I was just in the toilet and notice something behind my meds cabinet.

Anyway I found out it was my old Diablo manual.

I can not get the dissapointment out of my mind of how far companies have let thier standards drop in making manuals.

Anyone have any comment on this or anyone else used to use manuals as toilet reading material?

Ooohh... I definitely do. Or used to.
Manuals these days are nothing more than quick-installation guides. The only modern games I have that came with some nice, fat, old-school manuals are Sacred II, X-Blades and Supereme Commander.

Thank God(or your diety of choice) im not the only one. Though im a little ashamed by it....








How could I lose Diablos manual and not notice.

I used to as well, back when there was real content in manuals (Baldur's Gate comes to mind)

OH yeah the spell pages kept going for a while, same with char discriptions

LOL, reminds me of that Southpark scene. :D

I used to love reading manuals as a kid. It was just awesome when you got home with your brand new game (remembert that brand-new-out-of-the-box smell) and just sat there browsing in the manual, looking at all the stuff before actually playing it.

Well, not only game companies. Adobe is also BAD BAD BAD example. In previous versions of Creative Suite there were pretty big manuals with lots of pages. The newest CS5 comes with a few DVDs in paper envelopes and a few "paper cards". ONLY.

Just look at this unboxing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqHzQ2Cs2vQ 1:00+
It is Adobe CS5 Master Collection which currently costs over $2500 in US.

Where are the manuals??? .....

You just dont get that new game smell in the same way you used too.
Its like when you got a new book, I loved sniffing new books, sniffing a Kindle just doesnt do it for me

I agree. Going through the big fat manuals was like preparing for a test, but not a regular school test, but one that will determine your success in a fight to the death! Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but you were really interested how can you start the game on the best pre-knowledge as possible, just to make your experience that much rewarding. Last time I had such a feeling was when I unpacked my Witcher EE and just drooled over the manual AND the guide AND the short story.

Of course it doesn't, you have to grind it into a fine powder first.

The Ultima games had kick-ass boxes full of goodies and great manuals.

Unfortunately I don't have any of them any more...

I took them for granted at the time.

I'm sure there are better ways of getting a massive nose bleed.

Wait... on second thought, no there aren't.

I loved manuals, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you which ones I actually liked. All I have are vague visual memories of really cool, sometimes really weird line art or sketches, huge ass tomes with stories and histories of the people and world we played in, and it was all glorious. Now that all of these are usually included in-game (even the art in some of them), it's easy to understand skipping out on a huge ass manual, but I miss them.