With each game I purchase, the instruction manuals are getting thinner and thinner, and it kinda makes me sad because I love reading instruction manuals.

I remember when I wasn't allowed to play games as a kid, I would just read through instruction manuals to learn more about games, back then games weren't so big on tutorial levels and the manuals had everything, characters, background stories, and hints etc etc, I read the crap out of Resident Evil 3's manual because I thought it would somehow make me better prepared against Nemesis . Now days they're just a couple of pages outlining basic controls.

My favourite manual of all time is from Uncharted: Drake's Fourtune, it looks exactly like Sir Francis Drake's journal in the game, I would flip through it during a cutscene and pretending that I was looking at the same journal as Nate .

The paper manuals are probably going to be completely removed at some point, and it will be a sad day for me, just another thing to be taken away from the 'good old days'.

I remember when I was a kid and my parents bough me a game. I was like reading the manual on the car back to home with high anticipation. That also helped a lot, since I already knew the commands before starting a game.

Also, when in Christmas you received a game, but your parents were like "Today is way too late. You'll play tomorrow". Well dang, I'll play tomorrow, but I'm sure as hell that I would memorize the damned manual before it!

Man, I remember the instruction manual for my first game, Starfox SNES. They went to the trouble of doing photos with quite decent model spaceships to mimic a real/movie type look for the pics!

Totally agree. My video game ritual always started with removing the shrink wrap, reading the manual from beginning to end, and then popping in the cartridge/disc. Now a lot of manuals are disappearing. It's a shame.

Just recently, I had to look up the Resident Evil 6 manual on the Capcom website since it wasn't included with the game.

I remember the GC ones...
They had pretty cool information and nice pics. The Wii ones sucked in comparison.

I miss them because of nostalgia, but they're really not needed anymore, because games typically do the job themselves of setting up the story and teaching you the game mechanics (and they do it in a much smoother way than a text dump in a paper manual).

Sort of, but only for nostalgic reasons. Paper manuals are totally youthless in the day of digital.

I would almost never read them, not unless I got frustrated with something I didn't understand. They were good for leafing through during the old-school loading screens, though, which sometimes took forever. Honestly, I don't miss them very much.

Yes! Especially ones that would go into back story and so on. They are part of the magic.

The day paper manuals are removed will be a black one. I love paper manuals, I had much fun with them as a kid, it helps engross you in the games' atmosphere and world.