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!
Doesn’t appear to be, I found it in torrent form. Is there a process for submitting it to kiwix? Or would you just like the torrent?
there is a process, but i haven’t looked into that yet. torrent will work too!
To anyone else interested, reply to this comment for the archive!
Replying
I’ll take it please, Brazilian ISPs are extremely open to torrenting so I can seed indefinitely.
How big is it?
Around 2.3 GB, all of .txts!
That sounds like a great thing to keep alive as the net continues to enshittify
Me too please!!
I want to do my part!
I can help with keeping it alive.
meee :3
I’m also interested! Thank you!
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
What is nfo
A text file (info)
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.
Well, if you have a better way to get you to watch 12 ads, I’d like to hear it.
They sure make them on purpose. Just for monetization.
Even looking up a simple walk-through is impossible now, all you can find is slop.
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.
Yeah, you just Ctrl+F for what you need instead of clicking through 10+ pages.
Oh the memories of the Game FAQS for The Secret of Monkey Island. In fact all the Monkey games. In fact all the LucasArts games.
Such a Golden Era of PC adventures!
What I miss about these walk-throughs is that the complete lack of hyperlinks and images made finding the help you needed feel like its own challenge. I remember getting stuck in Ocarina of Time in the early 2000s, and interpreting complex directions for a puzzle in a 3 dimensional space without any visual aids was still tough. I played Twilight Princess for the first time a decade later, and the one time I got stuck I just watched a guy on YouTube solve it. Copying him felt pretty unsatisfying.
I liked that I could ctrl+f < thing I want to know about> and go right to it instead of having to jump around in a 20 minute video for a 2 minute thing.
Heck I remember ones that had specific chapter codes so you could find that code to get to that specific chapter
Yes but the flip side was not being able to easily find information you didn’t have. Sure, ctrl+f made it easy to look up heart pieces, but I remember getting stuck in the forest temple and having to read through every step twice to figure out where I was supposed to go (if I remember right in think there was an eyeball switch I didn’t see).
Videos don’t improve on that issue though. Just makes it harder to go step by step.
Well, I think this comes down to personal preference and what kind if game you’re playing. It’s easier for me to scan a video to the point I’m stuck on and watch for 5 to 10 minutes until I see what I’m doing wrong than it is to read while I play until I find the passage that has the information I need. But I’m sure lots of people find it easier to pull the answers out of text than search through a video.
Yeah it’s the 5-10 minutes part that bothers me. I can read way faster than that. But to each their own. I can still typically find written guides for things, they just pale in comparison to the ones from the old gamefaqs days.
For me it’s less the reading and more the multitasking, especially in 3 dimensional spaces. I had one of those magazine sized guides for Myst, and as a point-and-click, it was simple enough to navigate. But reading along with a guide, putting it down, playing, looking again, only to realize I got turned around and went to the left instead of right 3 steps ago is what got confusing. (Having a desktop in another room that i had to get up and walk over to probably didn’t help either.) You’re right though, modern guides pale in comparison to the level of detail in those old guides.
deleted by creator
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. The FAQ advice felt like a treasure map you followed, which helped feel like you were still “solving” the thing since you needed to engage your brain (and it separately felt rewarding to succeed).
To be honest, watching YouTube and following along isn’t even the low effort version in 2025 - That’s reserved for just watching a Let’s Play and not even ever playing the game.
Yeah, I never watch a Let’s Play if something I want to play unless I’ve already played it. Sometimes I wind up turning them off if the game actually looks good.
Lowest effort is a reaction video about it, so I don’t even need to think about how I feel about watching the let’s play video.
Yes! I loved following ASCII maps. Even though I had thrown in the towel on solving the actual puzzle, I still got the satisfaction of solving the new puzzle that was deciphering whatever the hell the guide author was trying to convey.
Exactly! It felt more like getting a hint rather than being given the answer.
Not to mention that with YouTube’s current search algorithm, looking up “CoolGame Room 7 Walkthrough” is likely to end up with results like “COOLGAME FINAL BOSS”, “COOLGAME SECRET ENDING”, “WHY CHARACTER 1 KILLED CHARACTER 2 IN COOLGAME EXPLAINED” thus spoiling the ever living shit of what you’re trying to play
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.
Dingojellybean (at) hellokitty (dot) com
Where are you now, dingojellybean? What have you seen?
Maybe the real Dingo Jellybean were the friends we made along the way
The great thing is that all the guides that were good back then are STILL good today for their respective games. Except one or two for MMORPGs I guess
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
Generating SVGs too, since those are just images dictated by vector numbers (most modern logos use them because they scale infinitely and are tiny in file size)
Creating or identifying?
Gonna go with creating for sure haha:
I’ve just realised what’s annoying me about this. Shouldn’t the (XI) on the left be (IX)? The numbers are a clock face yeah?
I’m unfamiliar with the game so maybe this is done on purpose.
No, you are correct. Well spotted.
You should write to Dingo Jellybean (dingojellybean@hellokitty.com) and let them know.
If you ever want to experience a classic JRPG, this is the one you should try.
Didn’t notice it until you said something, but yeah, you’re completely correct.
Here’s the original box art, if you’re interested. Chrono Trigger is a pretty good game, even today, I recommend being interested in it.
That person potentially owned hellokity.com in 1999!
There was a Sanrio site where anyone could make a hellokitty.com email for a number of years
internets no fun anymore
Dingo jellybean doing the lords work.
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.
Version: Last
Hah
BBS’ ansi art too; belongs in museums
Same with the art and music from software keygens from the 2000s
