I miss written guides. If I look something up for a video game, it's usually a discrete question that I want a quick answer for, which is something that YouTube video guides are uniquely terrible at providing. And there are practically no written guides after a certain date. It's awful.
I'll say that the one thing LLMs have improved is that Google's AI Search can answer a lot of questions for me without making me watch a fucking video. But I'd still prefer a labor of love text file FAQ.
it's usually a discrete question that I want a quick answer for, which is something that YouTube video guides are uniquely terrible at providing.
Have a question about how to do/find something
Only resources are YT videos no shorter than 15 minutes.
5 minutes are intro with the guy telling his life.
5 minutes are teasing about the response and going in circles in the map.
10 seconds for a short answer that sometimes it doesn’t help at all. (How to find the legendary fish in the fishing mechanic of the open world game? Go to water and catch it)
5 minutes of outro.
Even looking up a simple walk-through is impossible now, all you can find is slop.
This is why I share the complete GameFAQs archive. It's art, it's useful, it's free of ads, and I have precious memories from the discussion boards. That archive and emulators will keep me entertained forever.
is this a kiwix archive? I'd like to add that to the Library!
Oh I used this guide like three weeks ago, lol.
nfo file art feels like a lost form.
That and keygen music
The chiptune scene is more than alive and well.
A lost space and time, never to be reclaimed. Never be afraid to start another movement
This is the stuff LLMs should have been trained on.
To be fair they probably were
True! But I'm pretty sure most, if not all, LLMs remove all whitespace as, like, step zero of their process as they tokenize stuff. So the LLM is literally blind to the data this contains.
So you're saying we need to return to the 2000s and start communicating with ASCII art to stop AI scrapers? In.
LLMs are notoriously shitty at ASCII art
Creating or identifying?
Gonna go with creating for sure haha:
How does one even go about making something like this? I've never seen any guides or dedicated ASCII artists.
There was software for it. Both painting apps and image to ascii apps.
Hell yeah, unsung heroes of a bygone era
Even today, if I'm stuck in a game, especially an older one, I'll check for a guide like this first. So much more pleasant than the SEO slop you get by googling, and a better experience than sifting through video.
It's pretty hit or miss for anything newer. But for classic games, those resources are still super valuable.
It's was an unwritten requirement when configuring Cisco switches in the 00s too. Not sure of it still is, I haven't touched a router in 15 years.
A lot of front end devs hid it in webpage source too.
My homepage still has it.
Dingo jellybean doing the lords work.
That person potentially owned hellokity.com in 1999!
Still an all time great game, too.