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How gamers were nickel and dimed in 80s and 90s (besides arcades)
(programming.dev)
Granted, the "nickel and diming" of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today's cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here's a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?
Never used any of these hotlines.
What I did use were the magazines you could find at most stores at the time. Those would have walkthroughs and guides for most of the games available at the time.
The difference between games journalism in the past and today isn't that the reviews were more honest and reliable back in the day, it's that the magazines provided more stuff in addition to the reviews (previews, tips, etc) that made them worthwhile.
I also went with magazines or small "cheats only" booklets, since they cost about 3 minutes of a hotline call, hoping it'd have the cheats for the games I wanted. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. Then there were the cheats that just didn't work