I had Duck Hunt but didn’t have the gun to play it with - nor the knowledge that I needed the gun. Every now and then I would try and fail to figure out how to play the game.
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
This must have been a common thing, because you’re the 2nd person in the comments to mention this!
It’s funny now to think that if you couldn’t figure out a game pre-internet, you just didn’t get to play it. I know that happened to me plenty.
(edit: curse you, Batman on Sega Genesis!)
Back in the day we would often rent games for a weekend and sometimes we would get stuck at some point. There was one particular game that me and my friends really liked (Maui Mallard) on the genesis, but there was one specific point we didn’t know what to do. Every now and then we would rent the game again for a weekend in hopes of figuring it out. The game had basically three buttons IIRC: attack, jump and special. You could also press attack and special at the same time for a different attack. So one day I was playing it and reached the point that we all got stuck, and kept trying to figure out how to jump out of the area I was in (there was a clear exit, but too high up). My brother saw me struggling and mockingly said: “come on, do a super jump” and that made me think: can I do special + jump too? I tried it and then learned that this combination allowed climbing through short gaps (and this was the very first such gap in the game - anywhere else the combination did nothing). I was the neighborhood hero for a while thanks to that.
NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original so many wasted weekends…BattleToads too.
Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these “Easter eggs” that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.
One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on “plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That’s all it does.”
Except if you read the manual you’d know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.
I’ve seen some people insist that their manual didn’t say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.
If you press F in Skifree, you can outrun the snow monster.
I only got to know this because of an XKCD comic.
Gen Z/late millenials trying to interpret retro games they play on emulators with no manuals is the modern “people making extremely detailed marble statues because they don’t realize Romans painted theirs”.
That’s how you end up with Blue Prince and Dark Souls and stuff.
I refuse to believe that Romans painted theirs. I mean, the evidence is clear that they did but it would look so terrible!
Yeah, and old games were just well designed with no handholding and absolutely didn’t include full bullet pointed tutorials for the first hour in the manual as a matter of course.
I’m interested in your take on what Blue Prince and Dark Souls are echoing, if I’m reading this right.
I think they’re saying if you fire up some old NES games without the manual, you’ll only learn from trial and error, and it’s going to be hard as hell. (Even with the manual, they were not as forgiving back then)
Hence, people designing challenging games without instructions thinking THAT’S what the old timers must like!
Found this out completely by accident once after my sister and I played some Mario.
I had the 2nd controller still plugged in, and while shooting the ducks I stepped on the controller and the ducks moved differently.
From the on, every time someone wanted to play duck hunt I would grab a second controller and make it harder for them.
Bonus knowledge: the original game works by a light-sensitive sensor in the blaster tip, and when you pull the trigger, the screen goes black and a white square appears whee the ducks were, in a specific order. If the game controller detects the light square, it counts as a “hit” on whatever duck was in frame. You can cheat by pointing the blaster at a white light and pulling the trigger. It will just go through them one by one as you squeeze, thinking the light is the duck square.
I didn’t have the gun, but I had duck hunt, so I could only control the duck. Needless to say I didn’t play much duck hunt
The worst was games that required info from the manual to progress past a certain point, like star tropics. Rented the game and the rental place didn’t include the manual? Shit out of luck. And no Internet back then to look it up, either. (Yes, I’m still bitter)
I remember some computer games would also do things like that to prevent copying the game from a friend, like requiring a certain word from a certain page before loading.
I bought Sim City for PC at a used bookstore, and it didn’t come with the reference page for a code it would ask you for after playing a certain amount of time.
Without this code, the game would turn on all hazards (tornados, fires, flooding, Godzilla, etc) and make itself unplayable.
There were rental places that didn’t include the manual?
Most if them
You could actually win Battle toads, you’d only have to get gud
