I’ve found, via the miracle of “View Manual”, that Team Fortress 2 has one – a rather funny one. You can download it, and I put up PNG’s of the pages, and it’s a funny look at how the engineer can build his “Sentry v2.1 from TF Industries”. 🙂
Funnily enough, I did wonder what Team Fortress 2 did about teaching players the basics – it seems like absolutely nothing, which is a shame. It’d be a good game in some respects (due to having nice respawn times and easy to learn classes) to play if you’ve never played a FPS before. With no tutorial, and no manual, it’s pretty difficult to start playing! I guess Half Life 2 is include for that reason, to learn the basics of movement and shooting there. This manual is nearly unknown (as far as I’ve seen),
Anyway, the manual is a blast. I love the instructions for upgrading:
Loosen both sides (swing wrench violently) of main
housing barrel to allow for separation and retract-
ion of both the main barrel and housing container.
Most of the instructions say to hit the damn sentry gun with included wrench (selectable from the HUD of course) 😀 like against the spy’s sapper:
When Ultra-Sapper device is affixed to the top sec-
tion of the sentry device, remove red and green
wire and tune dial (bludgeon device with reckless
abandon using wrench included in package. Follow
up with sporadic shotgun fire in the immediate
vicinitiy of sentry device. Shotgun also included in
package.) to frequency KZQ-10z.
I wish there were similar manuals for the other classes. I’d love to know who made the spies odd working knife or disguise kit, or perhaps how the Medic’s Medigun actually works! This however, is an neat unexpected Easter Egg and likely a bit unknown!
I checked Portal and there isn’t a manual for it, sadly, since I’d have loved a similar thing from Aperture Science 🙁