i miss owning a physical video game strategy guide wherein half the information is incorrect because it was written hastily using an early build of the game
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Weren't those the ones from before my time that would tell you some fucked up shit like "this character's name is fungewucker. He fights in the war against the evil turtles for princess Roxanne" and it's fucking Toad from Mario
I remember having the Snake Eater guide and trying to use it to find the kerotan frogs..only to find some pages just say “FIND ME” because they didn’t even find the damn things themselves 😵💫
I still use my hardcover guide for FF13 because it gives very detailed information about weapon stats and hidden systems the game doesn't tell you about. Unfortunately all that stuff is late game so I don't use it unless I'm trying to do everything.
Reminded of my Morrowind strategy guide that was legit the size of some textbooks. Can't recall any outright wrong information but I did wear out the paper map unfolding it so many times.
Man, Tips & Tricks magazines were my go-to reading material while dropping a deuce. Their Codebooks were the best since I didn't have easy access to the internet at the time.
i miss opening a gamefaqs doc made within a week of a game's release that had 33 pages of everything you could conceivably need to know about a game and cute ascii art
Final Fantasy 9 "official" strategy guide... Where I had to find and cut out an alternative from a games magazine for the Chocograph locations because the ones in the book were wrong! 😂
Yup - and remember not having to buy a strategy guide because some games actually came with a real honest-to-goodness 100+ page manual that had a good amount of detail?
One of my favorites used to be the FF7 Versus guide that had both Test Zero enemies and the Emerald/Ruby weapons in them (and didn't have any rewards for beating the latter).
I miss when they had a special marker that came with them, and to to see the walkthrough portion of the guide you had to reveal the answers with the marker.
PlayOnline! Awful at the time because going online meant booting up a PC and using dial up to find out where an Elixir was hidden on a flash-heavy website. Trust me, it improved when they closed it down
now im just reminiscing about working on games in QA while the assigned QA'ers are working on the strategy guild side by side and constantly saying "this information will be wrong by tomorrow's build"
The entire Silent Hill 1 strategy guide has nothing but incorrect puzzle solutions because they were working off a review version of the game and the development team changed every puzzle in the game before the game released to the public.
The freaking zodiac puzzle was notorious at my local game stop for years. I forget what it was originally but they changed it to the number of legs and multiple game mags had to issue corrections.
My favorite strategy guide was Nintendo Power’s guide for Ocarina of Time, where the tips were delivered in a narrative format. “Link looked around the room and found a sigil of an open eye. When he hit it with the slingshot, the door magically opened!”
Haha I was thinking about this today. Playing ff16, and remembered getting ff7 with a physical guide that showed me all the secrets. I actually enjoyed the game more because I felt like I missed nothing. Without it I feel like I'm making mistakes that would require replays, which I won't do.
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https://www.exodusgame.com/
After passing by 2 statues, turn right (as in up, because it’s the right side of the character)
Still remember them talking about features cut from the English versions of games as if they were still present…
Stupid water temple.