Game Booklets and why i'm unsure it Angers me

Booklet / Manual / Instruction book, whatever you wanna call it.
 
I think we are all under agreement that game booklets are phasing out. Over the past 10 years game booklets have gone from being 100 pages thick down to what some games currently are, one page, ONE PAGE?!! Arghh, how can publishers do this? I remember back in PSone days, opening the small game cases and flicking through the book and give it a good sniff. Call me weird, I know i'm not the only one out there that does this. It maybe damaging to my health but it smells lovely and brings a sort of euphoria.
 
So this has been getting worse and worse, so why am I posting this now? Well i'll tell you why... 
 
 
I just bought Bulletswear Epic Edition and Fight Night Champion on 360, and as i'm playing through Bulletswear, I open Fight Night and i'm disgusted with what I find. Here l ook for yourself.
 

Booklet / Manual / Instruction book, whatever you wanna call it.
 
I think we are all under agreement that game booklets are phasing out. Over the past 10 years game booklets have gone from being 100 pages thick down to what some games currently are, one page, ONE PAGE?!! Arghh, how can publishers do this? I remember back in PSone days, opening the small game cases and flicking through the book and give it a good sniff. Call me weird, I know i'm not the only one out there that does this. It maybe damaging to my health but it smells lovely and brings a sort of euphoria.
 
So this has been getting worse and worse, so why am I posting this now? Well i'll tell you why... 
 
 
I just bought Bulletswear Epic Edition and Fight Night Champion on 360, and as i'm playing through Bulletswear, I open Fight Night and i'm disgusted with what I find. Here l ook for yourself.
 

I would use 'em more if they weren't useless. There's rarely any effort put into the things. :(

Booklets have been useless since 1980s - 1990s pc games where you needed instructions to play and install. Even the booklets that came with Transformer toys in the 80s, what kid needed them? That toy was out of the package and had been turned from robot to car 10 times before you could blink. 
I love that Guitar Hero games still come with instruction booklets. They release on every year and the game itself is not rocket science. If its red PRESS THE RED F*****G BUTTON.  *sigh* 
Wont anyone think of the trees?

I like the MVC3 one... It has all the info people are complaining about that's missing in the game. 
 
I guess it's proof that nobody reads the manual nowadays. 

I dont think its usually necessary for most games. I believe RPG's, sports games, and some RTS games need them to give you a refrence when looking up classes/moves/units in the game. Besides that I dont see the point, like why would they include a manual in crysis? Its a shooter, most people have played a million by now, and there is always a tutorial  telling you what to do. I personally think most games should just start coming with digital manuals that can be accessed while in game.

The literature that came with games was never any good anyway. At least now it can be useless without wasting as much paper.

EA games have always been bad about manuals. Sony first party games and japanese games always seem to have great manuals. The thing is that manuals can be replaced with good in game tutorials which MvC 3 lacked completely.

it's because a lot of games have a tutorial level in the beginning. it's kind of useless to put the thing that is already in the game. i do agree there needs to be more information in the manuals. i am one of those people that will read the manual before i play the game.

I used to always read the manuals, on the way home from picking up a game. Take it to school / work. Nowadays its not even worth looking through, I still do though.

" I used to always read the manuals, on the way home from picking up a game. Take it to school / work. Nowadays its not even worth looking through, I still do though. "

What's worse is that the demise of instruction booklets has lead to the rise of Unskippable Tutorial Levels. Critics can complain all they want about having to read the manual before understanding the game, but at least they'd only ever have to read the manual once, instead of each and every time they replay the game.

Some games, namely Rockstar and Bethesda games, still have pretty big booklets. Not 100 pages long obviously, but the cases are packed pretty tightly. But those are big games too. CoD doesn't need 30-odd pages to explain to people "see bad guy shoot bad guy screen is red don't get shot for a while multiplayer is good and has lots of guns", and there are a lot of shooters and other pretty simple games that just don't really need much of an explanation. Though I must admit, I really do like reading the manuals and wish they were longer, but the fact is most games don't really need it. Now, let's go get Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto 4, Fallout 3 and Oblivion...

Giving it some thought, Bulletstorm doesn't really need a manual, its a pretty straight forward shooter, all the unique parts of the game you learn fairly slowly. However Fight Night has a pretty uncommon control method, using the sticks like it does is only really in the Fight Night series.

I've always enjoyed reading the manual actually, but they were much better before.

I used to love reading the manual when they were nice and thick, like the ones you'd get in age of empires.. but now theres so little effort put into the whats the point.

they don't provide any information that is have been added to games now

I don't think there were that many 100 page booklets 10 years ago but things have changed since then. It's a little sad to see them phasing out manuals like this but now that the large majority of people who play video games have internet access through which they can get information about the game far in excess of anything the booklet can teach them, it's understandable that publishers are beginning to consider the instruction manual somewhat obsoleted. What you've got with Fight Night though is just terrible incompetence on EA's part, two online passes and an advertisement but the instruction sheet may not even be properly applicable to the game? They're not doing their job properly.