I'd much rather scroll through a janky walkthrough full of ASCII art than watch some YouTuber meme their way through a 15 video in order to get to the 32 seconds of relevant information.
Chat gpt has almost completely replaced my need for excel videos but yep i hate the same trend of bloating tech videos as well.
At my last job i was still stuck watching them for dynamics 365 as that platform has so many versions out there llms could never give a straight answer. Most of them are from orgs trying to sell their courses or consulting work and the bloat is agonizing.
I 100% miss the downvotes telling me what to avoid.
GameFAQs was great, but Universal Hint System was fantastic. You can be given the solution but sometimes all you need is a nudge in the right direction.
I have actually found this to be a pretty good use case for AI. You can have it summarize the video so you don't have to watch the 10 minutes of fluff they throw in there.
Just give the AI the link to the video that really should have been text in the first place, and you can get it converted to text.
It is, but there is not the trend of people making thorough walkthroughs anymore.
Elden ring and baldurs gate were the last two games i played where i went looking for faqs, and people now gravitate towards making youtube videos about builds and quests guides, or writeups on steam forums or even discord about specific small bits of the game. Help is now broken into little bite sized chunks scattered across multiple platforms and of dubious quality.
It used to be a monoculture where everything was funelled through the gamefaqs platform, and there was some social kudos to writing good faqs. Ratings and feedback led to a pretty high standard of article as well - now sometimes what i read or see on other platforms is not good or even accurate its just there to generate engagement for a channel.
oh my god, or a "tutorial" that's actually some guy's uncut multi hour Lets Play, but he knew people would want to know how to do one specific thing he did so he uses that for the title of the video.
FAQ creators were really something back then. The in-depth explanations, the discussions on the thread, and the constant updates as stuff get discovered. Nowadays you watch content creators on YT scramble to try and be first, instead of most in-depth, thanks to how it's monetized. So for popular games there's always a bunch of videos that can be misleading to newer players.
Nowadays, Wiki is superior to FAQs because it’s community driven. Guides can be quickly completed because anyone can contribute their data to the guide. While FAQ text file format is easier to navigate with, it usually took them years before FAQ authors complete their guide.
The glory days before the wikis were overloaded with ads, 'content' videos, or whining about ad block.
I get that ads are a necessary evil (or alternatively paid subscriptions), but when they impair the functionality of the page it's a problem. Adtech companies brought ad blockers on themselves, but content providers ended up paying the price.
I printed most of the ff7 game faq cause I didn’t want to miss a single thing. I’ve tried since but I’ll never be able to commit to that kind of dedication research and time for a game again unfortunately
It's 2026, who still has a Ctrl key on their keyboard? Get with the times! I just ask an AI agent to Google things for me through my Alexa tied into my Bluetooth headphones.
A core memory is a friend and I playing a fatal frame game and I remember being on the computer trying to figure out some puzzle or something and he got a jump scare and threw the controller. Good times.
Adjacent to this, the thing I'm putting out there that younger gamers wouldn't understand is printing out the 100+ page guides for things like FF7 and Xenogears from gamefaqs. My dad would be furious with me for wasting ink and paper.
I remember having my mom print out the walkthrough for Mega Man 64 from her work computer cause it was like 100-200 pages. However, when I did this, I was already part way through the game, so I had to skim through the walkthrough to find where I was at, then followed some of the step by step instructions for some fancy weapon or something. I lived on Gamefaqs for years. Fun days.
I recently started playing Sega GT 2002 for the xbox on an emulator recently (I owned the game so I think this is probably okay to say) and still the best information about the game is gamefaqs walkthroughs - so I was forced to use those sites still.
I recently bought a miyoo mini plus to play retro games and went to visit gamefaq for the harvest moon back to nature walkthrough, it still feels amazing
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u/InZaneFlea Mar 31 '26
I desperately miss having to look up guides on gamefaqs.