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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I’m aware of some DOS games that did it. For example 1989 Prince of Persia had you enter the exact character (page, line, word) from the manual.

    On PS1 you’d probably never complete Metal Gear Solid (1998), cause you need to call somebody on the codec, but the frequency was on the box cover.


  • They are right, it was used for that. Sometimes some key information for progress would be in the manual or on the box. Luckily it wasn’t super popular on consoles, due to the notion that it wasn’t as easy to pirate on consoles as it was on home computers, where you could just copy the floppy/CD.




  • Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days. Every single cartridge and disc sold there was just that. Best case scenario in a flimsy plastic case that would disintegrate in a couple of years. Had to rawdog the shit out of those games. Pure trial and error and perseverance.
    Stuck? Try every possible button combination in every location that makes any sense.

    For example, couldn’t finish Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure on Mega Drive (Genesis) because I didn’t know you can jump off walls. Finished it earlier this year though 🙃

    Not to brag, but my brother and I passed the garage test mission in Driver (PS1) as kids. Now that I think about it, I should put it on my resume.








  • For sure, taking control away from the users is terrible and scummy, but I think it’s an entirely different issue, covered by “right to repair”. A very small amount of people had the know how and the confidence to perform the repairs themselves even before this anti consumer practices became so widespread, so I don’t think it’s a huge factor in decrease of skill. I would say a much bigger factor is the fact that technology has become exponentially more complex. You can’t just open up a radio and replace a vacuum tube, everything is a microchip now, and the soldering iron isn’t gonna help much there. I guess eventually we will reach technology complexity and abstraction of such a level that no single person can hold the knowledge to “fix” it on their own.









  • It’s definitely not just a couple of seconds, unless you have a very lightweight OS and only 1 or 2 apps to work with. And no matter how little extra time it takes to cold boot the system, there’s still no benefit to doing it that way, so no matter how little that time is, it’s still wasted.

    As I mentioned, one is free to use their computer however they wish, but it doesn’t make it not wasteful to shut it down. If grabbing something to eat was part of my daily routine, I’d grab it beforehand, instead of needlessly going back and forth, wake the computer and use it immediately.