What are you reading ?

i agree about the quality or lack there of most modern gaming manuals. however alien shooter:vengeance- probably has one of the best i've ever seen and its only jewel case size. almost 30 pages packed with lots of useful info and humour too(the intentional kind). eg: intelligence (head icon) - the higher your intelligence level is, the less you think like a potato. besides this, you will be able to use better implants.what's shocking is this comes from a european developer.
i almost always read the manual the same night i install a game which gets me into the mood for the following day. online or pdf are good for reference but i almost never read them.

One of my SNES games - a very boring game about a desert war, by the way, I even forgot the title - had an incredibly funny manual. It was definietely intended by the translators this time, but I'm pretty sure the original version's manual wasn't funny at all… my version had mission descriptions like '3. Take the stronghold. 4. Return to base, but don't forget to buy milk on the way back.'

Originally Posted by magerette
The last game I got with a decent manual was Temple of Elemental Evil. The last rpg I got with turn based combat was ToEE as well—coincidence?

Probably not. And let's not forget the chocolate chips cookie of the gods recipe !
Have you tried Dominions 3 ? An incredibly deep TB strategy game that was released last year. It comes with a spiral bound 300-page manual, which you will definitely need.

Haven't run across Dominions—I pretty much forget to shop the strategy section anymore since almost everything is real time and/or WWII these days. I'll look it up.

Edit: Just checked it out at Gamespot—it looks quite interesting..("if you're the type of gamer who lets out a groan when he sees a manual the size of a phone book, the game probably isn't for you…") Learning curve: 3 hours.(!)
Thanks Cormac.

Right now I'm reading Well Of Darkness by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman (Volume 1 of the Sovereign Stone Trilogy).

It's not bad, I like the take on the different races and their relationships with each other, and the story is paced well and interesting.

I'm not a huge fan of the work of Weis or Hickman, but they are both good writers. I've met Margaret several times at conventions and she's really nice to talk to.

Originally Posted by magerette
Haven't run across Dominions—I pretty much forget to shop the strategy section anymore since almost everything is real time and/or WWII these days. I'll look it up.

Edit: Just checked it out at Gamespot—it looks quite interesting..("if you're the type of gamer who lets out a groan when he sees a manual the size of a phone book, the game probably isn't for you…") Learning curve: 3 hours.(!)
Thanks Cormac.

Yes, the game is very complex. Fortunately the demo comes with a very comprehensive tutorial which will teach you, if you do decide to try it, the basics of province management and combat (and a bit on magic too).

Spiral-bound manuals ? I don't believe I've EVER seen one !

Only a few days ago I was digging through my chest full with old game manuals and not a single one was like this type !

Is this typical European or what ?


The outcry was immense, by the way, when the gaming mags wrote about plans of the industry to only use DVD cases. Me, I felt like being treated not as a customer, but rather like … a cash-cow. They want money from me and dare to deliver the least necessary for that. Cutting down production costs in all place … Well, not all. Except the 3D graphics, of course.

Of course the industry had won. No-one selld games in the so-called "Euro-Boxes" anymore. Everything has at least the height of an DVD box.

And THEN they try to put handbooks into an DVD case that *hardly* fit at all !

But I guess I'm becoming more & more off-topic … Agree to open a new thread ?

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
Spiral-bound manuals ? I don't believe I've EVER seen one !

I have at least NWN, KotOR and ToEE … perhaps more but being >3000 miles away from them makes it hard to check

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
The outcry was immense, by the way, when the gaming mags wrote about plans of the industry to only use DVD cases.

We had much hand-wringing here about the move to small boxes … the use of DVD cases is still spotty here - don't really know why, though. But don't feel bad - we don't get anything better in the boxes than in the DVD cases

Well, I never had the three games you mentioned as full-price games, so I can't say … don't have KOTOR not at all, and NWN only as a gaming magazine's version. TOEE as extremely low budget version.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer

Spiral-bound manuals ? I don't believe I've EVER seen one !

Alrik, you're always getting the short end of the stick!

Spiral bound manuals in my collection:

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Icewind Dale
NWN and NWN Gold
Fallout
Temple of Elemental Evil

All, as you can see, by Bioware, Black Isle or Troika. I think there was an outcry about BG1 not having a spiral bound manual, so that's why the SoA edition did. I also got some 20-sided dice and a cool notepad with that one.

…and another bump, just for magerette.

I'm reading Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East right now. It's a great book and he is, IMO, a great writer.

I'm reading it again now as a sort of remembrance since he just passed away last month. We lost one of the pioneers of the genre (sci-fi/fantasy), and a genuinely nice person.

Originally Posted by Jaz
…and another bump, just for magerette.

You guys rock.
Edit: Okay, I moved this in from the other book thread to keep things from becoming too schizoid:

Wishes do come true, eh? Thanks HiddenX. Now what is everybody reading? Besides narpet?

You ARE reading, right, expanding your young minds and vocabularies?? Exploring the frontiers of other cultures and ways of life? Learning new expressions and visiting the farthest realms of imagination?

**Yes, comic books count. (Especially The Sandman.) Even game manuals, around here.**

Good. Mother is proud. Please share

At the moment I'm reading the first volume of the Dark Tower, The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. I've been meaning to read this series for a long time, but kept putting it off waiting for the last book. Now that that has been published I have no excuse. I'm only on page five, but already weirded out.

The Shinto Mage trilogy by Dale Elvey

Recently read:

- Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko - I had already read Night Watch (and played the game and watched the DVD) so this was a natural when it was released in the US (it is a translation from Russian). It was quite good, perhaps not as good as the first, but still a nice read. The last one - Twilight Watch - was just released, and I'll grab that one soon enough.

- The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I knew very little about this other than liking his 'All the Pretty Horses' ages ago. This was a fairly quick read, but was stark and harsh and written in language that was at once sketchy and descriptive. Not an easy thing to read, but a really good book.

… now I'm working on the Best of H. P. Lovecraftbook that GamerDad had recommended …

Currently reading Pandora - The Jesus Incident. It's the first book of the Pandora Triloogy. A really great SF book written by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom that depicts God as a ship, an artificial conciseness created by mankind.

I've been gobbling up Iain M. Banks's novels. Perfect summer reading. I particularly liked The Use of Weapons; had to read it three times to make sense of it, but it was worth it. I liked Consider Phlebas and The Algebraist almost as much.

Just finished Excession, and found it a bit too transparently preachy and thought the ending was a bit lame (although not as much as The State Of The Art, which I didn't care much for). Started on Player Of Games.

I'm also reading a history of 20th century Iran.

Originally Posted by txa1265
… now I'm working on the Best of H. P. Lovecraftbook that GamerDad had recommended …

Yah, HPL is something of a "must-read" I guess, if only to get all the pop-culture references to him that are literally all over the place (especially in games).

To be honest, I've enjoyed stumbling across the Cthulhu Mythos in surprising contexts much more than reading the actual original stories. Even though they're really marvelously imagined, they're often so god-awfully badly written that it's almost not worth it. (The exceptions are At The Mountains Of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where he manages to keep his adjectives under control. Most of the time.)

I've particularly enjoyed Neil Gaiman's spin on it — once you're done with that book, I'd nudge you towards Shadows Over Baker Street (which contains Gaiman's "A Study In Emerald")… and then there's that one short story about an American backpacker stumbling into an English seaside village named Innsmouth, sharing a few pints of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar with the oddly batrachian ("means, 'looks like a bloody frog,' dunnit?") locals…

Just about done with "Voice of the Gods" by Trudi Canavan. Nothing special, but a pleasant read. This concluding volume, as usual, is much better than book 2 of the trilogy.

Originally Posted by Prime Junta
Yah, HPL is something of a "must-read" *snip*…

…Even though they're really marvelously imagined, they're often so god-awfully badly written that it's almost not worth it.

They remind me a lot of the Robert E. Howard opus in that respect. The writing often gets in the way of the magnitude of the literary event that is their work. No one else could probably have written it better, yet as you say, sometimes the purple prose is overwhelming.

I've particularly enjoyed Neil Gaiman's spin on it — once you're done with that book, I'd nudge you towards Shadows Over Baker Street (which contains Gaiman's "A Study In Emerald")…

Thanks for the reference to this book. I had no idea Gaiman had written a Holmes pastiche,especially with Lovecraftian overtones. This collection is definitely a new take (though Daniel Stashower did venture into the territory with The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man.)
If you care at all for that sort of thing, I recommend Michael Kurland's The Infernal Device where he explores the Holmesian world with Professor Moriarty as the protagonist, and Holmes as an almost certifiable paranoid. Quite well done.