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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 Blizzard games, for example, go through major revisions before release, so that the artwork on the box is usually out of date by the time the game goes gold (as boxes are done months in advance) (siege tanks shooting battle cruisers on the SC box, for example).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...