Slashdot Mirror
On The Life Of A Game Guide Writer
marcot writes "The Canadian National Post has a story on the life of a videogame guidebook writer. I can't work out if it's a dream job or torture." Michael Lummis, the writer in question, "has done about a dozen books for [BradyGames] in the last 18 months", but says that contact with the game's developers "...is finite. They're working 18-hour [days] just like we are." We've previously discussed the pluses and minuses of paper-based 'official' game guides.
Beyond paying for what you can get for free, GameFAQs (despite having a pretty high crap:gold ratio itself) also has better quality guides.
There used to be a game retailer in my area that would give you the guide for free if the game cost something like $50 or more, so I ended up with a number of them (before they went out of business). Every single one of them is arife with blatant mistakes: Wrong solutions to puzzels, bad data in tables (wrong HP counts for example), stupidly bad strategies (the one that came with Starcraft suggeted Zerglings as a counter to Carriers), or negligent errors (repeated misspellings of a charactter's name, mixing up location names, and so on).
The free guides on a site like GameFAQs have the same problems, but they have two advantages:
1. There's usually more than one guide, so if one doesn't work, try another - one's just as free as the next.
2. They can be easily revised with corrected data, data that wasn't known when the guide was first written, or improved strategies. Once a book is printed and sold, you're mistakes are pretty much written in stone.