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 Post here about your favourite game strategy guides, manuals and other pamphlets, etc. for your games! For me, I've got a few booklets and the like that I fondly recall. Essentially, anything from the Age of Empires/Mythology series was fantastic, such as the fold-out tech tree from the original AoE below:  Many manuals were also great back in the day too, IMO - especially ones that had concept art and the like included. Regarding strategy guides though, I only bought one or two personally, however I distinctly recall reading and re-reading the Prima Guide for Pokemon Red many a time, back in the day! It was a highly comprehensive guide - very good for finding those rare 'mons out in the wild. So! What strategy guides and the like have you been reading? (Or have fond memories of, from back in your youth) Major Isoor fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 02:56
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Bout a year back I went to a games specialty store and they had a big rack full of nearly pristine games guides. I picked up one for Final Fantasy X-2 which was really cool and useful for all the weird obscure items and quests that are packed into that game.
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Apr 1, 2023 05:13
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I still have and use the Doublejump guide to Disgaea 2. It's a fat little 600+ page paperback. It's a lot easier and more amusing to use than google. I recently got Phantom Brave on pc, might pick up the guide for that one, too.
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Apr 1, 2023 05:18
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I was a Sega kid growing up, and also cursed with misfortunes, so I ended up with a Sega Saturn. Sonic Jam got a lot of play, and it came with digital manuals - both English and Japanese. I really liked the little sketches in the Japanese Sonic/Sonic 2 manuals - so much character in them! I also got the Maxis collection of Sim City, Sim Farm and Sim Earth for the PC - the manual for all three combined had to be a solid 300 pages IIRC, and had quite a bit of information about what went into the simulation, what the devs researched, etc. - oddly compelling stuff to my dweeby pre-pubescent rear end
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Apr 1, 2023 05:32
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I got given the strategy guide with my copy of the Godfather game on PS2 and whoever wrote it had given all the shop fronts and businesses little backstories and all the owners had their own names and stuff. Don't know if they got that from the developers but it was a weirdly cool level of detail Used my san andreas guide until the binding finally disintegrated and it was a load of loose pages I wish I still had my FF8 guide that thing was beautiful although iirc it had a lot of mistakes in it when it came to the monster stats
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Apr 1, 2023 06:01
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i had a bunch of NES and SNES-era nintendo powers that i read to death as a kid. you can't imagine my disappointment when i was old enough to convince my parents to get me a subscription and they'd switched over to a slick EGM-clone format for the n64 era, in place of the distinctive nintendo power style they did still put out really pretty strategy guides though. they were usually worse than prima's on the actual info but aesthetically they were unmatched since nintendo gave them tons of concept art to stuff into the things. if you ever run across the nintendo power ocarina of time guide, get that poo poo!! it's beautiful
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Apr 1, 2023 06:31
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I look back with (ironic?) fondness on my Final Fantasy VII official strategy guide. It was infamously riddled with errors and oddities. Straight off the top of my head, decades later, I can remember these: - It didn't list how to obtain any limit breaks despite listing them all with a brief description. Note that this was a visual description of what the player would see on the screen, and not a description of what they actually did. - Wrong images for some enemies in the bestiary - IIRC it used a picture of Carry Armor (a boss) for some enemies that were definitely not that - Screenshots where the characters had nonstandard names like "Smooth" for Cloud and "Biatch" for Aeris (she's a woman, so it's also sexist) - Wrong names for several Materia (W-Item, W-Summon, and W-Magic were all named with an "X-" instead) - It spoils the game's major plot elements A few others I just googled: - Bestiary was in no particular order. Not alphabetical, that's for sure! - Apparently one of the bosses had his HP listed as "Midgar" and his level listed as "Area" instead of, you know, numbers.
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Apr 1, 2023 06:45
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On the manual front I remember the manual for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb was made to look like Indy's journal where the controls were hand written and it had newspaper clippings and stuff. Far more effort than is necessary Also love the sonic 1 manual just going 'sometimes Dr robotnik will set a
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Apr 1, 2023 08:23
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the sex ghost posted:Also love the sonic 1 manual just going 'sometimes Dr robotnik will set a lmao I think that's explicitly in the Sonic 3 manual too - it's rare to do it accidentally as a kid, but when you do you are Not Happy
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Apr 1, 2023 08:39
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Oh also, just had a thought - was it GTA San Andreas that had the big fold-out map with its manual? Man, I spent ages poring over that, after reading the manual. More games should come with maps I think - they're always great
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Apr 1, 2023 08:55
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shoutout to the Civ II manual that's big enough to practically be a whole book on its own. 272 pages!! admittedly more than half of that pagecount is just overviews of the scenarios packed in with the Gold Edition, lol iirc it also came with a foldout that had the tech tree on one side and a unit tree on the other, but idk where mine is atm
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Apr 1, 2023 11:49
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The Versus Books guides were the god drat cream of the crop of strategy guides. Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil II in particular stick out as just top quality. Meanwhile, I was one of those chumps that bought the official Final Fantasy IX strategy guide, aka "a $30 book that tells you to go on the internet to find the answer". Also, lest we forget the GOAT Official Guide, https://archive.org/details/earthboundnintendoplayersguide1995 edit:  https://archive.org/details/Final-Fantasy-VII-Versus-Guide/page/n11/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ResidentEvil2VersusGuide https://archive.org/details/ResidentEvil3VersusGuide SgtScruffy fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 11:54
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TIE Fighter came with a surprisingly long novella about a rookie TIE Fighter pilot as a kind of walkthrough to get you used to the game https://archive.org/details/tie_fighter_stele_chronicles
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Apr 1, 2023 13:42
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I printed a gamefaqs guide or two in my day (single sided on a 90's inkjet of course)
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Apr 1, 2023 14:29
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The Postman posted:I printed a gamefaqs guide or two in my day (single sided on a 90's inkjet of course) Oh wow, that reminded me that I did the same thing! Big ones for Freelancer and Sheep Dog 'n' Wolf, from memory. I got my dad to do it on his work printer though, because even at that age I was 100% behind exploiting workplace resources/stationery 
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Apr 1, 2023 14:35
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The one I remember the most fondly was the FFX strategy guide I got as a kid. I remember pretty meticulously going through it, writing notes and stuff, I think I got pretty close to 100%ing the game. It also came with a poster of the sphere grid, which was cool.
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Apr 1, 2023 14:54
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I definitely had a strategy guide for Starcraft as a kid but I can't remember much about it. I think it was like info about the factions and then walkthroughs for all the scenarios except they were hard to actually follow because all the accompanying photos were printed in grainy black and white which made it hard to tell what was going on.
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Apr 1, 2023 15:06
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SgtScruffy posted:The Versus Books guides were the god drat cream of the crop of strategy guides. Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil II in particular stick out as just top quality.
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Apr 1, 2023 17:10
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How has Earthbound not come up yet? Best official strategy guide ever published, and I will brook no argument. This book alone should have ended the argument about whether video games are art.
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Apr 1, 2023 23:08
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SgtScruffy posted:The Versus Books guides were the god drat cream of the crop of strategy guides. Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil II in particular stick out as just top quality. This times a million. The FFVII author also did the N64 Zeldas, which are on my Mount Rushmore of game guides. Right up there with CyricZ's Yakuza tomes.
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Apr 1, 2023 23:33
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https://archive.org/details/sim-city-2000-power-politics-and-planning-revised-edition-strategy-guide/mode/1up The SimCity 2000 strategy guide. It is the most detailed and complex guide I have ever read for a game and goes beyond the scope of just an ordinary cheat code collection: It teaches you how to do hexediting, covers every mechanism in the game, provides real life urban planning education and interviews with American city planners, and had an FTP link that contained a lot of historical scenarios of real life city disasters that you could play (I e. Gary, Indiana). I still have my physical copy in the bookshelf. It set the standard for me of what a strategy guide should be like. Entorwellian fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Apr 2, 2023 |
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Apr 2, 2023 00:44
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I have a bunch of old guides and while I got rid of some of them I kept my beat-to-poo poo extremely well-love Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3 guide from Nintendo Power. I loved looking through those guides because they were my favorite games growing up. Later I got the Banjo-Kazooie NP guide from a Nintendo Power renewal months before I even got an N64 and read the heck out of it too.
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Apr 2, 2023 01:12
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I got rid of mine, but I loved my Prima Official Strategy Guide for Empire Earth. It wasn't as intense as some of these other guides, but it did explain the campaigns in full detail and give you tips on how to play competitively, straight from the actually good players.
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Apr 2, 2023 01:21
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My dad had zero interest in playing games with me but would print out FAQs and walkthroughs from gamefaqs at his job and bring them home in big blue binders, and bought me strategy guides for almost every RPG I played. There was one for Xenogears that had tons of great art in it that I'd bring on trips and read when I couldn't play it.
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Apr 2, 2023 01:25
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I remember having the Prima guide for like Longbow 2, and had ones for Fallout 3 and Dragon Age 2 and Skyrim, but only still have the Skyrim one even though I never use it because if I need to check something, I just google it.
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Apr 2, 2023 01:31
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I remember reading the Kingdom Hearts 2 guidebook in the back of my grandma's car and gasping out loud when I realized that Xemnas and Roxas were anagrams for Ansem and Sora.
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Apr 2, 2023 01:42
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the Majora's Mask strategy guide got me through so many study halls, even though it took me an additional 15 years to actually acquire & play the game.
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Apr 2, 2023 07:59
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I recently played Castlevania 3 and checked a scan of the manual to learn what all the powerups and stuff did and it's absolutely wild note: bats are not, in fact, rodents Almost every page has something insane on it https://www.thegameisafootarcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Castlevania-III-Draculas-Curse-Game-Manual.pdf
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Apr 2, 2023 08:30
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cheetah7071 posted:I recently played Castlevania 3 and checked a scan of the manual to learn what all the powerups and stuff did and it's absolutely wild That's right- they're bugs
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Apr 2, 2023 12:49
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printing out a 300 page gamefaqs walk-through on dad's work printer ftmfw
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Apr 2, 2023 21:09
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It was mentioned earlier, the Morrowind strategy guide was essentially a novel. My brother convinced one of his teachers to let him use it for a book report because of its length. I followed suit when I was of age.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:13
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I have the one good FF7 guide from Versus when the game was released, just kind of accidentally got it instead of the official Brady games guide which was complete dogshit. Buddy of mine moved away in highschool and had borrowed it, he later mailed it back to me unprompted with a nice note.
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Apr 3, 2023 01:12
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All I can remember at the moment is a couple of guides just missing bits of information. I had a smash bros guide that didn't know how jigglypuff's down b worked and just assumed she was a joke character. The FFVIII guide didn't have the final boss in it, and said strategy wise to use the same strats they gave for some other boss(Ultima Weapon?} which was basically "stay invincible and spam Limit Breaks". Wish I still had my Pokemon Red Blue guide, it had little stickers of the sprites for you to stick on the pokedex entries when you caught them. I remember never peeling any of them off and it'd be nice to have that pristine sheet.
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Apr 3, 2023 01:24
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Threads bringing back memories of Friday nights staying at my aunt's, reading the guide for Tomb Raider, Resident Evil or Dino Crisis for my uncle while he played through them - I was too young to complete games like that at the time but I could read the poo poo out of a guide and feel like I'm contributing. Happy memories.
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Apr 3, 2023 20:00
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Baller Ina posted:The FFVIII guide didn't have the final boss in it, and said strategy wise to use the same strats they gave for some other boss(Ultima Weapon?} which was basically "stay invincible and spam Limit Breaks". I think not spoiling the final boss fight was the style at the time for PS1 era guides. Except for Vagrant Story, because the boss has a one hit kill that's kind of difficult to avoid. Curiously, Bradygames PS1 guides go for like $60 bucks on amazon these days.
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Apr 4, 2023 15:03
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I still have my mario rpg prima guide and my official earthbound guide that came with the game I greatly miss that type of media and would regularly read guides for games i didn’t have, just because i liked reading it. Video game magazines too.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:42
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I thought this was so loving cool when I was a kid: A full novelization of each game in addition to a regular walkthrough. I must have read the novelizations a dozen times. Doubt the writing holds up but 10-year-old me thought it was brilliant.
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Apr 6, 2023 05:21
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 I went to four different malls with my cousin looking for this. That was over a decade ago.
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Apr 6, 2023 08:08
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Fond memories of obsessively reading the Pokémon blue guide, carefully hiding it in my hoodie sleeves so that people wouldn't bully me, ended up getting bullied for having a weird tube for arms  .
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Apr 6, 2023 09:15
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Warcraft II came with a pretty hefty booklet containing instructions and info on buildings and units. More importantly it had a bunch of artwork and lore for factions and important characters that 12 year old me thought was the coolest thing ever. I'm pretty sure I still have it lying around in a box somewhere.
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Apr 6, 2023 09:22
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