I miss video game strategy guides

[ToroidalBoat]

"I miss video games" (from Teen Girl Squad #5)

(first part of thread title keeps reminding me of this)

 

[Anon88]

View attachment 5631457

As funny as the FF9 one is I still think the FF7 one is better.

 

[biozeminadae1]

My name comes from the Half-Life 2 Prima guide, a type of enemies that never existed in the game.
Apparently it references them a lot, so much so, that the Amazon review section for the guide was filled with trolls talking about the non-existent BIOZEMINADS!!! - that's cool. Maybe it was an early design idea that was discarded and that didn't come through communication.

I think art books are far more interesting as it shows the development history of the game what ideas got scraped instead of how to get an extra 1-up or whatever.View attachment 5631494

Unless they're on the level of "Raising the Bar", most art books are terrible and offer no insight or additional information.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

The Prima guides I saw were notoriously bad. I don't fault people for having fond memories of strategy books, though.

When I got Starflight, it came with a hint/strategy book that had a rather interesting premise: it was an 'in-universe' document extracted from captain's logs received from the future (in fact, the captain of the vessel the log was found on was, at that time, graduating from the academy). Pretty good writing for the 80's, too.

 

[The Hardest R]

The price wasn't the fucking point it was to have something to read while on the bus dreaming about reaching the next area.

Yep, this was me. I got the official Nintendo guides and would read about how to get some of the stars or what times to beat on a Mario Kart trial. I outgrew them when I was 12 or so but before then, they were excellent at keeping me hyped about the next stage or how to get more out of a game I beat numerous times.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

That one got written by the ENB fag right? It's no wonder.

I believe it recommended using the shield for most things which.....lol

 

[Xarpho's Return]

My name comes from the Half-Life 2 Prima guide, a type of enemies that never existed in the game.
Apparently it references them a lot, so much so, that the Amazon review section for the guide was filled with trolls talking about the non-existent BIOZEMINADS!!! - that's cool. Maybe it was an early design idea that was discarded and that didn't come through communication.

I have the original 2004 Half-Life 2 guide. It doesn't talk about that at all. My guess is it's a meme like Penis Inspection Day.

The Prima guides I saw were notoriously bad. I don't fault people for having fond memories of strategy books, though.

Prima's stuff was hit and miss. The Zelda: Spirit Tracks one is awful ("if you've been following this walkthrough, you should have five hearts by now") instead of just showing me maps and points of interest (and all the maps are copied from the game's own minimaps without any full page maps or marking points of interest), and then of course the section at the back where that stuff is supposed to be detailed doesn't have anything. It is atrocious, and I blame Nintendo for not gatekeeping hard enough, like making sure that the good parts of their original guides went into Prima's stuff.

On the other hand, their guide on SimCity 2000 is one of the finest pieces of work on a game, ever. And of course BradyGames runs the gamut from Riven to FFIX.

Nintendo's were by far the most consistent and high quality--glossy, full color maps straight from the game's assets, and able to be used from a full walkthrough or just a hint. Granted, there were a few bits that they didn't cover (like in the game, they tend to gloss over Kanto) or in one case got wrong (where the Sword of Kings was) but for Nintendo games they were top-notch.

 

[biozeminadae1]

I have the original 2004 Half-Life 2 guide. It doesn't talk about that at all. My guess is it's a meme like Penis Inspection Day.

Maybe it was that and I'm misremembering. One of the soundtracks for the game is called Biozeminadae and Marc Laidlaw said it's based on some trolls spamming the Amazon review sections. I remember seeing these reviews with my own eyes, but now it's basically impossible to find them, trying as I am with current search engines.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Maybe it was that and I'm misremembering. One of the soundtracks for the game is called Biozeminadae and Marc Laidlaw said it's based on some trolls spamming the Amazon review sections. I remember seeing these reviews with my own eyes, but now it's basically impossible to find them, trying as I am with current search engines.

There is a soundtrack called "Biozeminade Fragment" (not "Biozeminadae", Google blanks on that).

You can look at the guide through Archive.org's "borrow books" login (be sure to look at the 2004 Half-Life 2 guide, not the Orange Box version--or just find it on Annas Archive), and I found nothing of the sort. "Biozeminade" does not appear in Arch.b4k.co's /v/ archives, and the only thing I can find that the soundtrack was a reference to a pre-game meme, not the other way around.

 

[biozeminadae1]

There is a soundtrack called "Biozeminade Fragment" (not "Biozeminadae", Google blanks on that).

You can look at the guide through Archive.org's "borrow books" login (be sure to look at the 2004 Half-Life 2 guide, not the Orange Box version--or just find it on Annas Archive), and I found nothing of the sort. "Biozeminade" does not appear in Arch.b4k.co's /v/ archives, and the only thing I can find that the soundtrack was a reference to a pre-game meme, not the other way around.

I see.

 

[King Vidiot]

You can find a lot of the old strategy guides online for free as pdfs. I sometimes use them if I can't find a better text guide on gamefaqs.

There are loads of them at the Internet Archive. They also have lots of scans of video game magazines. The Internet Archive is the first place I check to find copies of old guide books since they seem to get away with hosting copyrighted content.

It felt weird when Starfield didn't have one tbh. I always remembered Bethesda games having a guide, but then I realized that it'd been like 7 years since Fallout 4.

I went to a game store maybe 2 months and saw a guide for some game that was relatively recent, but I don't remember what it was now. I remember it was recent enough that I was surprised though so it must have been from between 2018 to 2020 or something and it made me wonder exactly when Prima stopped making physical guides.

The last Bethesda game to get a guide book was Fallout 76, which came out in November 2018 just over 5 years ago. The official book for Starfield is The Official Constellation Journal, which is full of blank pages to be filled out by the player, because that is how lazy Bethesda has become. The newest print guide I remember seeing in a store is the Cyberpunk 2077 guide that came out in 2020. It seems like Nintendo is the only game developer that still makes guide books for new games.

 

[Thiletonomics]

The sim city 3000 strategy guide was pretty well made though. The size of a fucking phone book and cost more than the game itself but it was decent

Heck, some game manuals at the time, were about the size as small (?) books. Streets of SimCity, out of all games, had a way bigger game manual compared to the content in the game itself.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Unless they're on the level of "Raising the Bar", most art books are terrible and offer no insight or additional information.

Yeah, usually it's the same official artwork that they put out everywhere else and rarely early sketches, concepts, or landscapes. And the official artwork would be any guide worth its salt.

I should mention for all of its strengths, the original Nintendo Player's Guide was not a great guide. Granted, it was full color and had a lot of information that nothing else did at the time, but like Nintendo Power, only covered from a half to the third of the game. Good luck on the rest--I suspect it was to keep the help hotline from losing too much business.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

I've still got the hardback strategy guide to Arc the Lad I & II, which is the size of a couple of novels. It's written really well and is peppered with the various humorous remarks about the game throughout it.

And, yeah, I remember how awful that FF9 strategy guide was. It directed you to use their website as often as possible, even omitting puzzle solutions in favor of "lol just look it up on our website"

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I've still got the hardback strategy guide to Arc the Lad I & II, which is the size of a couple of novels. It's written really well and is peppered with the various humorous remarks about the game throughout it.

And, yeah, I remember how awful that FF9 strategy guide was. It directed you to use their website as often as possible, even omitting puzzle solutions in favor of "lol just look it up on our website"

I've been reading The Walkthrough, by Doug Walsh, a memoir of his time working at BradyGames.

According to him, the FF9 debacle was entirely Square's fault (PlayOnline was owned by Square, not BradyGames) and all the BradyGames people hated the idea, but they couldn't blow off them off because they'd lose the lucrative Square license and lose out on FF10.

It also says a lot about the AAA games industry even at the time because almost no one on those teams knew exactly how things worked and came together. (Really says a lot about the way these developers work).

The other big reason why the guides died (besides YouTube and the like) was because of too many post-game changes. Diablo III was a hard book to write because of constant changes about everything would function and became completely irrelevant within two years.

 

[King Vidiot]

So the Dark Souls Trilogy Compendium came out last month and it looks really nice. I wonder if they made enough copies for how much demand there is. Amazon is backordered with over a month delay, and the scalpers on ebay are marking it up a lot.

 

[Zorgulon]

I still have my Halo 2 and Halo 3 guide books.