Manuals are great "reading on the can" fodder.

I like having the manual more of to increase the value of the product than anything. Although, I really like the feeling of holding one, and enjoy reading them. Also, sometimes in a PC game all I want to know is which button handles inventory, because I didn't like the tutorial (my Witcher 2, for instance, i tried the tutorial, but something just did not work and the campaign was useful for everything except the inventory/character management buttons, so less than ten seconds of reading the manual and I was able to figure it out.), or because the tutorial ended up not being helpful.

Also, they're fun to read when you are otherwise not available to play the game.
My last comment exactly.

Edit: Also, if you read any of the older Total War manuals, the guys at Creative Assembly have a really good sense of humor and are really well versed in their history. Age of Empires similarly is like a history lesson of the more interesting points, like the AoE and AoE II manuals (III is okay, not the best though). Also, Vietcong's manual tells you all about the interesting things the guys in 'Nam said and used (cork's my favorite).

Hehe posts like yours, about games that can't be played without manuals, but aren't terribly old, make me want to challenge myself and try them, even though they might not reflect my gaming taste^ ^.

Megaman teaches the player how the game works without manuals or tutorials. I dislike the presentation of that video, but the point is solid.

It's amazing what you can miss. I remember discussing Oblivion with someone who was taking this approach. He was complaining about how long it took to get anywhere and make any progress. Turns out he was completely unaware of the existence of fast travel from the map...

Most people gave up after few pages and just minimised the realism or turned on arcade mode if available. :-p Did look good on bookshelf. How many people can claim to own books like "Pilot's guide to F15", "Apache combat manual" or something similar (don't remember the exact names) in their several hundred page glory? XD Some early startegy games had ridiculous manuals as well containing indept details of background of coflict, the army composition and armament of the combatants. Why you needed to know, say, armor penetration capability of soviet T-90 tank or thictness of it's side armor when you commanded your forces in division level, I've no idea.

A good RPG manual is like a good novel to me. I've read front to back of Baldur's Gate II's manual probably 5 times. You get background, you find yourself immersed, and you learn things about the game that can give you an edge.

In some games, like Might and Magic 2, the manual was critical. M&M2 deals a lot with time travel and if you don't know your history of the world you're in, then you might not ever figure out where in time and space you need to go to change your present.

Yes sir, I like 'em.
Yeah, I do that a lot, too. There's probably more E. Coli in my manuals than a biology lab. (ew, I know :D)

I think they're for reading on the john.

There are a few games out there that genuinely require a manual, but most of the time it's superfluous. A well designed game shouldn't require a manual. A controls reference probably,but not more than that. Sometimes they even sprinkle the info on loading screens.

And some times even extra art work and short stories! :-)

A fair number of older manuals also went into detail about the nuts and bolts of how the game worked, something that you don't often see in current ones. In short, they covered a lot of material that nowadays you don't get because someone wants to gouge you for another $30 for a strategy guide. (A strategy guide that is often still less informative, at that.)

Necessity?

In contemporary games - little to none depending on genre.

In the games of old - fundamental.

when i played sim city 3000 for the first time , i did not understand a thing , deleted the game read the manual to understand how to survive in the game back then i had no internet manual was everything

You must remember that up until the early 2000's, every game developer was re-inventing the wheel with every new game. There are some truly mind-boggingly stupid control schemes for first person shooters in the 90's. The idea that you are supposed to aim up and down with the mouse by default is relatively new. Couple the lack of design conventions, many older games also lacked in-game descriptions like mouse-over information boxes, spelled out keyboard shortcuts ("Exit (esc)" etc) or they might even have been entirely keyboard driven with no on-screen buttons.

Then of course, there was a time where publishers were not so nosy in how developers spent all that cash they were throwing at them, so they could pay someone to write literary works of art that fleshes out the game universe. I still have the technical spec sheets for the Wing Commander 3 ships laying about somewhere... Nowadays we are lucky if they even put a tacky paper card in the DVD case instructing you how to download acrobat reader so you can open the on-disc PDF (which is about two pages related to the actual game, the rest is just EULAs and other generic documents).