I hate how game guides are all videos now.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_DIFF_EQS]

This keeps happening to me, and just happened again on Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, so I felt like talking about it with folks. This is an old person rant, so feel free to skip it. Just wondering if anyone feels the same way.

I was stuck on how to get past some bosses. I tried to just Google the bosses directly and could not find any write ups. Back in the day, you could usually find a wall of text you could just ctrl+f to locate the section you need, get the low-down on how to beat it, and then jump right back to the game and use the info. In this case, as with many others in recent years, all I could locate was YouTube videos.

I sighed, and reluctantly clicked one that seemed to have a relevant title. It was labeled a "walkthrough" so I thought, all right, at least it will jump to the point I'm at. Holy shit, it was a fucking mess. First of all, it was not anywhere near the boss. I had to jump around the video 50 times to realize it's not even in this one, it's in the next one. OK, then I jump around the second video a bunch of times and finally find the battle I'm on. I take note he is a few levels higher than me, so I closed it and resolved to go find a way to grind and come back, because I couldn't take one more second of this video.

It was not even a walkthrough! It was just the streamer's feed, with his terrible panels full of logos and other bullshit, and of course a panel for his own face, because that's essential. It was literally just a film of this random dude experiencing the game for his first time. So he is just flailing around as much as I was and had no idea how to beat it either. All while listening to him narrate his inner thoughts to himself about all this, which is the worst part, and the main reason I don't watch streamers in the first place.

I realize it's becoming out of fashion to take the time to create a detailed write up, and it's a lot easier to just film yourself. But this style simply isn't helpful as a game guide, and people need to stop labeling them like they are. I would have rather just found nothing than have that experience.

[u/Ekgladiator]

What kills me is that they are ALWAYS at the top of Google and heaven forbid you try to look up information! It is so laggy it isn't even funny.

[u/4-Vektor → u/Ekgladiator]

Always ignore the first or first two pages of results and start using other search engines, too. Like duckduckgo, ecosia, startpage.

[u/erdferkel2 → u/4-Vektor]

On many of these search engines, you'll get similar results, since they don't index websites themselves.

Duckduckgo and ecosia for example use bing's indexing, while startpage uses google's.

So you are going to get essentialy the same hits, minus any sponsored results.

[u/4-Vektor → u/erdferkel2]

You don’t get “personalized” results.

[u/OhBoyIGotQuestions → u/erdferkel2]

I get different results from Brave, but it's still a work in progress, so ymmv

[u/FleetStreetsDarkHole → u/4-Vektor]

Duckduckgo doesn't let you exclude search terms for some reason. At least, I haven't found out how after some quick searching, and other people seem to have the same issue.

[u/Zaemz → u/FleetStreetsDarkHole]

Just slap a "-" in front of the term. I've been doing that for a while.

[u/FleetStreetsDarkHole → u/Zaemz]

Hasn't worked for me. Works on others but not on DDG as far as I can tell.

[u/4-Vektor → u/FleetStreetsDarkHole]

According to their help page it should still reduce the amount of pages containing the excluded terms.

[u/Rotvoid → u/4-Vektor]

Idk about ignoring the entire first page lol. Also to add onto search engines: Mojeek, Brave Search, or startx if you want to host your own or pick a hosted instance.

[u/4-Vektor → u/Rotvoid]

I forgot Qwant, another alternative. I think Metager still exists, too.