>GameFAQs, 2001
>"Go to the the table and pick up the apple"
>IGN, 2023
>PICKING UP THE APPLE
>So you want to pick up an apple? There are many items you can pick up in this game, and apples are one of them. However, unlike most items, completing this game will require you to pick up at least one apple. In this article, you will learn everything you need to know to locate and pick up the apple
>PRE-APPLE TASKS
>In order to successfully obtain the apple, you must:
>Walk up to the house using the control stick. Press A to open the door. Walk through the open door. Turn left to go through the living room. Turn right once you are in the living room
>If you're in the right place, you'll notice a painting hanging on the wall. This painting is a reference to Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's 1893 proto-expressionist painting The Scream
>Turn right again to enter the kitchen
>THE KITCHEN
>Remember that you can only pick up an apple if you have hands. Fortunately, your character comes pre-equipped with hands, and cannot lose them during the course of the game. It is possible to maneuver him close to a wall or object so that his hands will appear to clip through the wall or object and disappear. If this happens, don't worry: he still has his hands, and is still capable of hand-based tasks
>Move toward the wooden table in the kitchen. This should be easy to locate, as it is the only table in the kitchen, on which is an apple
>If you enter the living room, you've gone too far
>Carefully position yourself next to the table. You can stand on any side or at any angle to the table. We stood at the far end of the table closest to the refrigerator, but this isn't strictly necessary
>You will see a prompt appear above the table. It should look like a green circle with an A floating above the apple
>While the prompt is active, press A
>You will reach over and take the apple. The apple will disappear from your hand, but don't worry. It's been added to your inventory
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Nothing wrong with taking pride in your job.
and do tell moron, what job is that?
to be fair the top example sounds like you're not explaining jack shit and players who couldn't find the apple on their own won't find it now either, after you told them that it's on "the table". surely they already searched for a table, that's a typical place for an apple to be. I'm assuming the quest was something like "find an apple (and bring it to me)". extremely brief "tutorials" can be a cancer all of their own.
realistically the job of a "games journalist" at this point is to lead you around a web site in circles and make you spend lots of time on it, in hopes that the longer you're there the more likely you will click on some of the ads.
I'm convinced most of these articles are AI made, I was looking at a site for a guide for getting the battle logs for Armored Core 6 and it read just like how ChatGPT would have made it, I'll try and find it
Found it, look at this shit - https://gamerant.com/armored-core-6-infiltrate-grid-086-battle-log-locations-combat-where-ac6/
>"Once the Tetrapods have been addressed, players should orient themselves to face the bridge that is depicted in the first image that is above. Fans should then ascend onto that bridge, turn to the left, and start moving forward. Armored Core 6 players will see an opening on the left side of the bridge after traveling in that direction for a short time, and they should boost through that opening and destroy the two Heavy MTs that are on the platform that is ahead."
It's like they gave the prompt "write an article for fans and players" and the AI can then only refer to the target audience as players or fans, instead of just not giving them a title at all. It also had the line "Armored Core 6 players" as a link to AC6 sales figures for some fricking reason
most of the flaws of this text excerpt actually point away from AI.
Most articles are written by Jeets or AI now. Dunno which is worse.
A combo of them is a nightmare
>After defeating "Invincible" Rummy, players should follow the mission waypoints, stopping as soon as they step outside. Fans should then turn around and ascend to the platform above, where they will find two Tetrapods that they should destroy.
it goes from players to fans? actual ai shit wtf
this one might be AI-created (or assisted), but shitty low-effort copypaste filler articles that superficially imitate other formats have been around for a long time
They just generate these with ChatGPT
This shit has been around for decades, long before GPT.
They do it to fill the page. More content = more space they can sell to advertisers.
>detailed guides BAD
Thanks for the chuckle, OP. Here's a hot vidya girl
this is why
wrong.
it's just search engine optimization.
Hint guides should be a thing. They don't outright tell you shit, but just nudge you into the right direction. Myst was really fun like this.
You forgot the advertisement for PickAPPle+, the popular premium phone app dedicated to helping you find and pick up apples
You forgot the 15 ads between each paragraph
>No ad-block
Do you know where you are?
The point is they do this shit to cram more ads on the site
I hate articles in most websites have huge empty space between text, because are placeholders for ads
what's an apple?
>please, i'm a craduat of Mumbai Upstairs English College Schooliversity
>pls view ad
thanks for the laugh OP.
Appending "before:2018" to your search is mandatory if you want to find usable guides for any game. Honestly the earlier you go the better. If your game released after this cutoff I'm sorry.
I'm half asleep, i literally thought I'm on Ganker from the OP
Why do they always use the apple or a pear for that general?
>This guide to Pokemon Pinball is dedicated to all those lost in the tragic events of 9/11. WE WILL NEVER FORGET!
>VERSION 0.0.0.3 (03-03-2001) - corrected minor misspelling in section heading (thanks b1thckill@2002dood for pointing that out on the forum)
Pokemon Pinball honestly has a lot of fricking terrible guides. When I tried playing it for the first time I unironically found the manual more informative than any website about the game.
>9/11
>03-03-2001
>the Internet is rapidly becoming a massive soulless circlejerk of bots trying to score ad revenue from other bots and there is nothing any of us can do about it
Humanity as a whole is becoming quite bad. We've pushed our species too far, and our instincual weaknesses are getting harder to subdue. Very disappointing.
grim
They do this to game the google algorithm and increase their chances of appearing near the top/getting a featured snippet. It considers length and detail when determining quality so incredibly simple solutions require a five paragraph essay about completely unnecessary information with ten ads breaking it up.
>t. depressed marketing minor
Everyone who seethes about this post is exposing themselves as moronic. OP perfectly encapsulates the problem of handholding and treating the consumer like a child that plagues modern gaming.
>works on my machine
Eat shit, I'm not going to waste brainspace and be outraged over people making stuff easier to find stuff.
I have to fricking scroll through some fat b***hes life story just to find the ingredients list for a recipe now, pisses me off.
I feel like cooking/recipe guides where were this bullshit started. Even years and years ago I can remember trying to search up any recipe online and you always have to scroll through a 50 page essay before getting to the actual recipe/ingredient list. I blame women
Following recipes is fricking impossible anyway. You follow it to the letter and get an inedible monstrosity in the end.
I am extraordinarily grateful to have my mother's cookbook (which was also a hand me down from her mom)
If I lost that thing I'd have no fricking idea how to cook
Almost every site has a "jump to recipe" button now, if you're still reading the blogs that's a you problem
They do this for SEO shit so that their article appears at the top so that they get more people clicking them for ad revenue. Doesn't help that a lot of it can be achieved now by having an AI write it and/or datascraping off other sites and articles, which can potentially result in outright wrong information being published and parroted.
Recently when I was playing Armored Core VI, whenever I needed to look up an ending guide, I had to put "reddit" at the end of my search results because the articles were giving info that I knew was wrong (ex: you can only get ending A on your first playthrough" when you could also get B)
how the frick did reddit become the most reliable source of information for any guides or technical problems on the entire internet
what has this world become
reddit replaced virtually all forums. blogs and journo websites are taken over by bots. if you've got a problem with a game or something and you need an answer from a human you don't have a lot of options
That's a good thing, right? I get my answer in one serach instead of having to go into forums of dubious origin that makes my blockers shit themselves unless I accept 1000 botnets.
Steam forums are decently active aren't they?
and yet they're rarely useful
>I have this common problem
>so do I
>stop necrobumping
...and then D*scord replaced most of reddit. If you could type questions into a search engine and get links to d*scord servers reddit would already be forgotten completely. I fricking HATE what the internet has become after 2007.
>have you tried asking the dedicated discord server?
I think I'll just take a plane trip to the mountains of Japan or something, go learn from the natives and eat rice and moss for the rest of my life
no more internet. no more bullshit
Because for all its faults it's populates by actual human beings sharing information for the sake of sharing information rather than trying to sell you something or drive traffic to their page. Ganker would be the same way if search engines indexed it (and threads didn't expire).
I think this is the end result of googles influence and the disgusting effect of “search engine optimization” on websites as a whole. Like recipe blogs and general info sites and shit. You google “what is this thing” and instead of getting a site that says “this is the thing” you get a site with endless unnecessary narrative like you describe that buries the info (that they often don’t even have, they just showed up because their narrative hammered in enough keywords to rank up in search) or in the recipe example it’s a 5 page essay obscuring the 5 lines of content at the bottom that you actually want.
The old web felt nicer because it was designed to put this relevant content forward based around user needs but the modern web is not designed for the user. Frick the user. It’s designed around advertising and page ranks. The content is secondary to loading the page up with words so search crawlers are more likely to hit and rank the page up. The lengthier content also means you can pump in more ad content for cash and now the page runs like shit and responds poorly. Even though mobile devices are thousands of times more powerful than the computers I used in 2001 browsing most sites like IGN and WordPress blogs feels worse because they’re so loaded with garbage. Even with Adblock, adguard, and pihole enough shit gets through. Even if you block it all they have so much bloat bullshit for their ui and if you disable js completely the sites just stop working
The internet is fricked, google and advertisers ruined it basically because they can’t stop taking every possible avenue to sell you shit even if it means making everything worse for humanity. Destroy every advertising company to heal the world
>every website should operate for free and i should not have to be exposed to ads either
>le grey yes man dot png
That's the only Internet I've known.
yes actually. either host it because you enjoy it without taking money into account or frick yourself
you know what i do when youtube tells me i have to disable adblock? i stop watching youtube until the adblock dudes update their workaround
Yes
Shame too, because GameFAQs used to be pretty based. Til they merged with Gamespot and basically became Reddit: The Vidya Site.
gamefaqs merged with gamespot before reddit existed
Do these written walkthroughs still exist? Why not watch a playthrough and look for the part you're stuck at instead?
I remember my dad calling the Sega hotline with a bunch of questions of different games once. The guy basically told my dad to git gud, kek. Must've been the comfiest job in the world.
Same vibe with cooking recipes or tech support articles
when teacher says the essay is 2099000040 words
>open GameFaqs guide
>a page of some sperg going on a rant
>another two pages about reposting/theft/etc. of their garbage text document
it's kind of quaint
yeah all of their articles read like a high school student trying to pad out a book report.