this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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I liked that I could ctrl+f < thing I want to know about> and go right to it instead of having to jump around in a 20 minute video for a 2 minute thing.
Heck I remember ones that had specific chapter codes so you could find that code to get to that specific chapter
Yes but the flip side was not being able to easily find information you didn't have. Sure, ctrl+f made it easy to look up heart pieces, but I remember getting stuck in the forest temple and having to read through every step twice to figure out where I was supposed to go (if I remember right in think there was an eyeball switch I didn't see).
Videos don't improve on that issue though. Just makes it harder to go step by step.
Well, I think this comes down to personal preference and what kind if game you're playing. It's easier for me to scan a video to the point I'm stuck on and watch for 5 to 10 minutes until I see what I'm doing wrong than it is to read while I play until I find the passage that has the information I need. But I'm sure lots of people find it easier to pull the answers out of text than search through a video.
Yeah it's the 5-10 minutes part that bothers me. I can read way faster than that. But to each their own. I can still typically find written guides for things, they just pale in comparison to the ones from the old gamefaqs days.
For me it's less the reading and more the multitasking, especially in 3 dimensional spaces. I had one of those magazine sized guides for Myst, and as a point-and-click, it was simple enough to navigate. But reading along with a guide, putting it down, playing, looking again, only to realize I got turned around and went to the left instead of right 3 steps ago is what got confusing. (Having a desktop in another room that i had to get up and walk over to probably didn't help either.) You're right though, modern guides pale in comparison to the level of detail in those old guides.