online.

From Destructoid: Gex Recriminations

The Suck Fairy is a mischievous spirit who visits the beloved properties of our youths so that when we return to them they’re much worse than they were when we first found them. That is surely the explanation; it’s not that we’re much more knowledgeable and mature readers/viewers/players now than back then. It can’t be that our horizons have expanded. It can’t be that the thing we liked back then was never really as good as we thought it was.

The Suck Fairy as a concept has been with us for a while now. I think it was introduced to the world in a September 2010 article on Tor.com by Jo Walton. There’s lots of weird concepts like that that litter internet culture (my favorite is the “Crazification Factor,” from a post on Kung Fu Monkey in 2005, long enough ago that its mention of Obama’s election refers to his Senate run), and sometimes we don’t even know the first time it arose.

Gek is maybe an odd choice for a visit from the Suck Fairy; surely, all of its suck was predispensed? But it was still beloved by some, many of them purchasers of the failed 3DO system on which it originated, one of those consoles with few games, and even fewer that could be called good. (The best, probably? Star Control II.)

The writer of this Destructoid article, still liked it for itself, but finds that it’s one of those games where context given by its manual kind of ruins the game’s premise by giving it an adverse context.

If you just play the game, Gex is a fairly shallow game about a lizard mascot character, in sunglasses no less, romping through a series of worlds based on media properties, uttering trite digitized quotes at various times.

If you read the manual, you find out that Gex is wallowing in sorrow! His dad was an astrogecko working for NASA! He lost his life in a terrible accident! Gex, unable to face the world, retreated into television! It’s the only way he can handle living! And, although Gex thwarts the villain’s plot to use him as a mascot character (a thing he already is really), nothing at the end of the game indicates that his mental state has changed.

The first of six manual pages that lays out the reason for Gex’s media obsession.

I think the writer may be overthinking things a bit. Often manual stories were written as an afterthought by people who had nothing to do with the making of the game. Have you ever seen the manual for the NES release of Konami’s Life Force? It claims that the evil gigantic space creature Zelos, huge enough to devour planets, was the proud offspring of alien beings named “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” The manual for NES Metal Gear claims that the villain wasn’t Big Boss but instead “Colonel Vermon CaTaffy.”

Gex got off pretty lightly, by comparison.

I’ve wildly misunderstood Gex (Destructoid, by Timothy Monbleau)