.>.>THIS ISN'T WHAT I REMEMBER.

A few minutes in, the voiceover guy says a more advanced "platinum" editipn came out with better support for 3D whatever. I couldn't follow it all, gaming isnt my thing.

i'm gonna go with the first fallout as having the best manual. Most of it was factual information about nuclear warfare and survival, along with recipes, all in a 70 or so page spiral bound book. That, or the Falcon 4.0's manual, which was about as long and thorough as an actual F-16's operator's manual. It's a dead, but certainly very much missed art.

The original game was software rendered, and it was one of the first games on the market with 3D accelerator support, back when 3D accelerators were complete garbage. I always thought the software renderer looked better than the accelerated stuff, but that might just be the pixel-nostalgia talking.

Alpha Centauri's manual was an amazing tome.

I'm pretty sure they hired artists in the 90s.

They did, and artists only had a very limited palette to work with, and they hadn't yet figured out the tricks to make things not look terrible yet. This game came out back when untextured Gouraud shading was still considered AMAZING.

there is zero excuse for the preload looking so wrong. there were people who knew how color worked but they just werent hired by publishers are you blind

The preload image looks awesome. It's a Timber Wolf coming out of a big burst of flame; how could you possibly find fault with that?

Also the preload image was probably hand-pixeled in 320x200 256 colors with a manually-created palette. Photoshop wasn't really a thing back then. Art-creation technology has improved a LOT in the last 20 years, along with the rest of technology.