Strategy Guides

[Moonface]

With the announcement that Prima Games will be closing down next Spring, let's talk about not just Prima's works, but strategy guides as a whole. Did you ever get any? Were you still collecting them even in the age of instant and free access to guides on the internet?

On the matter of Prima, I'm not surprised they're closing down, but I am impressed they lasted this long. Back in the days of little internet and being offered phone numbers to call for tips in games, I relied so much on guides to get through some of my games as a kid. I don't know if any of them were by Prima, nor can I check as they're a few thousand miles away from me, but I do remember buying guides for the first three Tomb Raider games, and I think I also had one for Croc 2. Any others I had were normally in magazines that would have multiple guides and usually split them into two parts across two issues, which nowadays I'd probably find to be a piss take but as a kid didn't know or care any better.

I know more recent strategy guides would add in cool bonuses like artwork and whatnot, but I found that most games with artwork I cared for would have an official art book that contained more than its respective guide would, so the bonuses became kinda redundant.

[lp0 on fire]

The only guide I owned was for Pokemon Red and Blue it was a gift form my parents...despite them gifting my brother Pokemon Red and a game boy color.

Go figure.

I always just used online guides, since I got the internet. It is still sad to see an end of yet another era.

[Nightingale]

I would occasionally read "Enter Diez"'s (AZ-Diez magazine's computer section) cheats, strategy guides and walkthroughs for games such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle.

You guys would be amazed by how useless those were once you got to the actual games and tried to play them alongside those guides. Sure, the section was just four pages long, so they had to make it brief, but they really went and assumed you knew a bunch of things that were key to solving the puzzles... which you usually didn't.

Fun times

[Moonface]

I think the only bad strategy guide I had was for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It presumably didn't tell me something important, as I always got stuck at the same point despite restarting my save numerous times, and eventually thought the game was broken so got it replaced, only to find it still did it. I put it down at the time to being that the game was a broken piece of shit but considering EL's sister has beaten the game (and so have many other people), I figure the guide I had just left something completely out.

[Dragon Lord]

I still loved getting strategy guides as a collector's item. In recent years I bought the guides for Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, Ni No Kuni II: Revenent Kingdom (this baby is massive, Dark Souls Remastered, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, and a couple of others that escape me at the moment.

I enjoy looking through them, even if I don't use them. Pretty much just reading them like a book just for fun. I got Prima's collection of Final Fantasy guides that they released a few years ago (remade guides for Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX), just because I thought it'd be fun to look through them.

It's sad that the biggest guide maker is now going to be gone, and that'll significantly reduce the amount of guides available. Hopefully Future Press can whether the storm and continue to make such amazing guides. Seriously, they're guides are a work of art themselves. They put so much work into making their guides as good as possible. For example, for the Dark Souls Remastered guide, they actually hired LobosJr, a streamer who has put in at least 10,000 hours doing various challenge runs of Dark Souls, to rewrite all of the boss strategies for the guide. And for their Dark Souls II and Bloodborne guides, they brought in a big Dark Souls YouTuber (now streamer) named EpicNameBro, who actually met and had lunch with Miyazaki (producer of Dark Souls and now president of From Software). So they go the extra mile to bring in experienced players of the game to help make the guide as amazing as possible. It's astounding how much effort they put into their guides, and if the day ever comes when Future Press shut downs, it'll be one of the saddest days in gaming.

[Kyng]

I only got a couple: one for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (in 2002), and one for Civilization V (in 2010).

The RCT2 one was pretty useful: it gave me quite a few ideas for beating scenarios I was struggling with up to that point. The Civ 5 one, less so - mainly because each patch affected the game balance in some way, so that after a year or so, the optimum strategy was very different from what was listed in the guide!

[WR91]

I don't think I ever actually purchased a strategy guide but whenever myself and my family would go to the store as a kid, I'd check them out by flipping through the pages. Now that I think of it, maybe I'm part of the reason Prima Guides are shutting down.