As a kid my family was pretty poor, so I never really got alot of the games I wanted. But we had internet, so instead I spent alot of time on gamefaqs reading their walkthroughs and imagining what the game was like instead. By the time I got older and was making my own money I would start getting strategy guides when I got games not because I needed them, but mostly out of a sense of nostalgia for that. Of course at that time they knew they couldn't really get away with selling you info you could just find on the net so alot of them are just nice collector's items with alot of good artwork and other flares to them. I think my favorite is probably the hardcover Final Fantasy XIII guide, it's a reasonably sized book and it's just real nice to look at.
I feel you. Video games are expensive here, so ended up reading walkthroughs from GameFAQs. Knowing about the secrets and characters of the game entertained me. Am interested to buy the strategy guides, though they are very expensive in my country eventhough I am working now. Looking forward to buy my first strategy guide.
Strategy guides evolved from tip lines, my favorite being the Sierra tipline, which in the early years, was just Roberta Williams's phone number. Need help figuring out a game's puzzles? Just call the woman who made them!
I collect artbooks instead. I love looking at concept art and sketches. I've filled several large bookshelves already. This past weekend I recently acquired the 25th anniversary artbooks for Kirby, Persona 5, Monster Hunter. I also found the art of Lion King '94 at a used bookstore, it was a great weekend.
I remember worshipping the Fallout 3 one back in the day despite not owning the game. Last one I had myself was Lego Pirates of the Caribbean from 2011, despite never actually bothering to pick up the game.
This might be the best place for me to put this story. Once as a QA tester for Fable 3 we had to do achievement testing, where we had to achieve every one, for every build towards the end of project. One of those achievements was to collect every article of clothing, the hardest to find was the chef hat. We all spent the first hour or so a day hunting every chest in hope to find the chef hat. Later after the disk went gold, the strategy guide was giving to us for review, chilling in a random pop out was a note saying that the castle chef would always gift you a chef hat if you befriended him, we thought this was a dubious claim until we all started trying it.... So many hours wasted looking in chests.
My favorite was the Resident Evil 2 Perfect Guide. That thing was LOADED with info; how many knife swipes it would take to kill the bosses, pics of cut rooms accessible through Game Shark etc. But for nostalgia-sake, my favorite will always be the included Earthbound Tourist Guide.
Tips and Tricks' magazine strategy guides gave me insight into the first few hours of several games that are now my favorites ever. It took me years to reaize the Survival Kids (GB) guide was, in fact, a guide for the whole game, the game can just be summarized in a few pages. Felt like a massive experience. When I was 10 years old or so my grandma and I took the bus to the mall, a big deal as public transport in america is garbage and it's literally the only time I've ever ridden a public bus. We bought the Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 guide at Software Etc. It was very, very thick. I read it front to back like a book. I love reading strategy guides for games I'm already intimately familiar with. I miss them.
I loved the guide for Mega Man Zero 2. Every single page had a background that was artwork in the style of the cover art and "cutscenes" for lack of a better word. The number of times I went through just for more of that art, good times.
The Dark Souls guides are not only useful but are also very pretty art books. The Lunar 2 strategy guide is one of my favorite possessions. Its beautiful.
Reminds me of the AVGN breakdown of the Nintendo Power contest: “Fun, that’s where the fun is? Right there?” (9:15) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DC1zkSmjBqU.html
When I was a kid, my brother had the strategy guide for Ocarina of Time. Not only did it have ALL of the official art for that game (including a bunch of stuff that, at that point, you couldn't find anywhere else), there was a whole page on how actual notes were mapped onto the controls for your ocarina, including the score of the Kakariko Village BGM specifically transcribed for the in-game ocarina, using the C buttons. And, on top of that, it gave the official canonical ages of Child and Adult Link (10 and 17, respectively), AND was written in a "storybook" format. The full-page spread of Link vs. Ganon from that guide would later become a 3DS case, which I own along with my OG 3DS. (I tried to paste it into this comment. YT doesn't like that.) I think my brother loaned the guide to some friends or something 20 years ago, and they never returned it. I still miss that game guide so much, even though I beat OoT ages ago. (And yes, I totally tried to trace all of that glorious watercolor art onto other paper, so I could admire it without having to borrow my brother's game guide. This went about as well as you might expect of a 13-y/o girl tracing with printer paper instead of tracing paper.)
As someone who has been creating video game strategy guides professionally for over 16-years, it always brings a smile to my face to see someone taking the time to cover this very niche area of the gaming world. I dabbled in the 'darker' side of video game magazine tips books and magazine guides/tips for Future Publishing in the UK, and it was a hell of a job. While I got to play a lot of games early, I also had to play a lot of crap games early. Also, creating a high-quality written guide (with screenshots that offer value and help alongside the text), is an unbelievable amount of work. I remember doing a Mass effect 3 guide in two weeks of the game's launch that ended up being 32,000 words in length, had over 300 screenshots, and over 24 fully-edited videos. Then add all of that manually to an online CMS, and then sanity-check the final result. Oh, and I also had to play and finish the game (repeatedly) within that timeframe. As I was playing the PC version, I ended up with about 85 manually backed-up saves in case a save file ever became corrupted. All of that took 12-hours a day, for the full 14-days straight. It *can* be a fun job to do, but it's definitely an insane amount of work to do it properly.
i remember hearing that the guy that wrote the guide for moonlight syndrome, wrote such an impressive guide for the game (it was the game told through the perspective of a journalist watching the games events play out) that suda asked him to write a scenario for his next game, the silver case, fittingly enough, the section was a second campaign with a journalist seeing the events play out from his perspective.
I can’t tell you how overjoyed I was to see how much time you devoted to Dan Birlew’s work. I always felt like I was the only bizzaro fanboy at the time who followed his stuff closely but he was so damn good and I’m so happy he got (and is still getting) recognition for his contributions.
I remember back in middle school, I helped out a friend with his English class research paper. As a thank you, he printed and bound an online guide of Final Fantasy VII. It was one which was based on the Japanese game, with direct translations and the like. I’m pretty sure I still have it packed away somewhere.
A friend of mine had the Versus FF7 guide when I was growing up, and man, it was amazing. He gifted me the poster since he wasn't using it and later gifted me the book itself as a going-away present. That guide means a lot to me.
You should've got the Ultimania guidebooks by Square Enix from Japan which are the size of phone books. They put Brady and Prima a run for their money with all the guide content, the bestiary, artwork, music notes, and development team interviews.
I recently beat Earthbound for the first time and the strategy guide for it is one of the most beautiful guides I've ever seen. There's so much art work and small excerpts written in a similar style to the actual game. It's also fully digitized within the SNES Classic's manual list, which is how I read it :)
I absolutely love the old PSone era guides and still collect them myself. Largely because when replaying an older game, they’re a great way to immersive yourself into the over all experience even further. That and you’ll almost always find unreleased content floating around in many guides. Largely because the companies who created these guides, typically had beta versions of the games. It’s a shame they’re finally being laid to rest...but yet I’m amazed how long they’ve lasted to this day.
Dood, I love collecting strategy guides. My favorites are Kingdom Hearts and Hybrid Heaven. I would love to hear more about your strategy guide collection! Keep it comin!
The Versus RE2 and RE3 guides are my favorite among my little collection of guides, they were super in-depth and had the little Wacky Funland blurbs that would point out weird or funny details. The RE3 guide was how I learned how to mix all the different gunpowders to even make Freeze rounds to use against Nemesis. and all the secret weapons and ammo, and the RE2 guide even had a section for Gameshark codes and beta items left in the game.
The worst for me was a guide I had for Turok 2 for the N64 that only had full walkthrough for the first three levels. The last three levels were just kind of vague turn left here with a picture kind of thing and were more of a scrapbook of vacation photos then a strategy guide or walkthrough. like after the third level it just flat-out said you should be a Turok master by this point and we're not going to hold your hand anymore. Had the FF9 guide and bought it without noticing/realizing the playonline stuff. Seriously considered printing all the little things out and taping them over the refer to playonline bubbles in the book. I remember there being a whole lot of errors in the ff7 guide too.
@@GrizonII I'm already nostalgic for them. Sometimes, I'll find guides at thrift stores and want to buy even if I'v never seen or heard of the game before, just because I like them.
Some people collect figurines, statues and plushies; however, I like to collect strategy guides! Thanks for making this video talking about them. It's unfortunate that strategy guides in print have basically come to an end thanks to online accessibility (something I contributed to), game patches, etc... But I'll always appreciate how good those hardback strategy guides look on the shelf and how useful some of the info within remains.
Didn't get physical strategy guides growing up with the exception of one small guide for Mortal Kombat 1-3 but have several now in my adult years including that Silent Hill 2 one. I love the extra stuff some of these put in that you can't get from GameFAQs guide and bonus goodies like posters and DVDs are just icing on the cake.
The fighting game strategy guides by Gamefan were amazing with all the artwork, combo pics, and bios. I read the _Mortal Kombat Trilogy_ and _Darkstalkers_ ones almost daily for years.
It’s still mostly in boxes, and in another storage unit but one in our apartment building. Hopefully we’ll be moving to a bigger place this summer and I can finally have a proper game room!
God, growing up in a small town where the nearest Best Buy or EB Games was a 45 minute drive away, some of my strongest memories were of reading the instruction manual or strategy guide on the drive home to get hyped for my new game. I love all my old Square guides for FFs and Xenogears. Wish they were in better shape now for collecting purposes, but they were well used and loved.
Details like the story of Dan Berlou - the GamesFAQ submitting fan who became a pro - are why I come to SSFF. Such odd, idiosyncratic info and perspectives, coupled with the genuine and gleeful persona of the host: it never fails to bring a smile to my face.
Prima Guides were the best! They even taught me how to read. When I was a kid, I had the best times looking at badass colorful images and learning how to kick ass at games.
I'm so happy I live in modern times. I can put all my big, bulky books on my Kindle and read them there! Got several strategy guides on it too! Everything from the Silent Hill 2 guide to a little mini RE3 guide from an old gaming magazine I used to have. Good stuff!
I had no idea President Evil wrote the official Silent Hill 2 and 3 strategy guides! I still have very fond memories of sitting up in the middle of the night in the early 2000s when I was in high school, poring over his Silent Hill gamefaq. I’m so happy to find out he made a living out of it.
I love Strategy Guides. I have a pretty substantial collection of PS1- PS2 guides. There are a lot of them that are pretty much just the price of shipping on Amazon...or at least were. I love the old school Nintendo guides. There is the black cover one with the very helpful Metroid map. Then the super Nintendo ones that are pretty expensive - LTTP, FF6, Super Metroid, etc. I usually try to get one for any RPG I have. I also like the fighting game guides. Favorite guide companies are the Versus Perfect Guides, PiggyBack, and Double Jump And Future Press. They make very nice modern guides. A lot them are pricey.
Aw man, I'd totally forgotten about strategy guides that were written in that narrative style! I remember ones for Ocarina of Time, Parasite Eve, and Pokemon Gen 1. Some of them were a little smaller than the average guide, so they felt that much more like actual novels. Much nostalgia!
I think my favorite strategy guide is the one for Myst; it was written in the first person, like it was a diary of the silent protagonist going through and solving the puzzles. It even had some extra backstory, like how the guy found the Myst book in a library in San Francisco. Really cool stuff.
It must feel so nice to finally have all of your stuff in your new home. Moving around a lot is the worst when you have to leave all of the stuff you've collected over the years behind until you finally take up permanent residence. Congrats!
I think the first strategy guide I ever had was Nintendo Power Super Mario 3 guide. Therefore, that's my favorite guide. Strategy guides were so great back then, but now they are driven obsolete after the internet and also for the fact that games get updated and therefore making them out of date before leaving the shelf!
Super fun and nostalgic episode. I remember one time my sister and I snuck into our dad’s office late at night to print a gameFAQ for DK64, 100s of pages all collectibles. I came home from school one day to find my dog had destroyed it, it looked like it had snowed in my room. I was still finding little pieces of it years later. My sister and I never beat the game, wish I could go back in time and thank Maple for the slog she saved us from.
I still bought and actually USED strategy guides up to somewhere around 2011-2012. A lot of the time, if I got a game day 1 and got stuck on a part, like legitimately stuck for at least a few hours, I'd turn to the internet and find no "complete" guides or forums talking about it, so I either had to wait a few days for things online to catch up to me (which I wasn't willing to do) or go back out and pick up the guide (which I always did).
I still have my Versus FFVII strategy guide. It is tattered in pieces, my brother and I took such poor care of these guides, but I love them. The Versus Metal Gear Solid strategy guide was easily the best strategy guide ever.
So it's probably been pointed out ad-nauseam with you posting a strategy guides video as another RU-vidr, but with watching this I'm so glad that you two took a completely different approach to talking about the same topic
One if the big reasons to get a strategy guide back in the day was for the artwork. If I had a coffee table and needed coffee table books, I would make them strategy guides for SNES/N64/PS1 games.
Yay I bought all mine in the last few years for a couple dollars each while no one was paying any attention to them. So much fun to pick one up with your retro game and do it old school.
I still love collecting strategy guides. I've recent just got the Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days guides and they're BEAUTIFUL.
Hey Derek! If you haven't seen it, the Prima guide for Pokemon Gold and Silver had a sealed secrets section- pages sealed within a perforated binding that you could tear open to learn "spoilers." Thanks for the video!
This is so cool! Strategy guides are one of my favorite things to collect. So many of them are unavailable in pdf form and nearly lost to time. It's so fun to flip through and admire all the hard work that went into making one of these. So great to see someone else sharing my weird little interest! Excellent video Derek and Grace!
By the time I was finally old enough to buy a strategy guide for a mainline Final Fantasy game after getting a job, it was for Final Fantasy 13. I had this awesome hardcover guide full of amazing art and character strategies for a game I just mashed the x button on auto attack for. I desperately wanted one for FFX, a gaming magazine I had featured six super in depth pages for the opening chapters and I adored it.
My parents were never particularly supportive of my gaming hobby, so I only recall owning two strategy guides. One for Pokémon Snap and the other for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Blue Rescue Team. Coincidentally, two games where the strategy guide greatly enhanced my experience. As a kid, I never would have known how to take the secret pictures to unlock Mew’s level in Pokémon Snap. And while PMD can be played just fine without a strategy guide, it provides awesome assistance in both being prepared for dungeons and finding rare items. In general though, I was never super in to strategy guides. Not because I could use he internet. My parents forbade me from using the computer unless it was for homework. I feel like most games are straightforward and well designed. You don’t need to know every secret because you can probably figure it out on your own. And that’s part of the fun, overcoming challenges all by yourself!
My first strategy guide was way back in the day as a little kid when my mum got the guide for Tomb Raider III, a game that can still take upwards of an hour to complete a level with all the secrets even with the guide. My favourites though probably have to be the ones for fallout 3 and 4, 4 especially coming in a nice hardback book with some beautiful art and maps in it, as well as giving background lore and details on stuff you're not told about in the game itself.
I don't have a whole lot of strategy guides, just ones I got for re-subscribing to Nintendo Power back in the day. I did use the FFTA one a lot though. And I liked how the Pokemon Red/Blue one had little stickers you could use to mark which Pokemon you had in your dex. AND, the Pokemon TCG one came with a free Venusaur card. Wowie! By the way, your little outro, "stay powerful, stay tuned, we'll see you next time," reminded me a lot of the outro Coyote Peterson uses for Brave Wilderness videos and that made me smile.
Man Scott hit puberty fast! But really glad two great content creators released two really fun videos on the same thing on the same week. Looking like a good week to be a nerd!
The part on Secret of Mana might have been a company mandate. After all, this is written in the manual (clay models of the characters and all): “This is no idle quest, to be completed in 1 or 2 sittings... you can expect it to take 70 hours to complete.” Sure, if you’re doing some kind of handicap challenge maybe? The language is equally flowery and adventurous throughout, so might be a pattern there? Also, if you like that style of guides, check out the Bard’s Tale I and II - Tales of the Unknown series. If you want a copy, I can always email you a scan I obtained years ago. To say as little as possible, there’s a reason I put them as number 1 on my own list...
This is a legitimately fun timing. I also love how your and Scott's videos ended up being very complementary, with both of you tackling the subject from different perspectives :)
I really like these videos, because they don't feel scripted(even though I guess they are, at least partially). It really feels like we are just sitting down with a friend who excitedly tells us about something he likes.
My dad had the early Prima Super Mario World guide that he bought new with his SNES in college and I used to read through it over and over to learn stages I was working on or close to when I was in elementary school. I couldn't play the SNES often because it was our only console and was hooked up to the living room TV (this was in the early 2000s) so I poured over the secret and super secret sections every night.
I have the Nintendo Power Super Mario Bros. 3 Player's Guide. My mom actually laminated the cover so it would last longer. However, I assume we at some point rolled it up for some reason, because as long as I can remember owning the thing it's spine has been in this perpetually half rolled state that makes it difficult to read, especially towards the end of the guide. I also remember when our mom would take us shopping, we'd spend out time looking at player's guides in the electronics section. Super Mario RPG was coming out, and we read the strategy guide in anticipation. Mom ended up buying us a copy, before we actually got the game. We couldn't hep ourselves and read ahead as it were, and got spoiled on a lot of important plot twists.
Man. Double Jump's books were freaking amazing. I was huge into the first Disgaea, and their guide was so impossibly comprehensive that I think I even ended up buying some for games I didn't own out of respect.
I've always loved old video game magazines and strategy guides! I did loose a good portion of what I originally had from my youth, but I still have this one gem I got from one of those old Book fair things from scholastic catalogs. I'm talking about the "Winning Tips for Nintendo: Newest Game Strategies" made by the editors of "Consumer Guide" and published in 1990! The art on this is sort of crazy and boasts to list 18 Nintendo games with an extra 5 titles for the Game Boy! A total of 64 pages with some ... okay strategies ranging from half ass to actually sort of useful. You could actually tell what titles they cared about and what ones where just filler. Looking it over now ... it isn't that great, but I'm sure I looked over that magazine almost a thousand times. Only because it was maybe the only thing I had up until I got a hold of some old Nintendo powers. Oh the memories ^_^ Now I gotta go look at what I still have of my old collection. Thanks guys for the nostalgia!
I'm a big fan of material released early in the life of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in the US, and those first few video games they localized had strategy guides that were a gold mine of weird almost-right content.
My favorite strategy Guide was one for one of the Disgaea games, it was styled like a Manga with story bits created to be a entertaining read like the more famous Earthbound strategy Guide
i dont remember buying that many strategy guides because i had game magazines that had guides in them psm, official playstation magazine, egm2, dreamcast magazine all had guides. i do remember buying that ff 9 enhance guide but i never used the online stuff i still own my ff 10 guide and metal gear solid 2 guide. the last strategy guide i ever brought was for dead space 3 but that was free. i did buy the nes classic game guide from toys r us for 6 dollars on clearance. now that you can just go on youtube and look up walkthroughs game guides are mostly pointless now. i like getting them for reading and nostalgia when there not over priced. versus was the best strategy guide tho. great video i actually enjoy this one keep it up.
Related to that Secret of Mana guide, I remember an Ocarina of Time guide that was written in a similar style, though I don't recall if it was the entire book or only sections. I distinctly remember a passage talking about one of the silver coin rooms in Ganondorf's Tower talking about Link feeling one of the whirling grim reaper blades nicking the corner of his ear. They went IN on it and I admire that. I THINK it was the official Nintendo book, too, but I could be wrong about that, it's been years and I was borrowing the book from a friend.
Partial to cheat code books but man those strategy guides with lovely artwork have their charm man. I think they use to sell them at the book fair back in elementary school. Also I really like the coloring on this video, maybe its the new camera, but the new videos look brightly lit, almost too much? Anyway luv u uncle Derek
I do think strategy guide type books should still be around as collector's items, not to act as a walkthrough or anything, but to be a collection of art, interviews, early test stuff, and secrets within the game. SOMA did something ultra fucking cool with it's release. It was entirely digital, but with a .zip hidden in the local files, only accessible with a literally impossible to guess password, which you could find throughout the game by performing various specific tasks like flushing the figure on the main character's desk in his apartment at the start of the game. You finally get it open, and it's a goddamn treasure trove. Art, models, reference photos [including real gore...], test footage, bugs, random bullshit, and 30 minutes of footage from a late in development build which is vastly different from the final. I enjoyed the game, but wouldn't call myself a fan, and still spent like 2 hours just fuckin digging through everything, it's incredible.
I used to have the Secret of Mana one and I loved its "novelization" style. If you're curious, I actually have seen other games whose guides did that... the various "Companions" for Sierra Adventure games (King's Quest Companion, Police Quest Casebook, etc) are all done in a similar fashion, altho there its split into "novelization-style" plus a section that is straight-walkthru (the latter usually covers optional stuff the novel does not). Sadly, I owned very few of these guides and I wound up losing all of them as I kept moving from house to house. Of all of them the one I miss most is Nintendo Power's Final Fantasy guide, which also tried to flesh out the "plot." Funny story: I got an NP subscription around the time of the N64 and bought that guide by actualy back-ordering it from Nintendo themselves. It's just weird to think that for a time, if I wanted I could've bought every NP issue brand-new straight from the publisher.
For the longest time - late 90s to mid '00s - only Prima guides were ever sold in stores around where I live in Ohio. It was REALLY weird to see Bradygames guides show up in random places on occasion (typically Used, at Mom & Pop game stores). And I've never seen a Versus Books until literally this episode.
The first 5 original tomb raider games for the PS1 were the only (to this day) games I needed a strategy guide for. Especially getting the secrets. It was like impossible to know how to solve some of those puzzles.
I used to read the guide for Fable all the time when I was a kid. My dad said I would tell him about things he missed even though I had yet to even play the game. I recently bought a new copy since our old one has been falling apart for years now.
Heh I remember that plot guide! It was later apparently proved wrong by the creators in pretty much everything but hell I learned a lot about lots of stuff (Jacob's Ladder!) Reading that one! Great video!
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