MudMan

Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn’t line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.

Again, I’m not saying it didn’t have an impact. I’m saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it’s partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.

And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).

Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it’s hard to tell).

Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren’t residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It’d take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You’re two console gens off there. That’s a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you’d expect that process to have failed faster than that.

Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I’m more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.

In any case, it was what it was, and it’s more enshittified now. I’ve been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don’t want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.

It’s not a “even if some existed” thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector’s hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.

Even granting that “booming” is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn’t buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that’s what IGN was doing, and they’re the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.

I don’t know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn’t break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.

I’d say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now… well, who knows, it’s a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?

I mean… MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.

MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn’t have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.

Hm… I’m a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so… it evens out?

I probably didn’t start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.

The government isn’t a subscription service or a company.

I can’t deal with Americans’ ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It’s so annoying.

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

No, for sure, it’s a good thing. I just found the expression funny in the context. The Crew is what it is.

If you like flavored condoms I am struggling to find a reason why not.

I mean, good on people getting this up and running, but “in case you’ve been living under a rock” may overrepresent how much the average person wants to play The Crew.

A sausage is ground meat in an intestinal casing.

If you wrap a whole steak in a sausage casing that’s not a sausage. You need to pound that dick before you can call it sausage. So at the start of the process it may be way less sausage than by the end, depending on how you go about it, I suppose.

I mean… I own both a LCD and an OLED Deck.

I would absolutely not use it as a computer without a dock and I certainly wouldn’t use it as a media player.

Other handhelds maaaaybe. The Legion Go has a stand and detachable controllers, so it could be a thing if it didn’t have the worst speakers ever devised by a human being. The GPD Win 4, the GPD Win Mini, the Ayaneo Slide and the Aya Flip all have some semblance of a keyboard, so you can get away with some stuff you can’t on the Deck or the Ally. I don’t think they make sense as a main computing device for the money, though, as they don’t have even the Deck’s low entry point as an excuse.

FWIW, the optical nub on the Win 4 is the best pointer device in any of these, and even with that and the physical keyboard I still wouldn’t use it to replace a laptop for media consumption if given the option. If I had a single device I could pick up I would sooner look into the ASUS Flow line of convertibles than into any current handheld, although you can certainly get a much cheaper all-rounder laptop than that.

Well, I’m less black and white than you are on this, but I could agree with most of that.

That’s not what’s in the law, though.

The law outright bans any and all loot boxes in games aimed at kids or teenagers (meaning anything with any loot boxes is automatically 18+ rated) and sets an obligation for all stores to verify people’s age on top of having parental controls. I guess you could go to court and find out, but the way I read it, age checks are mandated additionally to parental controls and both are set as obligations.

So it’s great for you that you have this whole mental framework of why porn is cool but loot boxes are not, but that’s not what the law says, so I’m going to guess I can chalk you up as disagreeing with this whole situation.

Also, the idea that NSFW content in general, regardless of where you place the bar for “porn” has “never been marketed at children” is hilarious.

Whose point is that? Because I don’t think it’s the previous guy’s point, and it certainly isn’t mine.

I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn’t the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games “targeted at children or teenagers”. No qualifiers. Doesn’t even say “paid loot boxes”, so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I’m going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it’s certainly not in the law.

So if you don’t like this for doing both at once… well, that’s weird, that’s why laws have multiple articles. If you’re worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that’s irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they’re overreaching by outright banning loot boxes… well, I agree, but I don’t think that’s the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.

EDIT: Someone in a different thread pointed out that despite referencing slightly differently there IS a definition of lootbox in the law and it does include a requirement for them to be paid, so I’m correcting the record here:

IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

Arguably they still can’t.

But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.