Who else misses those big handbooks of earlier games?!

I do miss handbooks. 

I loved having a stack of game manuals in the bathroom. The SupCom one kept me poopin for quite a while.

Those were a little before my time, but I still like the idea, preferably if they include an incredible amount of useless lore. One of the big things that keeps me away from Elemental right now is the opaqueness and superficiality of the "Hiregamenon" in-game manual.

Damn seriously.... i miss those old awesome super big sized handbooks. Expecially Civ was great in that part.

The "Hiergamenon" is no in-game manual. Its no manual whatsoever. It just a listing of techs, buildings & equipment. Just imagine a "Civilopedia" of a later Civilization game without any explanations on game concepts, lore or history.

The Age of Wonders 2 manual was stupidly huge. Waste of a rain forest.

As far as Elemental is concerned, they could have stuffed the Hiergamenon full of all the information possibly which the game contains, and they still can. Hopefully it gets fleshed out over time, to include all monsters, buildings, units, spells ect.

I love the old manuals, esp. Civ 2, MOO2, and SimCity 2000. The nice thing is that they were paper rather than PDF. I have a manual for a program (not a game) that is 1500 pages long in PDF format . Though easy to search, it's not so easy to read on the toilet...

I'm nearly convinced that Stardock's 'continuous development' approach makes a serious printed manual pretty much a waste of resources, other than as a collector's item for the state of a game at RTM for physical distribution.

That's not to say that I haven't had great satisfaction with good manuals from older games like MoM, Civ1-2, or SMAC. And more importantly, it's a poor excuse for the lack of effort on soft documentation like PDF manuals and even less of an excuse for...

I have no idea how Random House people were integrated into production, but if they took much money at all in the name of editorial contributions to the game itself, they were scamming Stardock.

Do you also miss porn .jpegs?

I prefer in-game stuff, give the benifit of better navigation and dynamic media. All the info in a book should be redundant.

Sometimes its just better when things move.

I miss a good information flow between the developer and the player, which you don't see in a lot of games anymore.  Looking at my original Master of Magic manual, it has 150 pages, plus a second manual with spells, of 48 pages (granted, 7 pages are spells listed in different style of tables).  There is a ton of detail in these - even down to the math of bonus stacking for offense & defense bonuses.

I don't require a huge manual - a good, informative in-game system can be just as good.  As long as it covers the details that are needed for players to get into and understand how to play the game.

You can always print the PDF manual. Then you will have something to read on the pot.

Spoken by someone who apparently never got to experience a proper ring-bound manual.

Sure I have.

But in a day of ever increasing costs and ever diminishing profits, it only makes sense to put the manual in a digital format.

Then, you can print any or all of it for the cost of your own paper and ink - or simply read it on your screen. And if you are prudent enough to have a dual monitor setup, you can read it on your second monitor even while playing the game.

Well, I pay more for games now than I did twenty years ago. Pretty much twice the price (has a lot to do with the Euro conversion, though), and I get a lot less in terms of material goods. I slowly wrap my mind around digital distribution and acknowledge some advantages. But it's not about the money for me. I'd not mind paying extra for a ring-bound manual (I can print PDFs, but the quality is nowhere as good). You don't even get them with CEs.

Most games don't come with an in-depth PDF manual anymore either. Elemental is a good example, but it's not isolated.

You could, except the manual was written well before the game is done and a lot of things in it are hopelessly out of date. Reading it is just as likely to confuse you as it is to help with anything.

I agree with GW totally on that. You can't write a manual until game systems are locked down, and that didn't really happen in Elemental until right at the end.

I miss old school manuals.

I miss .jpeg porn, but if you do a slideshow and have it change fast, looks like a movie.

The fantasy indie game Dominions 3 comes with a hefty spiral-bound manual. Not sure how many ink cartidges I'd go through if I had to print one of those suckers on my own.

These days they call them "strategy guides" and they charge you an extra $20 for them <_<

^QFT. 

I do miss the big manuals, too.  Does anyone remember the old-school DRM where a game would actually require you to look up information in the manual ever so often to make sure you owned a legit copy?  Just played some Master of Orion lately and had to smile when a pop-up required me to identify a certain ship on a particular page of the manual before continuing with the game.  Ahh, those were the days...

Old school manuals you could throw and take people out... But seriously... those were the good old day... I still have a few laying around here and there.

I wonder if Civ 5 will keep it's big manual. I always kind of liked that too.

I also miss nice touches like the spell book that came with MoM. I guess I can kind of understand why you don't see them as much anymore, and as games become more and more likely to be downloaded from somewhere like Impulse you will probably see them even less. But just because I understand why they are disapearing doesn't mean I can't still wish they were still around.

Its the same with magic tbh. You used to get these really nice bulky books, bound with skin and the like. It really gave you a feeling of power as you enslaved young women and summoned tenticles from the ground to 'work' them. Opening that big book up, with all those notes - written in blood by its various owners (all dead now ofcourse). Great times.

It sucks now.

Everythings a damn PDF. I hear from the new recruits that theres even interact help prompts when casting the dark incantations now. WTF?! Stupid clerics.

Theres a few people still doing it the old way but few and far between they are. I think it actualy makes the spells more powerful but I could never prove it.

Oh well. Thats all behind me now though, I left the Church a while ago... Still like the smell of hellfire though.

I do miss the old manuals.  I used to be able to tell if I would like a game by the weight of the box.  I'm not lying that was my barometer.  

I recently noticed something funny.  Starcraft II had a note pad in the box.  I'm pretty sure the only reason it was included was to increase the weight and thereby the perceived value to the person holding the box.

Me and my brother would always fight over the manual on the way home from the game store. Reading the manual was almost as good as playing the games.

I think the old manuals just added to the whole experience, setting and creating the atmosphere. But maybe that's just old school thinking and most people just want to play a game, not have a more "complete", immersing experience.

For example, I finally decided to pick up The Witcher, an RPG that I had wanted to play for a couple of years. Bought it at GG for twenty Euro, and now I'm facing a 11 GB download. That'll take me a few days since my connection is slow and I need it for work during the day. So, what did I do? I purchased the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski that the game is based on. The four books cost more than the game, but I'll get a lot more out of the whole experience that way. For the same reason I bought Brad's Elemental book (which still hasn't arrived).

Ah, the smell of a fresh game manual... I miss it so.  Kind of like new car smell, but way cheaper.

Reading the manual was always a big part of the fun for me.