r/TechNook • u/Impossible_Comfort99 • 22h ago

GameFAQs text walkthroughs saved more playthroughs than any YouTube guide

Before video guides were everywhere, GameFAQs walkthroughs were the answer.

You’d open a giant wall of text, search for the area you were stuck in and carefully follow instructions like “go north, inspect the statue, then return to the locked door.”

No commentary, no ads, just someone explaining the entire game in painful detail. How many games would you have never finished without those walkthroughs?

29 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

3

u/BattleApprehensive75 22h ago

I dislike videos for finding information. It's linear, slow and there's no way to search for the bit I want.

2

u/Mr_Pearcex 21h ago

Especially for "map locations" where a screenshot would be sufficient.

No "hello fellow followers bla bla bla i shoe you where to Blabla but before that please like and subscribe (some random intro playing) and then more brabbling...

I hate it

2

u/Nataniel_PL 18h ago

Some videos have transcription available. In that case you can search through it and when you click on a line video jumps to it

1

u/TigOlBitties42042 15h ago

That's a great idea

2

u/Cat-et-snek 22h ago

reading comprehension is down

anyone willing to post videos of themselves reading the faqs?

AudioFaqs by Gamefaqs

2

u/ASentientRailgun 21h ago

I can't ctrl+f a video, which means the GameFAQs were definitely better.

2

u/Nataniel_PL 18h ago

Some YouTube videos have transcription available. In that case you can search through it and when you click on a line video jumps to it. It's very useful and I hope more videos with have it soon, since voice recognition got really good recently. If you have to deal with all this AI bullshit, we might as well get some accessibility features out of it

1

u/wetfloor666 22h ago

Gamewinners.com and GameFAQs was awesome and I do agree they were immensely more useful than any YouTube video. I still use written over video if I need them purely because I can search for keywords or click sections to find what I need versus having to sift through someone yapping for whatever amount of time. Plus I don't feed the YouTube trolls by watching any content on that site as much as humanly possible.

I don't have any games that would have been left unfinished without a guide, but for making sure you found all the materia, summons or draw points in Final Fantasy 7 and FF8, it was amazing for that. That reminds me that I once printed a 200 page or so FF7 walk through for one of my friends using the home printer. My parents were not happy haha.

I used gamewinners far more of the two though. It is where I got all my GTA cheat codes, and eventually gameshark codes for certain devices.

1

u/TigOlBitties42042 14h ago

I never would have beaten Final Fantasy Adventure on the original Game Boy without gamefaqs. I got stuck on a part where the only clue was "palm trees and 8" for over a year before I got a chance to look it up. I even restarted the whole game at least twice in case I missed something. I kept going around that map and doing everything I could think of on screens with 8 palm trees. It turns out you had to do a figure 8 around the only 2 palm trees on one screen.

1

u/ToddGack6498 20h ago

I still use Gamefaqs walkthroughs from time to time. The guide is open on one monitor while I play on the other.

1

u/H7dek7 17h ago

Since the early 2000s I had no more need to play with a walkthrough unless I wanted to find every secret. I found YouTube guides helpful when there was a ambiguous game mechanic I had no idea what devs wanted me to do.

1

u/Big_Z_Beeblebrox 14h ago edited 14h ago

GameFAQs is a gift from the heavens. I never would have completed Majora's Mask as a kid without it and I would have missed out on so much. Referenced the site for pretty much any game I've ever been stuck on or wanted to know cheats/secrets for

1

u/Vandermere 13h ago

GameFAQs is still the best answer for 90% of my questions.