Gamefaqs - An old gaming website that still exists somehow

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

Do you guys remember Cheat Planet?

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Nah, I was a CheatCC kid

 

[Zorgulon]

Gamefaqs was the first website I ever used.

 

[Desu Mountain]

Nah, I was a CheatCC kid

I remember people throwing a shitfit about CheatCC because supposedly they were stealing guides from GameFAQs.

 

[Soda Can]

I remember people throwing a shitfit about CheatCC because supposedly they were stealing guides from GameFAQs.

More than that. Someone tried to sue the CheatCC guy over copyright infringement. CheatCC had made so much cash they buried the guy in legal fees and openly said "I going to make an example of you so the rest know to back down." There was a thread about it on LUELinks at the time, as it was about the only place it could be talked about without making things worse.

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

This pretty much sums up CyricZ in a nutshell.

 

[oh no im late for school]

i knew there were threads on some users from gamefaqs back in the day like tintower (more recently) or topgearny but it never occurred to me that there might be a thread on gamefaqs itself, neato. took an hour or so but caught up. wild how lue looks from another forum's perspective

nobody who isn't a deranged lefty pipes up about much of anything politically because there are genuinely crazy people there who will stalk you off platform and remember your real name from back when myspace was a thing. if you pissed a guy off on lue in 2006 you can bet your ass he probably still holds a grudge against you to this day and at the very least will do anything and everything in his power to get you out of his safespace permanently, like reporting benign bullshit that gets swept by equally deranged lefty mods. you don't have to rub the election in their faces to know they are coping and seething about it on an hourly basis

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

i knew there were threads on some users from gamefaqs back in the day like tintower (more recently) or topgearny but it never occurred to me that there might be a thread on gamefaqs itself, neato. took an hour or so but caught up. wild how lue looks from another forum's perspective

nobody who isn't a deranged lefty pipes up about much of anything politically because there are genuinely crazy people there who will stalk you off platform and remember your real name from back when myspace was a thing. if you pissed a guy off on lue in 2006 you can bet your ass he probably still holds a grudge against you to this day and at the very least will do anything and everything in his power to get you out of his safespace permanently, like reporting benign bullshit that gets swept by equally deranged lefty mods. you don't have to rub the election in their faces to know they are coping and seething about it on an hourly basis

I hear the same is true of websight.blue, the ETI successor site run by Kiffe (I think?) who it turns out is a crazy faggot, who could have guessed.

I recently refound this video from the old days that we all thought was a joke at the time, but I think that really is Kiffe and that's really how he talks and behaves. That little cum gasp as he drinks the pepsi has lived in my head for fifteen years.

 

[Sabrina]

Never heard of it but I can't think of any reason to make that video as a joke. Especially how old that is everyone wasn't on YouTube doing whatever, it was just pirated tv shows in that time

 

[laetiporus cincinnatus]

Never heard of it but I can't think of any reason to make that video as a joke. Especially how old that is everyone wasn't on YouTube doing whatever, it was just pirated tv shows in that time

I can absolutely see someone making troll LPs just to mess with people. It's not like uploading intentionally-shitty LPs is some thing that never happened back in early YouTube. The Retsupurae guys, who poked fun at dozens of bad Let's Plays, somehow managed to fall for and commentate over bait LPs not just once, but twice. I can't say for sure if the Kiffe video was meant to just troll him, or if it was trying to get Retupurae and SomethingAwful to laugh at him. It would be really funny if that actually was his video, so I hope it's real.

 

[Something Awful]

My favorite thing about walkthroughs on Gamefags is how many of them are presented as a continuous narrative, like it's a whole complete story with references, callbacks and inside jokes. Like the target audience is a person who sits down and follows the guide from start to finish, rather than looking up one thing when they're stuck.

They can barely fuckin' communicate with one another. Once you notice how so many GameFAQs threads are just commenters replying to the OP's topic as though they're just shouting into the void, barely ever directly replying to anyone else, you'll never unsee it.

Interesting observation, it's something that I've also noticed on Resetera (well, in the screenshots that get posted here, I don't go there myself). They just "answer" the thread topic like it's a survey question with some dull one-liner and move on.

 

[Soda Can]

My favorite thing about walkthroughs on Gamefags is how many of them are presented as a continuous narrative, like it's a whole complete story with references, callbacks and inside jokes. Like the target audience is a person who sits down and follows the guide from start to finish, rather than looking up one thing when they're stuck.

That's because people were doing that. The thread is long, long gone and archiving has never been a GFAQs priority, but CJayC had a thread up on the contributors board in the early 2000s about how cnet was using his traffic data to profile users. They found that the majority of users would open a guide and stick around for a time that roughly calculated out to a guides word count times by the accepted standard rate of reading. Or, in other words, the majority of readers read the whole guide in one sitting. There was a discussion with then writers who thought the primary reasons were A. The kind of video game magazine brain-rot specific to the era that had people absorbing content cause "that's just how you do it" and B. The fact that scores of statistics showed that 90% of computer users didn't know that ctrl+F was a function.

If you pull up guides written/rewritten around 2005-ish, you'll notice a lot of them are blocks of paragraphs that are written like stories that ramble on and on. This was a response to the above and an easy excuse for that fucking dumb "KB wars" crap to continue.

 

[Something Awful]

They found that the majority of users would open a guide and stick around for a time that roughly calculated out to a guides word count times by the accepted standard rate of reading. Or, in other words, the majority of readers read the whole guide in one sitting.

That's interesting. I would imagine at least some of that was people keeping the tab/window open while they're playing the game, but not actually reading everything. But I guess there really was a segment of gamers just following guides to the letter. That's crazy to me. Probably some of them have moved on to watching video let's plays/streams. Might as well skip the playing part entirely if you're just following someone else's algorithm anyway.

 

[TheHarbinger]

My favorite thing about walkthroughs on Gamefags is how many of them are presented as a continuous narrative, like it's a whole complete story with references, callbacks and inside jokes. Like the target audience is a person who sits down and follows the guide from start to finish, rather than looking up one thing when they're stuck.

They were patterned after the official and unofficial guidebooks that were made for early console games of the 80s and 90s. Lots of those guides would present everything to the reader in way that made the guides immersive. Like you were in the game world still. The strategy guides would often incorporate humor or tons of art to keep the reader engaged.

They were not guides to just beat the game to farm achievements. They were guides meant to help the player immerse themselves further into the game world. It was more about understanding the game you were playing and unlocking a better connection to the game. Rather than just a sterile approach of giving exact directions and locations to easily move through the game.

Interesting observation, it's something that I've also noticed on Resetera (well, in the screenshots that get posted here, I don't go there myself). They just "answer" the thread topic like it's a survey question with some dull one-liner and move on.

People like that don't even enjoy games. It's like the RPG players that just stare at the map compass and never look at the actual game world and surroundings. And just fast travel and teleport to the next fetch quest without any meaning or reason. The kind of people who dump their life savings into mobile games to micro-transact their way into the next dopamine hit.

 

[Desu Mountain]

I would imagine at least some of that was people keeping the tab/window open while they're playing the game

I do remember doing this myself while playing FF9.

 

[oh no im late for school]

I do remember doing this myself while playing FF9.

yeah you had to for ff9 because square left all the tables out of the players guide and made people go to playonline.com or whatever to get the actual useful information after having paid $15 for the fucking book

 

[Epic_Doomslayah_93]

Fuaaarrkkk, what a blast from the past. I remember I would just read the guides for games I wanted but didn't have. And I do recall that what TheHarbringer said is right; most guides weren't GO HERE to GET THIS ITEM to UNLOCK THING. It read more like a book or short story.

 

[Soda Can]

They were patterned after the official and unofficial guidebooks that were made for early console games of the 80s and 90s. Lots of those guides would present everything to the reader in way that made the guides immersive. Like you were in the game world still. The strategy guides would often incorporate humor or tons of art to keep the reader engaged.

The described most of the most well known writers on the site and a handful of others that only did one or two really well done guides. Kao Megura said, before his death, he used to track down old guide books like that to read as inspiration for his own guide writing. A friend of mine modeled a guide he did after a spectacularly entertaining Bradly Games book for Sonic & Knuckles. Sadly, the KB Wars are what really forced that kind of writing into the limelight and led a lot of active contributors to think they were funny.


I'm still picking my way through this long thread when I have time, lots of stuff I wish I was around to comment on at the time. I was following the contributors board before, during and just after the shift from from CBS to Red Ventures. Lots of complaining and features no one asked for. I imagine there's more drama just on the horizon, once all the stuff Fandom is doing to undermine how GFAQs operates reaches the point of no-longer-rumors.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I remember people throwing a shitfit about CheatCC because supposedly they were stealing guides from GameFAQs.

GameFAQs stole guides from earlier webzones. Notice how there's a bunch of FAQs marked 1993 or 1994? (((Jeff Veasey))) is a niggerjew.

I hear the same is true of websight.blue, the ETI successor site run by Kiffe (I think?) who it turns out is a crazy faggot, who could have guessed.

I recently refound this video from the old days that we all thought was a joke at the time, but I think that really is Kiffe and that's really how he talks and behaves. That little cum gasp as he drinks the pepsi has lived in my head for fifteen years.

You weren't on ETI if you didn't know about Kiffe and his crippled boyfriend.

 

[Soda Can]

GameFAQs stole guides from earlier webzones. Notice how there's a bunch of FAQs marked 1993 or 1994? (((Jeff Veasey))) is a niggerjew.

Fun fact, this bit him in the ass years later. Around 2015, some troll started faking e-mail recoveries for many of those super old accounts, then merging them into one to get control of their contributions. We're talking addresses from lykos and compuserve. The guy got caught by being too greedy, but it forced CJayC to briefly reappear on the contributor boards and admit that part of the issue was while it's true lots of the compromised accounts were from users who vanished in the first few years of the site, the lions share were fake accounts he set up at launch to justify how he was hosting super old guides without permission. It also highlighted the growing issue that cnet/CBS was refusing to defend copyright issues, for a bunch of reasons.

Around this time another writer was found to be copying late 80s game hint books verbatim. His guides were pulled, he was banned....and then unbanned and one guide was put back up. News from the people in the know was the guy worked for the publishing company in the 80s. When the publisher shut down in the mid-90s, he bought the publication rights to a bunch of texts for pennies. Put them in a situation of "he didn't write any of these, but he factually owns every word, what do".

 

[oh no im late for school]

Put them in a situation of "he didn't write any of these, but he factually owns every word, what do".

welcome to copyright mi rite? this is why shit like "taylor's version" of swift shit exist, when you're hoinfodaman you don't own much if anything