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Nick Reed
United Kingdom
Southampton
Hampshire
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Back in the 80's and 90's when (as a family) we'd play ZX Spectrum / BBC Micro / Amiga / DOS games (especially Adventure, RPG and Strategy titles), we'd make copious notes as we played. Maps, notes of conversations, price lists, deciphered codes, ... you name it! In fact, I was clearing out some old boxes the old month and came across this notebook from the mid 80's:
This was our "GameFAQs"...
Lately I find myself very rarely taking notes when playing games. With the invention of online guides, and (more importantly) in-game note-taking and quest trackers, real world notes seem to become less important, or necessary. That said, there's enough games still out there where you still have to do this (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's quest tracker I remember being so cumbersome I ended up making duplicate notes myself a lot of the time), but I'd say it's diminishing.
So, the question is - do you take any notes in the games you play these days? What about the games from yesteryear?
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T. R.
United States
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. H.G. Wells
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. Chief Seattle
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I'm actually making notes right now for the top of the line equipment in Phantasy Star III before I go back downstairs to gather it all.
Maybe this is a retro gaming thing?
All I know is that I really liked it when rpg's started telling you the value of the equipment in the shop, who could wear it, and the value of the equipment each character had on.
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The Bacon of Goodness
Canada
Ottawa
Ontario
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I did for The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two: The Hand of Fate. I also used the in-game map notations a lot in King's Bounty: The Legend. With the former, it was impossible to succeed unless you remembered a very specific code from the beginning of the game, and it was impossible to get back to. With the latter, I just liked knowing where the troops were that I could hire, so I would note them on the map.
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Andrew Hodkinson
Canada
Kemble
Ontario
兵者詭道也
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I made notes for failed and successful attempts at really hard parts of games, like an impossible mission in Kessen. Also, there was a game cheat for an NES Sim City that I wrote out.
But come to think of it, I started playing Mass Effect last night and was having trouble keeping the plot strands straight in the Citadel. Maybe I should take notes. found the Journal
I do have copious scribbles when inputting video games and trying to keep track of users' real first names and their Steam names.
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Chris
United States
Newark
Delaware
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Most of my notes boiled down to "here's the password", though I know I used to have a few notes about where to get secret stuff when I found it, or, in the case of mega man games, what beats who.
Although, I have a pretty sizeable list of notes for the Discworld MUD, including hand-drawn maps, quest annotations and locations and all sorts of other stuff. I also had one like that before World of Warcraft made their quest system so much easier to use. It has its ups and downs - while I like it for some types of quests, I also occasionally miss that surprise of seeking out something in a place where I know approximately where it is, then looking around and exploring an area in detail to find it. Some of the hunts still do that by giving a wide area to find one animal, but for the most part, that in-depth search that really lets you know the area is gone.
Wow, didn't mean for that to be a WoW rant, but so be it.
Edit: Wanted to add that I still take notes for a lot of flash-based room escape games too.
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Luke Stirling
Australia
Southbank
Victoria
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Just some of the many scraps of paper and post-its left over from my playing of SpaceChem over recent days:
Also, I plan on going the full-blown notebook approach when I go back to Ultimas V, VI, and VII in the coming weeks.
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Definitely when I play JRPGs, and usually when I play adventure games (I took lots of notes for Myst, and I used to draw elaborate maps for text games like Infocom's). To be honest, I find keeping paper notes a huge pain, and I was really happy when games started putting notebooks into their systems.
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Nope. I have tried before but it doesn't work for me.
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Luke Stirling
Australia
Southbank
Victoria
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celiborn wrote: I used to draw elaborate maps for text games like Infocom's
Oh man. I remember doing those pseudo-flowchart maps.
celiborn wrote: To be honest, I find keeping paper notes a huge pain, and I was really happy when games started putting notebooks into their systems.
Or like Phantom Hourglass which allowed for direct writing with the DS stylus on the in-game maps, which I totally loved.
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Ryan Gatti
United States
Portland
Oregon
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I haven't taken serious notes for over a decade. Most of the things that I'd normally take notes for are now automatically recorded in the games. It's a nice convenience, but sometimes it seems like it takes away from some of the experience.
I recall mapping The Legend of Zelda and noting the type of hidden room in each square... and shockingly, pretty much every screen had a hidden room you could find! Then again, I don't miss writing out the save codes... and that's why I now cross my Zs (since Z and 2 often looked very similar...).
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Duncan
New Zealand
...
Thank you so much. Next please
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Never, except for level codes and similar that some games require to access later levels later (although there's the entire internet for that). I have played games that I would take notes related to what is happening in the game for but they have extensive functionality in this area built in so there is no need.
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The Studliest King in the Mushroom Kingdom
Australia
Melbourne
Victoria
"Yes, your chunkiness."
Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom
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The only game I took notes for was Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, and it was both fun to make and fun to use. Out of all the Harvest Moon games, this had greatest number of crops with both second generation and third generation hybrids possible on top of the diverse range of first-gen seeds, and I made a chart of what seasons each of the 40+ crops could grow in.
It was incredibly useful seeing at a glance what I could and couldn't grow, especially since some of the in-game infomation was incorrect regarding suitible seasons.
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Andrew Schoonmaker
United States
Long Beach
California
This overtext intentionally left blank.
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Yes. Somewhere I still have the set of hand-drawn maps I made while playing Phantasy Stars I and II, and I have a couple of folders of looseleaf notes for assorted other games.
It's not that I take notes while playing every game I play. I'm happy to sit back and enjoy the ride a lot of the time. The ones that I really enjoy and have systems to dig into, though, I'm prone to doing data collection preparatory to writing a FAQ-like document (which inevitably never emerges; typically I'll get bored with the data collection before it's complete enough to be worth writing).
Lately instead of paper I've been experimenting with keeping notes in a text file on my laptop, which works fine for console games and less fine for full-screen PC games.
If I get back to and/or play through Geneforge again, I'll probably take some notes about the game world, though. The quest listing isn't bad, but there are any number of reasons why I might have to leave an area in a semi-explored state, and it's not always easy to keep track of which ones I've fully cleared and which ones I can merely travel through.
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M@tthijs
Netherlands
NOT
Holland
Earn tons of geekgold:...
...go to VGG and add videogames to the database
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I hear for DCS: A-10C Warthog full-realism you'll have to note the radio frequencies from the briefing. Otherwise you can't communicate with your wingman, the tower and the JTAC/FAC...
I used to play VGA Planets 3 by eMail, an up to eleven players SciFi 4X game. Though you'll have to fight in the game, logistics are overly important in the game. Without sufficient fuel, your attacks will just grind to a halt.
And when you top your freighters off, you'll waste a significant portion of your fuel reserves flying, well, fuel around.
So I started an Excel sheet to calculate how much fuel I had to tank for each of my ships, if they went on trip that took multiple game turns.
I started noting more and more, and over the course of a number of games and years, this became a worksheet consisting of dozens of separate tabs.
My Excel file was my secret logistical weapon and I could even use it as a psychological weapon, for instance announcing "I'll build a new starbase in exactly 7 turns". That I could make that sort of predictions based on my 10-turns ahead planning scared some of my more pragmatic playing opponents.
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James Smith
Australia
Ashburton
Victoria
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Not a note taker. Like others I have written down codes particularly for Crystal Mines II but I never got into writing down specifics. I didn't really play many games that required it and now that I play the big games where you need to rememberise stuff the game generally does it for me. Lazy Generation Y for the win!
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Bruno Abreu
Portugal
MAISON ABREU: Lair of Abreu, you know, that guy below. Do not mistake this for other Maisons or Houses or even Abreus.
I do look good on this chair, dont I?
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Not really.
Just when I needed level codes, and such.
Other then that not really.
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Last game I did this for was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Except you count games like Battlefield 3 where I use pen&paper to keep track of uncompleted challenges (the ingame system is not very informative).
In Morrowind the quest log was so bad they simply could have left it out completely as it didn't differ between completed and incompleted quest and just sorted them chronologically.
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Hadley Langosy
United States
Massachusetts
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I used to take the most detailed notes while playing Infocom games. I still have graph papers someplace with maps I drew to try to make my way through Zork.
I find that I take less and less notes now.
Usually, if I do, it's information about how much I can sell certain items for. (I seem to recall I have a list of bug and fish prices for Animal Crossing which keeps popping up in random piles of paper I need to sort.)
I think a major change is how visual games have become. It's much easier for me to remember something I've seen than something I'm trying to puzzle out, for example, in a text based game.
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Hadley Langosy
United States
Massachusetts
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rgatti wrote: I recall mapping The Legend of Zelda and noting the type of hidden room in each square... and shockingly, pretty much every screen had a hidden room you could find! Then again, I don't miss writing out the save codes... and that's why I now cross my Zs (since Z and 2 often looked very similar...).
I still have a xeroxed copy of the map which came with the original Zelda game. I circled all sorts of rocks and bushes because I found something under them when I burnt or crushed them.
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Arcadian First Lady 조랑말
United States
Portland
Oregon
수고하세요
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Oh yes. My Dad's Faxanadu Manual "Notes" section was full of Mantras from the Guru.
During my obsessive Monster Rancher phase, I ended up with 4 pages of notes after testing all of my roommate's massive CD collection.
And I usually take notes for Simon-style puzzles, or lever puzzles, that sort of thing.
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Andy
United Kingdom
Stockport
Manchester
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Re: Re: RVGQ #36: Do you make notes when you play?
I used to make a lot of notes and draw maps etc. but I don't find myself doing that so much these days. I think partly it is because of the type of game that I play, but also, as you say, the invention of in-game note tracking... and particularly the wealth of resources on the Internet.
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Twinge
United States
Berthoud
Colorado
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Most games that require this sort of note-taking are antiquated enough that I wouldn't want to play them in modern times anyway. The main exception that comes to mind is Star Control II - this is a fantastic game that lives up very well today; the flaw of requiring notes doesn't really detract from how good this game is.
Other than that, I still occasionally have notes on calculations, stats, etc. from games, though these are usually done in NoteTab rather than on paper. (E.g. I might calculate out a bunch of numbers when figuring out the damage difference from using different runes in League of Legends.) I think I might still have old notes where I figured out the relative damage of different guns in GoldenEye 007 or the different weapons in Soul Blade (the in-game charts showing the stats lies to you!)
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Железный комиссар
United States
Madison
Wisconsin
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Not very often. I know I made some notes when I was playing Persona 3 FES regarding various persona combinations.
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Nick Reed
United Kingdom
Southampton
Hampshire
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JohnRayJr wrote: Not very often. I know I made some notes when I was playing Persona 3 FES regarding various persona combinations.
Oh, good call - I have a page of notes from each of P3 and P4 on the personas I'd collected.
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Derek
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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I have never taken a note on a game before. I remember game manuals (I could just end this sentence right there since they barely exist anymore) always had the "Notes" section as the last few pages and I would wonder if anyone ever used them.
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