It’s a lowest effort/cost way to make a wiki on a topic. It pretty clear that the primary focus of the design is to serve ads with the actual content only existing to pull you in off Google.
this is how to do it
In my heart I knew this was the answer
In a quite literal sense, contributor Kornholio from the fansite suikosource.com is more important to me and potentially to journalism and the world in general than, say, to pick a “journalist” at random, Conrad Black
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God, Kornholio is such a good username
you gotta have respect for people whose username is “some shit I thought was extremely funny at age 13” with the added understanding that there is no way in hell someone actively contributing to a Suikoden fansite in the 2020s isn’t approaching–or within–middle age
This feels as relevant a thread as any for this thought I’ve been turning over for a bit:
The level of FAQ that does real reverse-engineering for game mechanics is something I only see further fading from internet searchability/accessibility. The example I had was wondering how roads and highways worked in SimCity 2000 - are there actually any ways the game checks for long distance connection between places, or are developments just looking for nearby road tiles, connections be damned? In other words ‘how does the traffic model work?’ I imagine that there is lots of sleight of hand that older games use to get similar behavior to more accurate models but with less computation (in many different contexts), and understanding how those different tricks are designed feels like valuable information.
Particulars aside, this level of mechanical breakdown seems to be the sole purview of individual pre-wiki fansites, many of which are probably scrapeable via the archive, others who knows, and finding them usually requires finding some forum post referencing a dead link and resuscitating it. As discussed above, the amount of ad-grabbing garbage you have to filter through, and number of forum/Reddit posts on secondary issues with hand waving answers just stinks. All this sort of mechanical information is strictly knowable, so playing a really old game with an eye for how it ticks feels like re-translating some old hieroglyphs that you know many people have translated before but the records were never kept. Even GameFAQs can come short for this info, depending on the game and what style of guide was written.
I want to go to the video game reference library.
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GameFAQs may be the single most important website for me. So many obscure and japanese language games I’d never have gotten through without a poorly written ASCII-art laden text-only guide from 2001.
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