Rediscovering GameFAQs
Figure 1. GameFAQs Logo
Over a decade ago I used to be a frequent visitor to a site called GameFAQs. As the name implies, GameFAQs was an aggregator of video game FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and video game guides. GameFAQs users would create their own guides in pure plaintext (no images, videos, or styling, just text) and upload them for the benefit of other gamers. Outside of the FAQs and guides, GameFAQs also had a sprawling forum community, polls every day, lists with releases of upcoming games, annual contests, private messaging systems, and many other features that you just don't see on present day websites. It's hard to fully articulate how all these small features culminated into an experience that was unique to GameFAQs[1] and made it a special place on the once very vibrant World Wide Web.
Well recently I've been fondly reminiscing on my days on the forum, and have been wanting to go back, see how it is over there, and to document some of the things I liked about the site. So I made a new account and am going to be spending some time at a place I use to know.
Making My Account
Signing up for a GameFAQs is easy enough, as it only requires an email address. As far as I know they don't block any email providers when signing up, so I used the email address on my contacts page. After a quick email verification, my account was ready to go:
Figure 2. Yukinu GameFAQs Account
There are a few important things to notice here, notably the amount of Karma you have and your User Level. GameFAQs used a
Karma system that was used to determine your User Level. If you get enough Karma you "level up",
and have the ability to make more posts per day and access a few special forums that require a certain account level.
So how do you get Karma? Simple, you get 1 Karma per day for logging in. It's not based on an
user upvote system or anything like that, its a simple linear accumulation over time.
One other thing to note on the account page is the My Signature system. Signatures are used on the forums and are included at the bottom of each post. You'll see how the signatures work later on in this blog post, but for now let me go ahead and create a forum signature:
Figure 3. My Signature
Alright, now that my account is all set up, let's start exploring GameFAQs!
The Front Page
The design of GameFAQs has changed since I used to frequent it, but surprisingly it still has a similar design overall and the front page has many of the same things on it, such as the Poll of the Day. I really loved the poll of the day back in the day. By looking at the poll results you were able to learn some interesting things about the community, such as which systems during each console generation were the most popular among the users and which franchises they were the most fond of. It was also fun guessing which poll result will have the most votes.
Figure 4. Front page of GameFAQs
You know what, let's vote in the poll today!
Figure 5. The Poll of the Day
It's been a long time since I've played the N64 Smash Bros, and I didn't really have a favorite character, but I did like Kirby's copy ability, added some variety to the character:
Figure 6. Poll results
Well, ended up with the second most popular result, but no clear majority on any of the results. That's sort of what I would expect for a poll on a fighting game.
The poll resets every day at 12 AM, and I voted close to the open of the poll, so the results may change during the day. I'll check back later and see if the results have changed.
Besides the poll, the front page has links to the current generation of systems and links to various popular boards. I'll have a lot more to say later when I start exploring the boards again, but before that have to talk a little bit about the site design. As I said, the overall design has stayed roughly the same I as I remember it from years ago, but I do remember there was a time when I swear GameFAQs was constantly tweaking the style of the site. One day I would open up the site, next day it looked different. Maybe they were doing once a month or two deployments of their changes and would deploy half implemented styles? Who knows what they were thinking. Anyways, I went to Wayback Machine to look at the old front end I remember, and here it is, circa 2010:
Figure 7. Old front page of GameFAQs
Man I miss that old design, so much more compact than the current design. Of course screen real estate was much more limited at the time[2], so compact designs were the norm on many sites.
The Guides and FAQs
I would imagine that for many people the first time they visited GameFAQs was to read one of the guides on a game they were playing at the time. That was certainly the case for me (I was browsing GameFAQs for a while before making an account), although I do not remember which game first brought me to the site. If I had to guess, it was probably a GBA game or a Gamecube game. In fact, I do remember at least 1 guide that I had read back in the day, and that guide was for the Gamecube version of Sonic Adventure 2, so let's go to the Gamecube section and find it.
Figure 8. The Gamecube section for all your Gamecube games, news, and discussion
It was nice checking out the GameFAQs system sections for the systems that you owned and seeing how the top 10 most popular games and boards were changing over time. Oftentimes when a new AAA game released you would see it quickly show up in the top 10s. Over time, as a system's library matured those top 10 lists stayed fairly stable; you would see the same games, but move to slightly different positions. Here is the same Gamecube section from 2010, nearly all the same games in the top 10, except the one game I'm actually looking for dropped off the list on the most recent top 10, WTF.
Figure 9. 2010 Gamecube section
Alright, let's look for the game. It starts with "S", so alphabetical search by that char:
Figure 10. Manually searching for the game
There it is, the Gamecube version of the game was sold under the name Sonic Adventure 2 Battle:
Figure 11. Found it
And here is the page for the game:
Figure 12. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
Eh, it's ok, I still prefer the old version of the page:
Figure 13. Old Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
Alright so the guide I distinctly remember was that Chao guide at the bottom, the 120KB one. File size was one of the strategies you would use on GameFAQs to pick the best guides available when there were many for a game. Obviously this strategy doesn't make any sense since the writer might have bloated the guide, but we didn't know any better so we went off of these random heuristics.
Figure 14. The Sonic Adventure 2 Battle guides
And here is the chao guide, in all it's 79 char width plaintext glory.
Figure 15. Chao Guide Front Cover
Figure 16. Chao Guide Overview
You may be wondering why the guides are primarily in plaintext. Well it probably stems from the fact the precursor to GameFAQs was based on an archive of an FTP server that hosted game FAQs and guides. The guides likely predated the web (the precursor was first hosted on AOL back in 1995, the web was still quite nascent at this point), and thus were probably in plaintext format as opposed to a markup format. And so GameFAQs likely continued using this format for consistency. It wasn't until 2009 that GameFAQs started accepting guides that included a machine readable markup language that could be interpreted by GameFAQs.
Looking back, I really appreciate that they stuck with the plaintext guides for so long. Plaintext is ubiquitous, compact, highly compressible, easily searchable, and distraction free. There is also a charm to it that is difficult to fully describe. Many games are very visual and objective oriented; players often have some goal in mind when playing a game (getting 99 woodcutting for example), and these objectives can typically be achieved by finding and mastering the correct algorithms. Since many games are visual, these algorithms typically rely on visual cues that guide the player in learning the algorithm. Take, for example, dodging enemies in Dark Souls: the enemies typically telegraph their attack and the player knows what they need to do (in this case dodge the attack, and then attack back), and so must figure out the correct attack patterns for each enemy (the algorithm used by the player of achieving the goal of defeating the enemy) and master the execution. With plaintext, all of the visual cues of the game are gone, and so explaining these algorithms requires quite a lot of interpretation by the authors of these plaintext guides. And that's exactly where the charm is for me: seeing the different ways in which different guide authors interpret and draw meaning from the games and try to convey the points that they found salient to other players so that we can all achieve effectively the same objective in these games. With video, a lot of that interpretation and translation is gone, since you can just show the player all the visual cues without any of the ambiguity involved in the translation. Of course this isn't a bad thing at all; it's actually very helpful to have the videos these days. It's just different.
Well I hope that at least gives you some idea of why I liked the plaintext guides, as abstract of a feeling as it is.
Anyways, there was no single format that the authors of each guide would use. They would all just roll their own plaintext formats in a way that most made sense to them. Also, the guides were all in 1 single page, so it was very easy to print the guides. Many a person back in the day would start printing out these guides, only to realize the guide they were printing was 100+ pages long of monospace text that would waste all their printer ink.
The Forums
Most people probably first heard of or found GameFAQs because of the guides, but many stayed longer term for the forums. In a way, the GameFAQs forums were a bit unique compared to many other forums. You see, many forums were built on top of popular forum software such as phpBB, had a pretty standard set of features, and typically had a fixed number of boards for long stretches of time. You pick the boards you like the most, get used to them, and sort of stay within your own camp for a while. On GameFAQs, though, it was different. Board creation on GameFAQs was tied to the gaming industry: a new game would come out and a new board for it would automatically be created. And this constant creation of new boards, combined GameFAQs's overall structure, resulted in quite a dynamic forum system on the site.
You see, the layout of GameFAQs was structured in a sort of hierarchical fashion:
Figure 17. GameFAQs Site Hierarchy
The front page of GameFAQs contained a list of the top 10 video game boards across the site, and had links to current generation of game systems. The system page for each of these systems also contained their own top 10 boards just for games only on that system. And finally, each of these system boards had links to a directory listing of all the games on that system, which you could use to find the links to the board for each video game. As a result, navigation to a board typically required traversing this hierarchy, but there was a critical shortcut for the few games that made it to the top 10 board slots (and especially for the top 10 on the front page). And so, as you would expect, these top 10 spots were prime real estate for any game on the site. If a game made it to a top 10 spot, it would often see an influx of new posts, and you could find a lot of active conversions on the board.
So what games made it in the top 10 spots? Well it was often popular new releases. A lot of the conversion in the gaming industry follows the new releases after all. And so, a new game would come out, would get a lot of traffic, and if it got enough traffic it would take a top 10 spot, leading to more users and more traffic until the next new game came out. Overall, this had an interesting effect on forum dynamics as it would encourage the forum posters to branch out, see new boards, talk to some new people, and see some old people from other boards that they were both a part of.
Let's Browse The Boards
Well since I'm talking about GameFAQs and made a new account, might as well browse the forums and do some posting, right? I used to browse the Terraria boards when the game was first coming it. I really loved Terraria back in the day, it's a great 2D sandbox game, the combat is satisfying, there are lots of things to collect, and the game has expanded over the years into a huge amount of content for only about $10.
Figure 18. Terraria
After a quick GameFAQs search, I found the board:
Figure 19. Terraria GameFAQs Board
Looks like last post was a couple months, but still has some decent activity. On GameFAQs, it's common for boards for older games to only have a post every couple of weeks or months, and many GameFAQs users are quite comfortable with this. You'll often see users posting in threads that are years old, and many users check old posts they made on various boards. I can appreciate a long running thread, so many services these days push a constant churn of new things without ever letting old threads developer. I seed won't grow in one day after all, it takes time and patience.
This thread looks interesting, a poster is looking it for other players for an older version of Terraria on the Xbox 360. I wasn't even aware you could still play online on the Xbox 360[3]:
Figure 20. Anyone willing to play old Terraria with me on xbox 360?
Anyways, let's write a post in this thread:
Figure 21. Are the Xbox 360 servers still up?
I'll check back later and see if I get any replies in this thread. In the meantime, shall we check out some other boards?
Let's check the Nintendo Switch's system page, and see what games are in the top 10 boards currently:
Figure 22. Nintendo Switch System Page
Not surprisingly, the upcoming Legend of Zelda game is the number 1 spot on the top 10 boards. I didn't complete Breath of the Wild, just never got around to finishing it; maybe I should pick it up again before the new one releases? On the board, I found a thread talking about some of the systems in Breath of the Wild, so let's check it out. For me, the weapon durability system is one thing I hope they work on in the next game. I would have liked a system where you could salvage weapons and can use that to repair other weapons.
Figure 23. Zelda TOTK Board
Figure 24. Most broken system in BOTW
Figure 25. Topic Creators case for BOTW
So topic creator (TC) thought the armor system needs some fixing. I didn't get far enough to notice this unfortunately, so can't comment there, but the TC does make a compelling case. Linear armor scaling always has some issues in video games, it's hard to balance properly.
Also, check out the first reply to this thread:
Figure 26. First reply to TC
Good ol' GameFAQs, shutting down the TC with the first post. Not really though, GameFAQs, like many old forums, bumps threads in chronological posting order, and so small replies like this can be helpful for keeping a thread going.
You'll also notice at the bottom of that post is a forum signature. The signatures on GameFAQs could be 2 lines long, and supported bold and italics. Very often people would like the games the games they were currently playing and their friend codes in the signatures. It was also common to find quotes and links in signatures (mine has both a quote and a link, gotta keep the tradition going after all!). This poster linked to a video in their sig, so let's check it out:
Figure 27. First reply's video, role="bordered-image"
Not available on my Invidious instance, unfortunate but it was worth a shot!
The Exploration Continues
There is still more GameFAQs ground that needs to be covered, but I'll stop here for now. I really miss GameFAQs and forums in general, and I hope to rediscover a lot of old forums I used to know and to be a part of them again. Even if you've never been a big GameFAQs or forum user, I hope this post can convey some of the magic of forums, a once staple of the internet from a bygone era.
This is Yukinu, signing off until next time.
- ^ Well unique to me at least.
- ^ 1024x768 4:3 screens were pretty common compared to 1920x1080 16:9 screens today that have about 2.6x the screen real estate.
- ^ A lot of older systems have a homebrew scene that likes to bring old systems online. Dreamcast, for example, has been brought back online, and you can see how many people are online at https://dreamcast.online/now/.
