To broaden the topic slightly, the Windows XP comic book was a disgrace (or was that already the case with Win 95? I forget)? Why are we paying 100′s of dollars for an O/S to get absolutely nothing?

I still have these bad-ass Windows 3.1 manuals lying around. You could break a physical window with those. They were no doubt on the side of “overkill”, but the pendulum has swung too far back.

The Sid Meier games are usually a source of nice manuals, just enough detail, some designer notes, and you’re rockin’. I still remember getting Civ 2 while in Europe, and flying home, waiting to play the game, reading my Polish language copy of the manual. I still love two inside jokes the translator left in the manual (translator/editor’s comments, to be precise), on in-game mechanics.

In particular, the game eliminated communism, and the snarky (but oh so accurate) comment in brackets says, (this is only true in the game world, of course). You can say that in three words in Polish, which makes the comment wicked-awesome hilarious.

A pity Supreme Commander wasted like a dozen pages describing its units though, without providing useful information. “This is like the level one unit, but a little stronger” gets old fast.

My point is that while certain realities have helped the decline in quality manuals (e.g. printing costs, an increasing reliance on in-game tutorials and documentation, the common wisdom that no one reads them), the fact that a publisher can ink a deal with Prima or Brady to offload the chore while taking a cut of the profits has only reinforced the status quo.

Yes, guides include information that would never be seen in most manuals (namely the walkthroughs). But the personality of the Fallout manual, the expanded lore of the Starcraft manual, and the design insight of the Civilization IV manual are rarely seen outside of the front counter rack of a GameStop these days.

In short, mine is the familiar lament of now having to pay for what was once free.

So, instead of demanding a higher standard from our game manuals, you`d rather I just got buy a strategy guide for 3000 yen more? (remember, I live in Japan)

I wrote this article because I`m upset with the slouching level of quality from certain companies that have more than enough money to make these changes. They have the money, and the resources. 10 page black and white manuals for games are totally unacceptable.

I don’t care if a tutorial is so amazingly fun that it wins Game of the Year; it should always, always, ALWAYS be optional. And you should always be able to return to it quickly and easily if you need help. I understand that the developers have good intentions, but if the control systems for their games are so complex that they think players could never figure them out without mandatory tutorials, then they need to refocus their efforts.