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Are Game Guides Dying?
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest GameSpotting feature discussing whether the print-based game guide is a thing of the past. According to the piece: "As long as there have been games, there have been game guides to help players beat them. Over the years they have evolved into slick, glossy (and thin) books with tons of valuable information and high-quality screenshots and maps... Guides make tough games easier. But are they worth it?" The author references a videogame-store friend laughing: "Why buy a game guide when I can just download the FAQ for free?" Is there any new presentation of paper-based game guides that might make you tempted to pay for them, or are they truly dying out for good?
first of all of course, they're free.
they're also available when you need it (just one googling away).
most importantly they're updated with various bits of little tidbits usually. the official kind of booklets can fail you miserably if there were some last minute changes to the game, or bugs. paper versions also aren't usually made by some mad gamer, which can be a plus as well as a minus.
also forums provide nowadays most of the information that such booklets would be useful for.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It used to be you would get a useful manual with a game. Now, all that you get is a "how to install" and a "how to play the tutorial" section in the manual. The rest of the useful information is printed into the game guide for extra profit.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
They may be almost completely pointless for somebody who knows about gamefaqs.com, but some are great as art books / reference for game programmers (especially RPGs). And they have nice maps and stuff.
What I want to know is who's watching those 'cheat code' segments of video game shows and G4's 'cheat' full half-hour. I mean, watching it hoping one of the games you own ends up there and then going to the web site and printing the codes? Why watch in the first place?
On another note: are "are X dying" articles dying? I haven't seen one in a few days.
buying a guide for RTS games is probably an absolute waste. Blizzard games, for example, go through major revisions before release, so that the artwork on the box is usually out of date by the time the game goes gold (as boxes are done months in advance) (siege tanks shooting battle cruisers on the SC box, for example). i imagine books are on a similar schedule, so the information in such a guide would be useless.
then you get into the whole realm of strategies which are very much an evolutionary thing, changing dramatically over time, particularly with each balance change introduced.
Another great advantage of Gamefaqs is that there are typically many different faqs/walkthroughs for the same game. I often find it useful to read a couple of different authors' explanations of a difficult part of a game. If one author offers a confusing or difficult solution, I can simply jump to another faq to look for a better explanation or a more elegant tip. With a print guide, if you don't get what the author is trying to have you accomplish (or if the proposed solution is difficult or klugy), you're screwed.
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
The old Infocom games had the best hint books...
They used special pens to reveal hidden answers so you couldn't accidentally read something you didn't want to.
There were some great red herring questions to keep people honest, too.
Of course, they are all Online now, too...
I buy game guides for most of the console games I purchase. Not so much for myself, but for my daughter. Guides for Gran Turismo 3, and the FIFA games have helped her get up to speed in a game quickly. Hard to read a FAQ on the PC from across the house she says. Since I wait for them to go on sale, the cost is negligible for me.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
It's not so much that the content is available for free as it is that the guides cost on the order of $20+ USD and that's quite expensive! I really don't care about the glossy print nor artwork on a guide. It means nothing to me. The ASCII format is wonderful because I can format it if need be and I can search it easily too.
I have console gaming friends and I would always be printing out GameFAQ guides and cheat codes for them. Once they found out they could just ask me for the content, they stopped buying the crazy guides. Half the time they are so gaudy you have trouble reading the damn things due to lack of contrast!. i.e. Dark page with dark print or very tiny print.
I use GameFAQ constantly! I generally try not to use it until I've beaten the game on my own but sometimes you get stuck on something really stupid and can't figure out how to get past it. I look up what I need and I go back to the game. This mostly happens with poorly designed levels that are darn near impossible to understand without a guide.
It's possible, perhaps even likely, that games companies will become the dominant producers of guides. Why should they let third-parties profit off the back of their hard work? Plus of course there are two revenue streams available to them, not just the one available to third-parties...
1. Selling the guide on its own.
2. At a later date, when sales of the game and guide have dried up, bundling them together (perhaps with a DVD or soundtrack CD) and selling them as special editions, gift packs, etc. Third-party guide publishers generally don't have this option available to them, so the shelf life of a guide is relatively short.
George Broussard of 3D Realms has already talked about preventing third-parties from publishing guides to Duke Nukem Forever, by not allowing them to use screenshots. (Sure they can still publish the guide, freedom of speech 'n' all that, but who's going to buy a guide without screenshots?) That would suggest 3DR intends to produce their own guide at some point, and if a big developer like 3DR starts the bandwagon rolling then we can expect to see a lot of other developers piling up on the back of it. And quite right too.
I am not a big fan of guides in most cases since to me, getting a solution without finding it yourself defeats the entire purpose of playing the game in the first place. I do however purchase guides under certain circumstances. Some RPGs for example have just absurd amounts of complexity and having some charts to organize information can be welcome indeed.
Dark Cloud 2 springs to mind. If you have never played it, the game boasts a number of very deep side games and a robust item crafting system that could take you years to completely chronicle yourself. Having a reference for fish breeding, and inventing can save me from a lot of boring repetitive experimentation. While I think the fishing is neat, I have no desire to spend 40 hours doing it. Am I cheating? I guess but I prefer to think of it as speeding through something I don't find as entertaining in favor of spending more time beating monsters with my wrench.
Most games however are not this complex, A typical FPS has you wandering through a fairly straight-forward maze shooting and killing things and looking for some way to open a door at the end of it. Do I really need a guide to tell me that in order to finish the Last stage of Halo I need to drive really fast and not hit obstructions? Is it any mystery that I am supposed to shoot everybody I see when playing Red Faction 2?
Are guides dying? Not anytime soon. While the store charges you $15-$20 a piece for them, keep in mind that they only pay about a dollar a piece from the publisher so the huge markup balances any losses incurred from unsold stock. Besides, every on-line FAQ that appears in the first week of a game's release is plagiarized straight out of a guide anyway. If guides were gone, the FAQs would shrink up as well.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Not I have bought a guide in a while, as I use GameFaqs just like everyone else, but the one advantage that I think people haven't mentioned yet of the printed guides are the screenshots. There are definitely some games and situations where words just can't adequately express what you're supposed to do or go. Usually in the FAQ that will be accompanied by "just keep trying - you'll get it eventually!"
Like I said, I haven't bought a guide in a while, but if I'm already at the store, and I happen to remember that I'm stuck somewhere in one of many games I play and then put on hold, I definitely might check out the screenshot. Screenshots of items and enemies might be useful as well, as in the text FAQ all you're getting is the general description and then it's up to you to match that mentally when you actually encounter it in the game.
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.. was when I bought my son the guide book for one of the later Final Fantasy games ( I believe it was FF9). The book was full of the typical hints, tips and tricks, but all of the key information was missing. For all of the really important stuff you needed to take a code number listed in the guide and input it into Square's playonline.com website (which required registration, of course).
If I have to go to the computer to get the information anyway, why not just use one of the free faqs available? Why pay my money for a slick, colorful guide with little valuable information? I am pretty sure that was the last guide book I ever purchased.
In the future they will probably just skip the printed material altogether and charge you $5.95 to access the same information on their website.
The only real advantage with a store-bought game guide is that they are typically available as soon as the game is released. Usually you have a company that puts out the "official" game guide for a game, and the author of this guide has had plenty of time and access to the beta version of the game. So its great if you are one of those release-day buyers that lack patience.
One might argue that they look prettier and more professional than a FAQ but often the content itself is very lacking. A good example of this was the last game guide I bought which was for Master of Orion 3. On the surface it looked like it was going to be an extremely informative and helpful book for strategy. But when I actually took it home and started really digging into it, I found that it offered very little. I found it akin to having an 18' X 36' swimming pool that only ended up being 3 inches deep.
Plus, you have to take into account the fact that games get patched (well PC games anyway). A lot of times the patches can really change the dynamic of the game. You are not going to see version 2 of a game guide. On the other hand you will see version 12.55 of a FAQ.
I don't really get the whole portability argument either. If you are on a console you arent even tying up your computer anyway. If its a computer game, theres a decent chance you can either run it in a window or otherwise alt-tab out of the thing. Plus its not like you have to print out all 200 pages of the FAQ. A lot of times FAQs have a lot of info that is cool as a reference but not really required to "win the game" or otherwise get you unstuck.
As far as grammar and spelling, again I don't necessarily see the game guide winning out in every case. With a FAQ, if you make a grammatical mistake, its easy enough to correct. FAQ writers have all the time in the world to update and make corrections. Game guides on the other hand are going to be under some strict deadlines because publishers want that book out there the minute the game is available.
One thing that annoys me the most about game guides is the software stores nagging you to buy them. I think they know the deal and so they will offer incentives to make you buy it with the game, like say give you 20% off if you buy it when you buy the game.
I'm though buying game guides myself although I don't see them disappearing entirely either. I think the impulse buyers will be enough to keep them going although I think either you are going to see the prices go up or profits down.
Makes you wonder though if somebody would ever try selling a CD-only version of the game guide since it would save them a lot of manufacturing costs. Or for that matter bundling it with the game as a separate package. Its not like you don't see enough "super-secret special collectors edition complete with collectable toilet seat" versions of games out there.
Maybe you haven't heard about how the strategy guide stuff works, but here's the gist of it.
The game goes gold. Then it is sent to a publisher who has rights to the game. They, in turn, have a group of hardcore gamers who are also litterate (things like capitalizing the start of sentences, proper comma and semi-colon usage, etc). They get to play through the game before anyone else, with the catch that they have to play through it completely and also write everything down. They take screenshots, and in some cases also make maps. All of it is vetted past the game developers.
That's how Versus Books, Brady, and Prima do it.
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No forum comes with glossy, pretty pages. No forum has answers for the end of the game if you are stuck near the end, and it just came out. No forum gives you something that's super easy to read on the couch (unless you purchase a tablet PC; however, you could also buy about 200 guides for the same price).
I can't count the number of illiterate gamefaqs exist on the net. There are so many people who failed grade 8 english who like games, and they all seem to like to try and write guides.
For PC games the guide can be outdated, but for most console games, it's the most complete guide you'll ever find.
How many people out there are willing to spend 60+ hours on a game, and then write it up all for free? There are lots of people who'll write complete FAQs for SW: KOTOR, but how many complete guides exist for Hey, you, Pikachu?
There are 2 uses to a guide. The first is the most obvious: when I get stuck, I will look it up in the guide. I do this sparingly, so as not so spoil anything. Cool guides that work to not spoil it (like Brady's Wind Waker guide), are even better. Once I've beaten the game once, and the game offers replay value (again, Wind Waker does this, as does KOTOR), I will play through the game with guide in hand. I will find everything, I well check all the side quests, I will do everything I humanly can. If I really consider it done and I really won't want to play it years later, I even get extra from my local video game store when I trade in the guide with the game.
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They've learned not to ask me anymore...