"What the hell is with these notes?" I asked to everyone in the room, my hands flailing away at my plastic axe. It was not Guitar Hero: World Tour’s number of notes that confused me - playing Guitar Hero 3 previously introduced Neversoft’s admiration of superfluous notes for difficulty’s sake. Neversoft’s love of odd notes combined with its love of 80s power ballads had given birth to an entirely new note in World Tour: a purple one that spanned all five note lanes. My previous experience didn’t yield any clue on how to hit these long purple bars that were relentlessly assaulting my life meter. Soon my life meter was decimated, as was any remaining bravado associated with my mad Guitar Hero skills.

I am so awesome right now that it hurts.

It passed my mind that Guitar Hero had finally implemented a one-man band feature, and that I was one bass pedal attachment short, but that thoughts was quickly deemed too good to be true. So, knowing that Guitar Hero tutorials are so tortuously long that they are prohibited under the Geneva Convention, I paused the game and displayed an altogether different kind of experience, one that comes from checking the card catologue, calling411, and using a paper map. I checked...the game manual.

Soon after discovering that these mysterious notes were interpretations of open strings, several folks in the room expressed surprise that such information was even in the manual. This struck me as completely odd. What else would be in there, crossword puzzles? Maybe one of those 3D pictures that you have to cross your eyes for twenty minutes for, and then a guitar pops out, and a headache. I eventually realized that it was the same reason that nobody obeys traffic signs: nobody reads them.

In the old days (so old they might be olde or even olden), reading the manual was nigh-on required, and not just because it filled the time while one’s parents drove home. In those days, games loaded straight into their title screens, and directly into the game a button press later. The player would then be instantly beset by every masochist slant of the designer, with only the manual’s vague hints and poorly translated instructions to support their endeavors. Ignoring the meager assistance offered therein would only feed more sorrow and suffering to the heartless Japanese designers, causing them to grow in size and wrath. These horrible creatures threatened to spread darkness over the land forever, that is until one magical day. The clouds parted and a host of angels echoed a chorus so beautiful and perfect that it caused all of these vile creatures to dissipate under beams of pure love. That day, tutorials became interactive.