Since they announced that DuckTales is being re-released in HD, I thought this would be a good time to do a rewrite of my “Inside the Guide” column for DuckTales.
This guide contains many examples of what you would call “early Michael GameFAQs work,” which is a nice way of saying, “I wrote it when I was 16, when I had no idea how to write videogame guides.” Specifically, I put three things into this guide that I would omit if I wrote the guide today:
1. The Story Section
When I wrote this walkthrough, I thought every guide had to have a story section. This is a problem when it comes to NES games, because half the time they have no plot whatsoever, and the other half of the time, you don’t have the manual. Which means I was stuck writing a story section when I didn’t know what the story was.
In the end, I made up the most general storyline I could think of:
That is the entirety of Section 002. Looking back now, I’m pretty sure I didn’t need a separate section just for that thrilling plot recap.
2. The Controls Section
For those of you who don’t know, some guides have a controls section, which lists all of the game’s possible moves. This is important for tricking the people who play Super Smash Bros. Brawl into thinking that there’s more to the game than just random button mashing.
Of course, control sections are overkill in NES games like DuckTales, because they all pretty much have the same control scheme. A = jump, RIGHT = move right, and so on. It was quite unnecessary, and I certainly didn’t need to list “attack left” and “attack right” separately. There is a payoff, however. The sixth item in the controls section is this:
Down: Scrooge “ducks”. Only works if Scrooge is not in front of something that can be climbed.
That’s right. I made up an entire section, just so I could use a duck pun, in my Duck Tales guide. 16-year-old Michael was classy.
Mega Man isn’t the only non-linear Capcom game.
3. Double-spacing
I doubt anyone but me really cares, but when you look at the excerpts of my guide that I put in this article, you’ll notice that I double-spaced after every period. Because, grammatically, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You need two spaces at the start of every sentence.
Only the stupid Internet doesn’t think that’s the case, and when I leave a humongous 50-space gap in my HTML, computers interpret it as a single space. Lame!
So I purposely put two spaces after every period in my guide, just because it’s common Internet style to use single spaces. That was my way of sticking it to the man, with GRAMMAR!
… I’m not sure anyone noticed.
I wonder what ruffled his feathers.
That’s all I have to say about my guide for DuckTales. It reeks of amateur moves, and when I write a guide for the remake, I’ll probably cut most of those things out.
One thing I won’t cut out, though, is the ASCII art I made for this guide. Enjoy a picture of Uncle Scrooge, made entirely out of dollar signs:
