When did game manuals get shit /vr/?

Greatest hits on PS1 is where it all went down hill.

>too cheap to give people colored manuals

>>2784863
All we get now are shit flaps of double-sided paper with one side controls and one side legal information.

>>2784872
I just bought Monster Hunter 4U for the 3DS... the "instruction manual" was safety information in 3 languages and literally nothing else.

>>2784863
What's wrong with that manual?

>>2784878
OP here. It was meant to be an example of when they were good.

I mostly stopped reading them starting with the 5th generation, though that might have more to do with 5th gen being where I started pirating like crazy than the fact that the manuals themselves weren't worth reading. Even so, the stuff I do own like my Saturn dating sims and what not, I still care more about the cool extras like posters or character info cards or whatever that came with the games than I do about the manuals.

>>2784872
I don't mind that since the manual is all digital but then the digital versions are straight garbage as well

I still find myself looking at the MGS 1 manual because of the artwork. You won't see that with The Last of Us Remastered shit flap.

In general, probably with 6th generation when they had to be made to fit in a DVD box. A lot of manuals from that time are very bare bones, black and white, and sum up to "go check the in game manual".

Exceptions though. There were a lot of nice color manuals with the story and maybe a map. Pretty much exclusive to GC games and I remember the GTA games having nice ones. Ratchet and Clank had terrible manuals along with pretty much everything else on PS2.

7th generation they got really skimpy. Black and white everywhere. And I think many were just an insert with no manual.
8th generation has a few surprises here and there but even Nintendo has gone straight to only an insert with some games. Woolly World has no manual outside of game for example.
.

>>2784887
Well Dragon Quest 8 did right and it was PS2.

>>2784892
I mentioned the GTA games as having good manuals too. But they sure don't represent PS2 as a whole. There were a lot of shit manual on games that should of had a shit manual.

>>2784893
*There were a lot of shit manuals in games that shouldn't of had a shit manual.

>>2784893
Well they came with maps too adding to the package overall. I still have Vice City's on my wall.

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La-Mulana has a cool manual.

>>2784898
I don't speak Japanese but that artwork has a real charm to it.

>>2784893
I have over 150 PS2 games and the only shitty manual off the top of my head I can think of is Subsistence, and that's only because they had to shrink the manual down so it could fit into a dual-disc case.

>>2784910
Ace combat was shit
All the EA games were trash
Ratchet and Clank games
Jak and Daxter
Outrun I think
DMC

Most are pretty bad.

>>2784868
My copy of FF7 is green labled and the manual is in full color.

>>2784925
Hmm, maybe not all of them did it.

>>2784863

I first noticed manuals getting shitty during the xbox/gamecube/PS2 era where Ubisoft started printing short, B&W booklets on cheap paper. It's a sad state when a game has a full colour booklet packaged in and it's considered a feature (Shovel Knight).

>>2784868
It happened before PS1 GHs. Reprints of SNES/Genesis games (ala Majesco reprints of Konami games) did this as well.

>>2784881
Was confused about the Koopa longs being highlighted. Oh well. One of my favorite manuals desu. "We just love being mean!"

>>2784863
I honestly think that Final Fantasy IX was the turning point for manuals. The thing has a manual, yes, but inside it says something like "go to the website for more info". As did the strategy guide, if I'm not mistaken. That was the turning point.

I bought Might&Magic 1 for Genesis at a market the other day for $20. Had the manual with it too, it's like 150 pages or something. Lots of great info, but not too much artwork in it. It's basically like a mini strat guide.

>>2784868
In Europe every manual was black and white

game manuals were "better" then because games were worse and needed to be fleshed out and explained to the 5 year olds playing them.

Can't say an exact cutoff point, but I do remember the disappointment when I read some PSX manual and much to my sorrow it was in grayscale. Damn.

>>2785348
most, anon, not all.

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My Sega (Genesis, Game Gear, Saturn) western manuals are all black and white and not too many pages.
Nintendo manuals were always full color (or close, Link's Awakening manual for example is not full color, but it has a cool red/green palette that still looks very appealing, pic related).

Japanese manuals were always good for any console, full color and lots of pages and artwork. I've imported some modern japanese games for PS3 and they have thick, full color manuals, while US PS3 games have boring black and white manuals with few pages and almost no art work to look at.

street fighter alpha 3 on psx has a nice manual.

>>2785574

now that you mention that, Alpha 2 on Saturn also has a good US manual, full color and individual pages for each character.
It's the only US Saturn game I own with a decent manual.

>>2785348
Blue & white, m8. Very rarely black.

>>2785348
SNES manuals weren't

The official answer to the shitty quality manuals nowadays is ''Muh ecology, we're saving the planet here, and you're a nazi if you think otherwise.'' But it's for the sake of money saving obviously. IMO it became shit during the PS3/360 era. Not even in 2008 but later, like 2012. I remember the MGS4 manual as pretty decent and Mortal Kombat 9 as a shitty one. But yeah I miss the old Mega Drive manuals. The PS2 manuals were great too thanks to the DVD format.

While I sympathize with OP (and the others in this thread who also yearn for the days of proper gaming manuals), you all have to remember that this was completely inevitable with the rise of the internet and a more digital, paperless world. I still wish they'd provide a completely digital manual in, say, the PDF format favored by scanlation. Hell, I don't think they'd be in any danger of loosing money if they only provided a manual with the "Collector's Edition", but Jesus Christ at least give us the _option_.

>>2785356

Troll sighted.

>>2785565

>My Sega (Genesis, Game Gear, Saturn) western manuals are all black and white and not too many pages.

Yeah. I remember years ago when I started getting into retro gaming picking up on that difference _immediately_ (I was a Sega kiddie- didn't know shit about the SNES). But you know what the biggest buncha bullshit was? Like you alluded, the Japanese got the full-color monty on the MegaDrive! Seriously, compare their Sonic the Hedgehog manuals to ours....It's sickening.

Any game made today can have all the information you need in-game via tutorials and control options, any backstory via fancy cinematics and text crawls, etc.

You just don't NEED to have a booklet with shit like "the story of Hyrule" and "advanced jumping techniques" for dozens of pages.

Take Zelda games for example. Original had every enemy name and a short description in the manual. Ocarina of Time didn't, because all you had to do in the game is target them and press C-up to get name and description from Navi.

>>2785658

>You just don't NEED to have a booklet with shit like "the story of Hyrule" and "advanced jumping techniques" for dozens of pages.

"Need" has nothing to do with it.

>>2785658
What am I supposed to read on the toilet after I bought the game?

>>2785645

Yeah, japanese Megadrive manuals are pretty good, I love the Sonic and Streets of Rage manuals.

And yeah the problem with "digital manuals" nowdays is that they don't put too much effort into them, they are soulless instructions that look like a website, there's no actual design, no artwork.

Sonic Jam on the Saturn has digital manuals for both the japanese and the US versions, that's pretty cool, and you can compare how different the manuals are, the US ones are all black and white, almost no arwork, while the japanese ones are full of color and lots of artwork in every page.
I grew up with Sega clone consoles in my country and all my carts were bootlegs, so I never got to see actual Genesis manuals for a long time.
The Sega CD US manuals are also all black and white and little artwork, same as Genesis ones.

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>>2785676
Your phone slash pda.
This is the future grandpa, and you can't afford to be stuck in the snail-lane leaving a paper trail behind you. Time to switch gear and jump on the information super highway.

>>2785697
>>>/v/

>>2784863
Late PS2/early PS3/Xbox 360 era.

>>2784868
That's minor in comparison to how shit is now.

The last good one I remember was KOF13

If you pick up that box it's shockingly heavy because of the manual

>>2785047
Just took a look at my own FF9 manual. There's no mention of the website/Playonline anywhere.

The strategy guide was chock full of that bullshit, though.

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They went shit in the GENESIS era, when late-run games started being packaged with those awful cardboard boxes. The manuals went from glossy color, to cheap b/w xeroxes. Those boxes always got damaged in some way too.

>>2784873
That's because all 3DS games have detailed instruction manuals within the game. Just go to it in your 3DS and read up there.

Also, Monster Hunter is a very complex game so it also teaches you a lot through tutorial quests. A decent manual for Monster Hunter would be a think book require, new packaging and still do a worse job of teaching you the game than the tutorials do.

Most games hardly ever come with one anymore, so whenever I actually do find one it feels like a nice little surprise.

Let's go in the opposite direction.

The newest game in my collection that has an actual manual would be Saints Row 2 for the PS3. Not sure if the PC version had a manual as well, or if it was a pamphlet, likely it was the latter since it came out in 09 while the console version came out in 08. However, the manual is in black and white.

Actually, I think I can do one better. The absolute newest game in my collection with a COLOR instruction booklet would be Bioshock 2 for PC, from 2010! Not sure if the same is true for the console versions, but there you have it. Both games (SR2 and BS2) also had those awesome holographic boxes, man why didn't more games do this?

Probably around when steam came out, that's my best guess.

>>2787392

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 for PS3 came with a thick, glossy full color manual, game was released in 2011 or 2012.
I've read Capcom went full jew and then released another revision of the game without a manual though.

Demon's Souls also has a color manual with a decent amount of pages, but to be honest there's barely any pretty artwork to look at other than the prologue page and Jack Frost on the last page on an Atlus ad.
I believe Uncharted also had a color booklet but it was very few pages and all text, very boring, I sold the Uncharted games anyway since I didn't like them.

The other games I have all have black and white booklets. (which might be because they're published by Sega, Bayonetta and Yakuza 3).
Max Anarchy, also published by Sega, but on its japanese version which is the one I have, has a great-looking booklet with really good quality, full color and artwork/good quality renders of the characters

polite sage for not retro

>>2784863
roughtly about the time when tutorials gained momentum. The manuals basically moved ingame, in a crappy way.
When platforms were severely limited in terms of memory and plain processing power, including a tutorial was prohibitive. So the manual did that job. And not just tutorials. RPGs did world building in manuals, leaving the "game" to be mostly a number crunching engine. Same with the feelies for interactive fiction. They were an off-screen mechanism to work around hardware limitations. With these limitations gone, devs move as much of that stuff as they can in game, leaving the manual to be little more than a grey printed sheet on how to launch the game, and an overview of the controller. Sadly, what devs are missing in this is that manuals are read slightly differently. People used them as teasers, or to get into the game world when they couldn't play, to share with friends, and to learn the game mechanics at their own pace. The in-game mechanisms don't allow for any of that. That's where tutorials become annoying, and world building becomes shallow. There are few devs that actually understand the value of the manual. Sadly though, they're independent. Physical publishing is needlessly expensive, and manuals in PDF form don't capture the old spirit of manuals as well. Probably not the best example, but I remember stuff like Legend of Grimrock having a beautiful looking PDF manual, old school graph paper and more. But yeah, it's all digital, so it's harder to actually notice it as manual per se.

>>2785661
in a way it does. Manuals are expensive, compared to in-game material. If you can avoid them, and try to be economical, you avoid them.

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>>2785565
>Japanese manuals were always good for any console
This. I like how the manuals for the Double Dragon games were way better in Japanese.
How else would I have known that the fat masked guy from Double Dragon II was the inspiration for the same fat masked guy from the Neo-Geo fighting game? Also, the Double Dragon III manual was an entire comic.

>>2784863

For Nintendo, I'd say it's the end of the Gamecube/GBA era where manuals really went to shit. 3DS manuals nowadays are barely even 2 pages.

For PC, they were already shit by the mid 90s. Consoles never really had anything approaching what came with the average pc game before then.

>>2788531
But PC games had glorious README.TXT files. Or PDFs with pictures if you're lucky.

>>2788619
That doesn't make up for what was lost from the Infocom era. Even mediocre games came with a massive pile of shit to clog up your desk drawers. CRPGs had manuals as thick as a man's thigh, hunt for red october came with the fucking book. Granted, many of these games were 80 dollars or more, but even after prices equalized there was still much more to manuals.

Still, those grorious readme's and pdfs were a lifesaver when it took 2 hours to install a game and the internet was for posting pictures of cats.

>>2788139

Not what I was talking about. I think you know that.

>>2784882
I remember there being a stigma about manual reading by this point. It was seen as unnecessary behavior. I take it these people only played simple console games. More complicated games on console and many more games on PC seemed to expect you to read the manual thoroughly.

What it really is, the cost of data finally hit crazy-low numbers, and the cost of printing/shipping went up. That's why we get everything digital, no one wants to distribute books when they could put all the same stuff in a plastic disk for a fraction of the cost and resource requirements.

>>2788631
but it's precisely the problem. You don't need a manual any longer, it is not able to provide essential info that the game could not provide. As a result, the whole production of a manual is scaled down, and the cool bits are dropped off as well. The low quality of modern day manuals is directly related to the lack of need for a manual