So, Ubisoft has announced that starting with Shawn White Skateboarding, they are no longer going to be packaging game manuals with their PS3 or 360 games, instead relying on in-game manuals and tutorials. They are doing this under the guise of “less CO2 and greener games”. Of course it has nothing to do with lowering the costs (which of course won’t be passed onto us consumers). This could be the beginning of the end for game manuals.
But I’m not here to complain about Ubisoft, I happen to enjoy alot of their games. Instead, I’m here to celebrate the game manual, and everything good about it. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do on the bus home after getting a new game is open it up and read through the game manual. It has such a distinctive smell, it will always remind me of new games. I’ll read that thing front to back (mind you I’ll still be rubbish at it when I first play it). It just one of those things I do with every new game.
Or who remembers looking up moves in the Street Fighter 2 manual back on the Mega Drive! Halfway through a fight you’ll be flicking through pages of manual looking for how to do Zangief’s spinning piledriver or some other move you just couldn’t seem to remember when you were eight years old.
Pages and pages of blank pages at the back of every manual, simply titled “Notes”. I don’t know a single person who ever used these notes pages for anything, but every manual had them. Hell, I bought Just Cause 2 yesterday, flick to the back of the manual, 4 pages of space for your notes.
Finally, everyone must remember biography sized game manuals. 3 inches thick, really small text and a foreword by Stephen Hawking. Yet the actual section you’d have to read is only about 5 pages long, and then translated into every language under the sun; French, Nav’i, even Klingon.
So here’s to game manuals, you will be missed.
