A long time ago, I got a copy of Ring King. I don't know if I rented it from somewhere or if I borrowed it or if it was mailed to me in an unmarked envelope or what happened. But, the thing is, I got a copy, and I spent a few days playing it.
The thing, though, is that, like just about every game that I had access to at the time, I played it without the manual. This isn't usually that big of a deal, since some huge percentage of NES games are easy enough to figure out if you've played enough of them (and I've played a lot of them). So I dove in and... it didn't go well. Probably because this thing has a weird stamina system and you have to train to raise stats, and blah blah blah. I didn't do so well at the time because I was a kid and I didn't have time to figure out that mess. I wanted to get right in and play it, which I did. Poorly.
After my time with the game ended and I sent it back to the store, or it returned to its home planet or whatever, I kind of forgot about it, except for the ridiculously brainworm that is the main music when you're trying to fight.
That is... until the last weekend when I went to a flea market and found a copy of Ring King at a booth selling all kinds of old video game junk. So I bought it, brought it home, and immediately had to test it to see if it worked. Spoiler alert: it did!
And I immediately failed to play this game again. The problem is that I still haven't read the manual for this thing, and I forgot pretty much all of the things that I figured out about it the first time around. I forgot what the buttons did, I forgot to dodge, I forgot to assign my points to my stats, and I accidentally pressed the 'slowmo' button on my NES Advantage so I skipped all that stuff at the beginning anyway.
Yes, I know that I could find a .pdf of the manual somewhere. And I know that there's a cheat code to make my character invincible (but that's a pretty boring way to play). And I also know that I can go to my local game shop and get a copy of the manual (probably, I don't have their inventory memorized... yet). And I know that I could go to eBay and buy one, and then the post office would bring it right to my house and I wouldn't even have to put on pants.
But for now, I'll still muddle through it, figuring out what does what, until I get bored or frustrated enough to seek out the manual or a FAQ or something. But where's the fun in that?