fuck ranking games. been there done that. lol
what are the greatest strategy guides / hint books / supplemental tip sheets / quick reference guides / player’s guides, etc. ever associated with a vidcon?
i gotta put the Earthbound Player’s Guide up there. shit slaps. love the claymation
this little wave race 64 card rips:
anyone remember the little hint book that came with link to the past?
TOP SECRET MESSAGES FROM SAHASRAHLA. I’m pretty sure it even came sealed with a sticker
but the one i really liked for LTTP was this one:
i loved this weirdos strategy guide. it was written in an incredibly snarky gamefaqs attitude voice but way before gamefaqs so it always stuck with me
someone found him on twitter for me and i gushed at him about how this is my favorite guide ever and scared him off im pretty sure but it was still fun to be able to directly tell him how i have the whole damn game memorized from reading it three times while i had pink eye and couldnt touch the controller
The official Moon guide has an entire fake walkthrough for Fake Moon, as well as the entire Youshamen comic, plus a bunch of other in-universe-themed pages as well.
i’ve said it many times before, but i think if there were english translations of gamest mooks, arcades would have lasted longer in the west.
they aren’t strategy guides, but the manuals for pokemon red/blue and snes sim city were memorably excellent.
when i was a kid, there was a magazine called sega xs, that was like 80% strategy guides and then 20% a section in the back printing every known cheat for uk-released games on every sega console. a lot of the guides were for platform games, and took the form of page after page of composite screenshot maps, which i loved.
I had the one of these for Mario Kart of all things (I think an aunt saw it at like goodwill and got it for me because she knew I liked Mario Kart) and it had a bunch of swears in it which was really funny for me when I was like 6. like why is this book swearing so much about Mario Kart
i love how prima and brady started out as TOTALLY NOT LISCENSED BY NINTENDO. WE DONT HAVE APPROVAL FOR ANY OF THIS SHIT. THE HOTTEST UNCENSORED MOST EXTREME KICKFLIPPING TIPS AND TRICKS YOU CAN FUCKING IMAGINE YOU STUPID BABY
Millennium’s Metal Gear Solid: Official Mission Handbook
This is the real Big Boss.
8 arrows to explain relationships and 4 of them are described with “?”
The Riven guide is great. It has multiple guides in one, each giving you a different layer of literality. The first is just a novelisation of your journal as if the character had written it. The next is just socratic questions about each problem with no answers. The next is more straightforward hints and the last is just a literal explanation of all solutions.
My best memory of actually using a guide while playing a game was Dark Souls 2. I preordered that nice hardcover FuturePress one along with the game and I used it when needed instead of the Internet.
The one I spent the most time with, though, was Super Mario Bros. 3. I read it for a year or so before I even got my NES. It’s still fun to look through. (Close second would be the NES Game Atlas. Not as elegant but far more content.)
The best artwork award goes to this Final Fantasy Tactics one.
did that mario 64 guide that got taken down by nintendo ever resurfaced anywhere? it was like clay dioramas of all the levels. did i just imagine that
I’ve posted about it before but for me the winner is clearly the Game Boy Nintendo Player’s Guide that I got from the library as a kid. I didn’t even have a gameboy! But it was so exciting to imagine all these worlds stuffed with secrets
I loved these stage maps all laid out like that, especially with your little dude in action all along the way. It’s a lot more playful and kinetic than just a map!
This chart blew my mind and made FFL seem so deep and mysterious and weird… which is entirely appropriate for a SaGa game
I looked through the book credits but wasn’t able to figure out who made actually made this handpla but look at what computer graphics stole from us. Kinda makes me think of Dragon’s Heaven for some reason, the director just like “I think my models are cool so I’m putting them in”
Ok well daphny picked the cool alt Link to the Past guide so I’ll guess I’ll be the boring middlebrow guy and say this guide lit my brain on fire:
That Terada art. I loved reading the book far more than playing the game, and I loved playing the game.
there’s bunch of sega xs issues on the archive too!
I always loved this FFVII guide that I bought with the game. Well, I bought it before the game. Maybe when I preordered? I don’t remember, I just remember that it was out before the game was out. And I remember that because I spoiled aeris’ death through the guide before I owned the game, which was an impressive thing to do in 1997.
It’s a nice guide, full of artwork, stats, maps, lists. I like the layout. It’s an unofficial guide, which coupled with the facts that it was out before the game, calls Aerith by her proper name, and features no images of in-game english text leads, leads one to believe that the writers did not have access to the localization. I was obsessed with this stupid game in 1997 and I poured through this guide enough that I eventually wore out the binding.
this same company produced a street fighter alpha 2 strategy guide that I unfortunately cannot find a scan of. it is notable for being written by a group of tournament players, many of whom remain recognizable to this day. it represented by far the best repository of information for any fighting game available in the western world until the height of the SRK days. considering the presentation + the quality of information you were getting, it’s still pretty much the best source for a single game that doesn’t include video outside of dustloop.
working designs used to produce in house strategy guides for their games. they were very in depth, and also about what you’d expect from something written by working designs. I will mention the Lunar Eternal Blue complete guide in particular for only one stupid reason: it features a direct quote from 15 or 16 year old me, which I will not reproduce or directly link to because duh
The whole Nintendo Player’s Guide series is great, but I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the SNES preview one which had these fun pages where they’d have oddball real world facts tangentially related to each of the games covered in that section, like about Easter Island for Gradius III, or Vlad the Impaler for Castlevania IV. I got a kick out of some of the stretches they had to make for some of the games.
Otherwise it was a really weird one in the series because it was previews of launch window SNES games rather than maps and whatnot. Classic Nintendo Power marketing scheme.
I think those first four guides—the NES Atlas, passwords and cheat codes one, the Gameboy one, and the SNES preview one—were included with some level of a Nintendo Power subscription and were doled out quarterly over the course of one year, the same way those red cover Mario 3/Final Fantasy/4-player games overview ones were a year or so before. Its wild how much that sort of thing would totally make my year.
They kept that series going into the N64 era (Goldeneye is the last one I think I got and that was through cashing in Nintendo Power subscriber points), and of course the deluxe scratch and sniff manual that came with Earthbound at the top of the thread was formatted to match the series.
The Mario Paint one was another later one that I got a lot of use out of.
Prior to those I was pretty heavy into those paperback-sized How to Win at Nintendo Games books. My mom picked up the first two pretty early into us getting a NES half for their intended purpose and half so we could read about other games, and I had to wait for her to get done reading them to get my turn.
There was some spectacular BS in those. One of the surprisingly later ones (4?) has a thing about rumors of a secret chocolate factory in Mario 1, and by that point I had a pretty good understanding of the limits of these games to know there was no way the limited sprite building blocks in SMB1 could be used to represent that sort of thing.
I think the author of those went on to co-write some sci-fi novel series with Gillian Anderson Tekwar-style.
How did I forget the 4th of those red cover guides was for Ninja Gaiden 2!?
It crosses the line between biography and strategy guide but the Official Book of Ultima was weirdly huge for me as a kid. I only had access to the NES games except for a very narrow window where one of the kids on the block had a dying C64 that his dad fatally sprayed with WD40 to try to fix, but I must have read this thing over and over.
It just came up in another thread and someone mentioned that Lord British bio part was pretty iffy.
