Hacker News Reader

Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those cultural memes ("The Top Gun landing was ImPoSsIbLe") that tells on the person saying it for not having read the manual. If you don't read the manual, the landing sequence is pretty much impossible to figure out. If you do, you pretty much get it the first and every time after that.

View on HN

The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions.

I had the game and the manual, but I can’t recall if I ever read the manual. I played the game a ton and was maybe 50/50 at the landings, but just followed the on-screen instructions. I could probably have puzzled out the target numbers, but never did (was it in the manual?). Now you can just google the correct values and nail it every time (paying no attention to the on-screen directions).

[edit] incidentally, my “it’s not actually hard” thing from the NES is the dam level in TMNT. It’s a challenge like the first two times you play it, then never again. It’s just not that hard. I think it’s easier than tons of Mario game levels, for instance.

My recollection, now quite fuzzy but deeply entrenched, is the key is to never touch the throttle. The LSO would yell at you but I noticed your speed slowly drifts down from drag until it's just inside the acceptable range at touchdown. Managing heading and altitude is not all that hard, so my brother and I had a pretty solid success rate to the amazement of our friends.

A good chunk of the difficulty in the TMNT dam level comes from the fact that it has a lot of poorly implemented mechanics. Displaced Gamers has a really good video breaking all of it down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI

Thank you. You just unlocked a repressed trauma.

> The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions.

Interestingly, the instructions are actually all correct. If it says, "Left! Left!" for instance you will crash if you don't fix it.

I think the disconnect might be that altitude and speed somewhat feedback on each other and it takes time for your inputs to settle, so it always feels like you're chasing the instructions.

I think people focused too much on the speed too early on, which put them in a stall condition without any feedback they were stalling. For most of the run, you want to be losing altitude so you don't notice, but near the end you're probably too low with not enough speed to climb, so even though you're pulling up, you're still losing altitude, and that's where people got the idea that their inputs didn't "matter."

> but near the end you're probably too low with not enough speed to climb, so even though you're pulling up, you're still losing altitude

The region of reversed command -- pretty cool that such a simple NES game managed to replicate that counter-intuitive part of the flight envelope.

https://agairupdate.com/2021/10/02/the-region-of-reversed-co...

Except for those of us as kids who RENTED the game which didn't typically come with the manual...

That said, this is bad game design. A manual should never be needed.

This was at the beginning of game design. Everyone was still learning what good game design was and it kept changing as the technical constraints changed.

> A manual should never be needed.

That's going too far.

Also, we're talking about the 8-bit era: 1) technical limits prevented a lot of in-game exposition that you could do now and 2) before the internet, people had fewer options for reading material. I read every manual for every NES and SNES game I ever had, multiple times. If I was into a game my options were limited to 1) play it, 2) read the manual if I couldn't play it (e.g. if I wasn't at home or not allowed to take over the TV to play).

Plenty of time to read the entire manual on the car ride home from Toys R Us or while another family member was using the one TV.

Manuals in those days were often essential for background story, gameplay, and anti-piracy.

Your statement applies today; game design back then was different, manuals were not frowned upon and often exciting to read through. They were part of the game.

> A manual should never be needed.

Following that rule puts a hard cap on the game's depth and complexity at the design level.

It's probably why most games today are pretty shallow.

More generally, it's also why most software grew from tools into Fischer-Price toys over the past two decades.

This was back in the era when manuals (and companion documents) were needed by many, if not most games.

There was a lord of the rings PC RPG I played around 1990, I believe, where many of the NPC interactions said to refer to page N, paragraph M. They didn't have the space to store all the text in the game.

I think it's fair. Even an experienced pilot would probably crash on their first attempt at a carrier landing if they didn't do some book-study first.

There's nothing bad about a game that needs a manual. It's not going to be everyone's preference, but that's true of everything. Some people like games that you can learn by playing. Some people like deep games that require external material. There's nothing wrong with either one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com