I think however that some games were overpresented in the way of booklets. I could wish for more, and I do, but I think it is keeping just a little bit alive. The many ads in the booklet serves as clues too, but not to puzzle-solving but more as a waypoint of what is to be found in the sity. GTA3 presents the booklet as a parleur to the city you are visiting. Maybe not to the extent of the old times huge novels, that I must admit I used the same way as Scythe- good reading on long commutes or as bedtime reading, but only after playing the game. A few games, like Baldur's Gate for example, carried on that tradition into the 2000s but soon the big-box game was more or less eradicated by the DVD-case game and with that change, seemingly, the attempt to maintain an illusion was lost too.Īlso I think the booklet on GTA3 and its successors are doing something. The games of the mid-90s did their utmost to maintain the illusion that you actually are the person you are playing, and their manuals were party to that illusion, and they were largely huge. Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, Civ2, Colonization, Master of Orion 2. Am I alone in missing these things? Was I alone in reading those manuals, becoming part of their imagination and getting lost in the world of these games? I think that the thinking now is that our graphics and whatnot have reached the stage where we no-longer need to sustain our disbelief or take on "roles" - but I don't think we are anywhere near that - the arid, cold, soulless, vacant world of Oblivion is surely testament to that. So an effort to create a theme and imaginary world for the game has by and large been traded for functionality and nothing else. This is a trend that has pervaded all areas of gaming - even the Civ series has offered progressively less historical information and has attempted to "flavour" its manual less and less - the long descriptions that traditionally accompanied the Wonders of the World have been replaced by very brief descriptions and its in-game function. Compare the paltry manual that accompanies Oblivion today - or even better - open up your 2004 copy of Neverwinter Nights and look at the spared down spell description and banal functionality of the instruction manual there. Are Colonization and Alpha Centuri no longer acceptable to the modern gamer because both are "too detailed", too esoteric? I remember the days when games would come in big boxes with big manuals that typically came in the form of a brief from your boss or perhaps a journal or an old tome penned for wannabe adventurers - the archtypal example is Baldur's Gate 2 - a map, a big thick book, a hotkey list. What has happened to the gaming world where a Colonization 2 or an Alpha Centuri 2 seems to be almost totally inconceivable and yet at the end of last year we got: Heroes of Might and Magic FIVE, Space Empires FIVE and Caeser FOUR - all totally pointless releases, all featuring in some shape or form streamlining of micromanagement in favour of flashier graphics and "macromanagement" - following the model set by Master of Orion 3.
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