If you geek out over instruction manuals like I do, you may want to start collecting Famicom games.
Yes, some of the earliest examples of manuals made for this system's titles are more than a bit barebones in nature (see:
Donkey Kong and
Super Mario Bros.), but later ones can be quite fabulous.
Case in point: the manual produced for Konami's
Yume Penguin Monogatari, which I previously discussed in
this post.
All you need to do is check out the back page of
Yume Penguin Monogatari's
instruction
manual to know it's top-shelf stuff. (By the way, I'd highly recommend clicking on each of the scans that can be found throughout this post, as that'll allow you to take a much better, and closer, look at their brilliance.)
The next few pages are pretty great, too--with the ones below providing readers with their first look at this game's main characters as well as their first taste of its rather head-scratching story.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe the illustration above is supposed to show
Yume Penguin Monogatari's protagonist, Penta, struggling to balance his love of food with the love he feels for his ex-girlfriend.
The illustrations on the left-hand page above, on the other hand, show what happens to Penta if he's hit by one of the game's enemies or ingests any of the food said baddies toss at him. (Conversely, "diet drinks" found within each stage enable him to lose weight.)
Penta's moves actually differ depending on how big or small he is at any given time, by the way--with the projectile "po" attack (all the way to the left) being the most desirable, of course.
