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How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming
Heartless Gamer writes "2old2play has another great story up looking into how games have become more complicated due to strategy guides. From the article; "Strategy guides have affected gaming by making games harder for all of us. That's right, it's not a typo — strategy guides have created more difficult games. Lend me your eyes and attention spans, and I'll explain. Admittedly, it may be a rambling explanation, but bare with me and we should get there eventually." Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
strategy guides have created more difficult games.
I remember those, form the early 80's. When you had to buy Invisi-Clues to solve InfoCom games. It struck me that some of these puzzles were so far from obvious you were going to fail without the booklets and their magic markers (which made the clues visible.) Why would I put this object in there? Where's the in-game hint there I should try such a thing? After all, there were probably 1.07e22 possible combinations...
I don't remember a strategy guide for Space Invaders, but one for patterns to Pac-Man was a near best seller.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head with the video games -- you're getting pretty poor return on your entertainment dollar if you beat the game the day you bought it, thanks to a guide which tells you where to get the Spear and Magic Helmet you need and where the wabbit is hiding so you can kill him. Everyone is in a big hurry these days. Some is just impatience ("I want my reward, now!") and some of it is competitive ("George has already got the magic carpet from the Genie? Crap! I need to catch up to him!") I thought a Simpson's episode did a bit of fable (complete with moral) where Bart wanted some video game incredibly bad, then when he could just about get the game, some rude kid shows up in a shop and tells his mother the game is passe and he doesn't want it, he wants something else now. There's something about traveling in the herd which makes people need to succeed and buy these things.
I'm so happy to be out of most of these newer games and having lots of fun with old games (even infocom invisiclues can now be found in the internet :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
Well, it's clear that you're not spending the time working on your typing skills.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It's hard to take someone's comments seriously when they display such an obvious lack of spelling and grammar.
Or are we supposed to be doing this naked? That's an M-Rating for sure.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Something must have lost balance over the years becasue I remember playing Monkey Island and getting stuck a few times, but not enough to have to go and read a guide.
Maybe it's a mix of information availability and the wrong balance of game developers toward this issue.
Some strategy guides are ok to use, but those that contain full walk-throughs, with pictures, are cheating and just plain tick me off.
The readily available information out there, not just strategy guides but informal stuff on the Internet, has helped drive increased complexity in strategy games. However, the market has as well. People want more challenge, not rehashed games over and over. Unfortunately this has also led to many games becoming needlessly complex IMO and focused on complicated game mechanics at the expense of storyline and overall gameplay.
Games with relatively simple rulesets and execution like Chess can, after all, be extremely challenging. Just layering on complexity is in many ways a cop out.
Well, looks on the bright side.
11-year-old kids can feel cool, smart, or feel like some bankers, etc, when writing "Super ultimate guides on making money on Runescape".
Slashdotted in zero.
2 old 2 play? No, just 2 big 2 bother with. Because the "article" we're supposed to be talking about is a one-page editorial column of approximately 5 kilobytes of text.
Seriously, poster: What the figgety-fucking-fuck were you thinking, and what do you have against archive.org?
The only thing that strategy guides have done to affect my gaming experience is when I go into Electronics Boutique and the sub-human working there manages to belch out, "Do you want a strategy guide with that?"
NO, I do not want a strategy guide. I am exceptionally good at gaming; by the time I have finished this video game you will still be here selling some moron a copy of "Not Another Teen Movie" on UMD. I do not want any other products other than this game, which I will be awesome at. Good day, sir.
Does that about cover it?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, it's clear that you're not spending the time working on your typing skills.
Well, that's what editors are for and why their paid the big bucks, eh?
oooohh, the Official Slashdot Editor Guide Odd, doesn't look like they've sold any copies, EVER
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've never purchased a strategy guide and cant think of anyone I know that has. Im not usually one to cheat but when im helplessly stuck and really like the game (usually the game is just average so i drop it) gamefaqs.org and dozens of other sites have all the info you need. I put strategy guides in the same category as game sharks...useless crap for kids that would rather cheat than learn to actually play.
The reason I use them is because I appreciate how much time is put into making a modern game. I want to make sure that I don't miss any parts of the game.
Usually I will play through the game once on my own, but then use the strategy guide to go through a second time and hit all the side quests.
See my Home Theater
This is why I would like to see more procedurally generated games.
Games where the actual story is completely different - with different characters generated for each instance.
Imagine a murder-mystery game, for instance. Which takes place in an actual-sized city. Your character waits around the precinct until the call comes in. You travel to the murder scene and it's completely random what happened and how it happened.
In this case, no strategy guide could say, "you should always look for a knife or a gun" because the murder weapon could have been any physical object - instead of a particular "murder_enabled" object. Maybe the murderer used a microwave oven to bludgeon the victim.
A procedural AI would do it's best to cover its tracks, and would learn your particular style of deduction so that the next murderer is even more thorough at cleaning-up.
With the advent of a good physics engine and procedural map-generating algorithm you would have a completely different murder scene every time, in a completely new location.
This could apply to all kinds of games. RPGs where the decision interaction between nobles and generals would dictate political climates and trickle down to direct the individual actions of the NPC AIs.
I certainly hope that Spore is going to be the "Wolfenstein 3D" of the procedurally algorithmic games of the future.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
Most strategy guides are misnamed. They should call them "Spoiler Books" or something.
You don't learn strategy from strategy guides, you learn how to follow a walk-through. Where's the satisfaction in that?
Maybe I'm old-school, but I've never used a strategy guide for any game. If I can't beat the game without one, either I'm not as skilled/smart as I'd like to be, or there is a design flaw in the game. Both have been true with different games, and it's only the second possibility that really bothers me... especially when I lay out cash for a game.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ok it goes like this:
1) Make a game people like to play.
2) Toss in some incredibly hard puzzles that no sane person can figure out.
3) Sell the answers in a "Strategy Guide"
4) PROFIT!
Nothing like making your own market.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
This makes me feel old... erm... or something.
Stroller.
up up down down left right left right B A select (I have a brother) start!
I really think this is complete and utter BS. I can't remember a single designer on any game I have ever worked on even considering a strategy guide when it came to design. This just screams of another gaming site grasping at straws and posting a contrversial topic just to get hits and it worked.
Adventure games of ye-olde year were not easy! I wish they had strategy guides, or maybe even an appendix of all the things you could touch, talk, get/take, look/see, etc... Frustration to no end.
Plus, there were always 'strategy'-typed guides for games ever since i remember them back in the eary console days. Many rediculous puzzles in games aren't a scale of difficulty but simply the result of bad game development. By the time a player gets to any puzzle in the game, they should be equipped with the mental ability to reason out the problem.
Take some games like the Zelda. I played though it without looking for answers. Its not that there weren't interesting puzzles to solve, its just that throughout the game, they sculplted their puzzles to 'train' you to use the tools you're given in creative ways. If a game gives you a gun and tells you to shoot enemies, it might not be evident that you can use it for other things like hitting switches or blowing up barrels hollywood-style.
Bye!
I always thought that games got more complex because the game designers were brilliant at what they did. The real reason is because of all these stupid gaming guides. What's next? John Carmack is not Santa Claus?
It's hard to take someone's comments seriously when they display such an obvious lack of spelling and grammar.
Or are we supposed to be doing this naked? That's an M-Rating for sure.
You are making it very hard to take your comment seriously, Mr. Holier Than Thou.
You can't take the sky from me...
Pfft. We've used strategy guides since the early eighties, when they were often included in computer magazines. Anybody remember Elite? The difference is that back then, games usually weren't long/complex enough to justify a full glossy book.
It's all about the money. If you write a successful game, you can also sell new "episodes", special editions, strategy games. It's the slightly more grown-up version of the Mario lunch boxes, watches, etc.
Or are we supposed to be doing this naked? That's an M-Rating for sure.
This is slashdot. Make that "Rated U For Unpleasant".
"Having just been Dugg, our servers are buckling under the load. Sorry for the inconvenience."
My friends, they are experiencing what we all know as the "Digg Effect".
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I think not being able to die in Monkey Island (and other Lucas adventures) was a big part of this. It limits the problem domain. In some of the Sierra adventures, if you hadn't done just the right thing early, you could literally be trapped with no way to proceed and no way of even knowing this was the case.
Space Quest 2 was the worst offender that I can recall. In the first scene of the game, if you don't notice a particular item and grab it, then at the end of the game you're screwed, with no idea why. You have to start over. From the beginning.
The LucasArts adventures were just so well-written and well-executed. Solvable but challenging puzzles and not being able to die are both aspects of this.
Come on, LucasArts, give us more!
Hate to klikk on the last /. story only to find that the story broke on digg, and when /. comes after, the servier is dugg down.
Editors: Get fresh stories!
"Fix it"
* Business meeting *
Suit 1: Hmm, not enough people are buying our strategy guides for our games. How can we make more money?
Suit 2: We could invest more time and money in our games to make a higher-quality product.
Suit 3: Shut up Tom, that idea is horrible.
Suit 1: Let's up the games' difficulty so people will be FORCED to buy our strategy guides! Brilliant!
* Act Two *
Suit 1: OK apparently our customers are starting to use an "Internet" to download FREE, unauthorized guides made by other customers. What's worse, the legal department informed me that what they are doing is completely legal. Now, we need to either find a way to take down this "Internet" thing or figure out how to change the legality of these guides. Ideas?
Suit 2: I think...
Suit 1: ...from anyone EXCEPT Tom?
----
Etc. OK it's a bit of a Dilbert spin, especially near the end, but I bet the first act happened for real SOMEWHERE.
Strategy guides could also contribute to laziness among game developers. It's hard to make a puzzle that is challenging, yet not too difficult. This is evident in all kinds of puzzle/adventure games. The Zork trilogy had some puzzles that even some very smart people I knew just couldn't crack. And in Final Fantasy VII, the developers made no attempt to put enough clues in the game to perform chocobo breeding. So if a game developer knows that a strategy guide is going to come out in a month or two, why put in the extra effort to tune all the puzzles? Someone else will release the guide, and players who are having trouble will just use it. It's a shame, though.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
I don't necessarily have anything against strategy guides, (in fact I find most I've gone through to be very enjoyable reads with high production values), I do fear they've had a direct effect at cheapening the actual content in game manuals. It seems like most pack-in manuals with games are not much more than installation guides/or control layouts. I know there are exceptions to the rule, but the days of comprehensive pack-in manuals seem in the past.
I'll agree that strategy guides have made strategy games harder.
A guide to a game like final fantasy doesn't affect much, because the game is the same every time. But a strategy guide for a game like WoW or AoE allows any dim wit to jump towards the top. Not that this is necessarily bad; competition is fun and can make those of us who can think up our own strageties better.
They'd never be able to do that without a strategy guide/walkthrough, nosireebobski.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Hey, at four or five rant posts per typo the, "Add random typo to inflame user interest," chapter seems to have been well read as well as put to good use.
That would be the "More Revenue Through Typos" chapter
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Having just been Dugg, our servers are buckling under the load. Sorry for the inconvenience." Swish, three pointer to Digg.
That was an awesome game. And the only time I can stomach people using dig and dug in the same sentence. I'm sorry, but there is already a word for server meltdown, and that is slashdotted. There is no point in inventing new synonyms for every website that links to stuff. And to add insult to injury, http://reddit.com/ is better than digg. Thank you for reading, now please mod me and parent down.
No, my classmates were total strangers. There wasn't much opportunity for interaction when the classes consisted entirely of the teacher lecturing. Socialization wasn't encouraged or facilitated.
A little bitter maybe?? you DON'T have to read slashdot, so don't complain! I recommend you stay with Digg, Slashdot may not be for you!
The abundance of gameguides on the Net is one of the bigger reasons why the adventure, or point-and-click games died.
:)
For me this only became painfully obvious when I was playing Dreamfall: The longest journey, the other day.
This game, on multiple occasions, left me clueless on what to do. Instead of (as in the good ol' days) trying every possibility for hours, I just gave up after five minutes and went for a quick browse to gamefaqs; thus solving the problem at hand but not really getting any satisfaction out of it.
And then to think I had to freaking call a -very- expensive (Nintendo-sponsored) Hotline back in the days everytime I encountered an 'unsolvable' NES problem
This is why I would like to see more procedurally generated games.
Games where the actual story is completely different - with different characters generated for each instance.
You'ld need a very good AI to do that. We don't know how to build one. But let's suppose we did, somehow, and it's very good.
So, you now have a game AI powerful enough to auto-generate a completely engaging new story with a new and interesting murder plot on the fly.
Do you:
(a) quietly corner the murder-mystery book market, publishing hundreds or thousands of original, high-quality mystery novels under various pseudonyms,
or
(b) write one computer game, which will sell fewer titles, and tip off the competition about the AI you've got?
I know what I'd sell, and it sure wouldn't be the video game.
I personally thought games were getting extremely easy nowadays. I, for one, welcome more challenging games.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Isn't it a good thing strategy guides pushed developers to create more challenging or complex games?
I don't think strategy guides have affected the games as much as they have affected the *included documentation*. Back in the day, you could be The Mack on your block just by reading the booklet - since 80% of your opponents never did. Docs now reflect the fact that few eyeballs ever fall on them are are much less detailed. There were very basic instructions in the Madden 06 Strategy Guide that just weren't in the included booklet.
nonsig. unsig. desig.
This is bullshit. Really. Games are not harder than it used to be. Arcade games made you spend your money, they had to be tough but cool enough to make you spend quarter after quarter. Many NES games were harder than SNES ones. Many Sega Master/Genenis were harder than NES ones. Yet I bet the crap out of the young pals with their shiny new 399.99$ console and I'm not even that good. Betcha most old timers here do the same with the little lads.
In a corporate world as it is now where franchise is the hot word to have in mouth, there is no doubt they have to come up with gimmicks and silly mazes only to pretend they have pondered about something. And what the hell with mini games anyway? Design a good game and mini games will be useless!
At this point, the technology doesn't exist to do it well enough to keep it from getting repetitive. You just can't link things together with the subtlety and detail that a human can. So in games that do it (Freelancer would be an example) the variation actually makes it more rote. Sure no two missions are precisely the same, but they are all the same general thing.
It's going to take a lot more advances before there's the ability to generate compelling random missions.
In the early days of unnofficial strategy guides, they were actually really cool and helpful. I stopped buying them a few years ago because effectively they became the manual that should be included with the game and they lost the point of view of the player and became much more manual-ish. If I played RPG's I would probably still buy them but for RTS and FPS games, they stopped being worth the money and I hate to reward the complete absence of a good manual by sending the publisher an extra $20.
I usually stay away from any strategy guides unless I've really messed something up or it's my second or third time through a game. Mostly because at that point they help you find the things that you'd never think to look for. A lot of the time there will be obscure hints about an extra, but often there aren't even hints.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Y'now: pixar made a movie about how you had to buy the book to beat Zurg. Since when is something news that was mainsteam entertainment years ago?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Developers didn't really catch on the fact that strategy guides help sell games while generating a tidy profit themselves, but once they do, it is obvious that you must make your game hard/obscure enough for people to be buying the strategy guides. I don't like this game design because it's introducing complexity/difficulty for the sake of just doing it (to the players, anyway). Though with the availability of sites such as gamefaqs.com, at least you have a free way out of this mess.
Only time in my life I've bought a Strategy Guide. Yes you can use gamefaqs.com, but its much easier to have everything you need in one guide when it comes to games as complex as Oblivion...
Instead of coralizing the link or otherwise using a service that's designed to mirror a page and handle huge load, you just sent all of your traffic to the Web Archive Project, and used a freaking PDF to boot. Thanks for killing off a useful service for your damn article.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Try Schizm:Mysterious Journey without a guide. You'll be bald in no time.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters.
:P
Are we talking about the same Final Fantasy? Because if you're playing for the combat and you think the "puzzles" are difficult... I think you're probably in a minority
I got the guide for Dngeon Keeper. The first half of the book, telling me about the abilities of the monsters was actually damn helpful: I could work out what strategies ought to work.
The second half of the book was bad because it told me the full maps. And, apart from using it the second time through to find all the bonuses, I didn't need it.
In several cases, more info than you get is necessary, but strategy guides go too far.
If I get cheats, I prefer to get them online: the effort of getting them stopped me going on there until really stuck.
I've searched the PDF and I can't find the "from the article" text cited. The closest I could find was this lead-in to another story, searching for "strategy guide"; "typo" came up with nothing. I can only assume it is embedded content in a form not readable or searchable by my version of Acrobat (x86 linux 5.0.10 Nov 8 2004).
And yet still I went to the trouble to fix the dropped ff's and fi's, apostophes, quotation marks, em dashes, italics and emphasis.
MY BRAIN AGE WAS 24
The Editor Pwns You!
by Code Monkey
I must admit that I am hooked on thinking games. I am not sure what draws me to them, but puzzles and thinking games are indeed entertaining and valuable tools. I'll admit it, I really suck at math. My wife destroys me in the Brain Age calculation tests. I do not remember the last time I needed to actually remember my multiplication tables until now. What used to be boring school studies of 6x8, 7x4, and 12x5 have become a "game" to me. Perhaps I find this enjoyable because of the challenge and I feel that perhaps it might just kick my brain into shape.
It's not that I'm lazy, Bob, it s that I just don't care. A great Office Space quote which rings true more often than not. Until now, I never really cared to remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide -- that's what computers are for, right? Well I'm pleased to say that I had a brain age of 24 according to Nintendo's Brain Age for the DS. Unfortunately, I was only able to be smart for one day. My age has gone up since. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, Brain Age ranks your brain based on tests and having an age of 20 is the best you can get. I wasn't too far off. Now I must practice each night to try to beat my prior Brain Age score and reach 20. Holy crap, I m doing homework for fun.
There are many interesting games out there for a good price, which will challenge your thinking skills and keep you on your toes. You are getting older, and with age come pains and flabby brains. Don't let this happen to you. Take a twenty dollar bill you might normally spend on Pizza or a Calzone and get Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, Sodoku for the DS. If you're a PC gamer, you can download Word Harmony or Bookworm from PopCap Games and whip your brain into action.
Many puzzle games can also help to keep you on your toes. I've found challenge in many varying puzzle game genres. You can even stretch the truth and call games that require extensive thinking like Oblivion a puzzle game. Many RPG's incorporate puzzles into quest scenarios to increase the difficulty and make the rewards a higher value. However, with strategy guides and the Internet it is easy to just call it "impossible" and look up the answer. I challenge you to put that guide book away and do it the hard way, just as you did back in high school (when you weren't smoking up in the bathroom). Granted, if someone asks what you re playing you may not want to say "a puzzle game" if you're truly playing Oblivion. Just tell them you re playing an RPG. For a true experience, Tetris on the DS and Hexic HD on the 360 are a few well designed puzzle games.
This issue attempts to bring you closer to the heart of Mario. With a recent release of New Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS and the hype over Mario Galaxy for the Wii, I think it is time to reflect on our past. That's the 2old2play way of doing things, and this month I've written a slightly "made up" version of Mario's history dubbed "The 2O2P True Hollywood Story: Mario." After watching the biography of Johnny Depp on the Biography channel, I thought to myself (being the geek that I am) "I wonder what Mario's life would be like." Therefore, in true geek fashion, I decided to bring Mario to life and see what a popular star of video games would be like.
I hope you enjoy the issue. This was a very trying month for many of us due to family vacations, summer-time fever and my Oblivion addiction.
Thanks,
Derrick Schommer (CodeMonkey) [level 20 battlemage]
editor@2old2play.com
In short, from TFA, it isn't clear to me that the existence of more strategy guides is causing more complex games any more than the converse. The article could be titled "How Gaming Affected Strategy Guides" with only minor change of text.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters.
Translation: I have no interest in actually solving puzzles when I could be hitting repetitive button sequences, with little or no thought given to the process, until I'm rewarded with a fanfare and an animation of something fading out of existance.
Da da da da.. da.. da.. da-da daaa!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...most games came with books the size, or at least information content, of most modern "strategy guides". They were called "manuals", and took up the space inside of the box instead of just having a disk and a cardboard insert.
For many games, the separation of what used to be expected in a robust manual into a separate "strategy guide" with the manual, if any, included with the game often little more than a basic introduction to the UI seems to be more of a way of restricting nominal price increases (as more of the work and cost is separated out into a different product) and narrowing the manufacturer's activities to their core competencies, than an excuse for making games more complex.
Sure, games are more complex, because newer computers can handle more complex games, and there is a market for them to fill. But its not strategy guides that have caused this,
I use strategy guides (aka walkthroughs) because the game is to hard on my own. I am not as good as others. This why I don't play online.
\
I belive that games have become easier over the years. Games like contra would be a chanlenge every step of the way. Strategy guides were created to allow games to appeal to the mass market rather than gamers who were willing to put in the effort to beat the games or solve te riddles. It seems to me gaming companies have caught on and made a majorty of games that require time but very little skill to "beat" the game in order to appeal to a larger market. In the past only players who were good a specific game could beat it however today it is expected that everyone who owns the game should be able to beat it.
smart and mis-spelled? What prize do I get for the not so obvious missing hyphen?
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.
Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos. (Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!
Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization". There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?
What went wrong?
Go play an atari 2600 game and tell me that games today are more difficult? Go on I'll wait.
Thanks for coming back. Atari and NES games were by far the most difficult games ever made, but the fact is they weren't extremely good games, there were a great deal of great games there but what made them great is unique ways of playing them.
What really pisses me off however isn't strategy guides, or hint books, but people who buy the strategies immediatly when they buy the game? I bought the oblivion strategy guide just because of the beautiful look to the guide. I never cracked it open. I like the optimal experience from these games and that means no strategy guides for me.
The fact is that even when a game doesn't need a strategy guide or really can't use one, someone will write one to make money off of it. The simple fact is unless you don't have the internet you don't need a strategy guide. Gamefaqs has had great guides, granted the 360 guides are lacking since people don't seem to be writing them as fast (not that there's a huge need for it) but stil shouldn't gaming be a collective thing, and an optional thing? If I want to play Saints row (my company makes it so I decided to use that and it's new) legit and beat it all myself that's great, I love it, but at the same time if I want to play saint's row and get help from friends and use any hints I can I should be allowed to do that also. The simple fact is that game developers knows there's no such thing as a perfect secret. We can't stop you from figuring out a hint and telling a friend and we don't want to. But at the same time people should at least be smart enough not to spoil other people from our big secrets unless it's an honest mistake. Of course that never happens, some people just try to be spoilers.
We don't care why you bought the game, to cheat the hell out of it or to just play it as you want. Game companies want sales so no one is going to make it impossible for one group to play the game how they want. But to put it simply, strategy guides don't make harder games. Gamers asking for harder games makes harder games (and guess what we're still asking for them)
I remember a few years back, I bought some PC game I don't recall right now. The salesclerk then proceeded to hawk the official strategy guide for the game. Told me I'd get 20% off if I bought it with the game. When I rejected their offer, he then proceeded to tell me that if I brought my receipt back within 7 days of purchase, he'd still give me 20% off the strategy guide if I bought it.
I couldn't believe that it had come to that: People are so unwilling to play a game and enjoy the experience, that they buy the strategy guide WITH THE FREAKIN' GAME. I could see after a month or so (hell, a few weeks even) and you're stuck, wanting to get some hints on how to proceed. I've had that happen a few times. Prince of Persia (1st one, Xbox) comes to mind - that stupid elevator fight that I never DID get past. However, to resign oneself that you were going to need it right from the moment you opened the box baffled me. And the fact that the retail outlets were encouraging that stunned me even more. Then, of course, it hit me - they probably make some large profit on the strategy guide, why else would they push them SO HARD.
I also realized that I know people who have caused this - a guy I know will not buy a game without also plunking down the extra $16 ($20 - 20%) for the strategy guide. It isn't even a conscious thought with him anymore. I guess the object is to blast through the game and do it as "perfectly" as possible as quickly as you can, so that you can go on to the next $50 game (+$16 strategy guide). I don't get it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They call it Final Fantasy but there's always another feckin' version coming out.
I've come to learn that, with certain kinds of games, what I used to expect in a manual will be found in the Strategy Guide.
So I tend to buy the Strategy Guide with those kinds of games when I buy them. Now, I'm not talking about "puzzle" games, but things like The Sims.
Certainly not with me; if its not still worth playing a game for at least a couple years after I bought it, I don't consider it to have been a good purchase in the first place.
I enjoy the fact that games are full of deep arcana, that if I find a game interesting enough to get me properly hooked, then I can play hours of content that other people don't even need to bother with. The one danger of this, though, is that if your extra power-gaming sidequests are going to have any cohesion at all, then they need to be backed by story. And if you write a game that has completely optional pieces of story, then there's the danger that you'll end up with a game that seems half-finished to people who don't play (or aren't aware of) the optional bits. Of relevance to the summary, Final Fantasy VI, VII, and X, while respectable stories in themselves, all contain "important" backstory within well-hidden sidequests. X has quite a bit of it, in fact.
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you could always tell who played Contra alone and who played w/ friends b/c of the addition of 'select' in the cheat code
Look at how it affects MMORPGs. WoW is a no-brainer, sure; but making puzzle solutions so spelled-out for the user takes a lot of the fun out of solving difficult them.
One of the things that I kind of liked about EQ, was the fact that there were really tough puzzles where you could accidentally sacrifice some hard-won quest item if you didn't know what you were doing. Unfortuntately, after the first generation solves a puzzle, they post it on the Internet then it's easy for people after them. To compensate, EQ cranks down the drop rate for key quest items or they make the quests so unbelievably complicated. Imagine instead if information were much more limited.
Imagine if you and maybe just your guild had to figure out how to solve certain problems that were different from what everyone else was solving. Then, game makers could feel comfortable in making puzzles that teased your brain a bit, but weren't so ridiculously hard to make up for the Internet effect.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
"The trend in video games is to make them into an interactive movie."
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay wasn't an interactive movie, even though it got it's start on the Xbox.
Strategy guides didn't pave the way for more difficult games. It was the fans. With fans often bragging beating games in 1 or 2 days (or even hours), the developers make mental notes that the game isn't challenging enough or the developers are secretly collaborating with Brady and other strategy publishers for profits. Assuming the former is true, developers would add more levels or make the game world larger which requires $$$ and man hours. Or, they could simply add tedious puzzles which take less man hours and $$$ and force the users (the fans) to spend hours solving it.
Here's my personal experiences growing up. Battletoads was probably the only game my 2 brothers and I couldn't finish while renting it. From what I recall, every game we rented was conquered. 40+ hour rpgs like Chrono Trigger, FF6, UW: New Horizons (rented 4x to beat all 6 chars), and OGRE BATTLE 5 was conquered within the 3 day timeframe. Usually we took 2 days. It required rotation of brothers playing the games and/or doing the chores like dishes and lawn. Of course, I could have done it myself but with 2 brothers, 1 NES/SNES, we had to fight for time.
One nuisance with puzzles was with Lufia for the SNES. There was a puzzle where you had to press 4 buttons in a certain order and if you messed up, you had to fight a random encounter. Then, you had to leave the room and re-enter to reset the puzzle. With no hints, that puzzle took almost an hour using trial-and-error. It was back in the day, so either we were too poor to buy a strategy guide or the internet wasn't as big as it is now (gamefaqs would save the headache). This 1 memory alone made me believe in the strategy guide conspiracy.
Every geek has some sort of website, programming or computer project. Here's mine: www.youtasteit.com . What's yours?
"misspelled" does not require a hyphen.
But certainly not all games. For a counter example, well just look at what is either on it's way to, or already the most profitable game of all time: World of Warcraft (pulling over $1 billion/year and rising). The game is anything but simple. It's easy in the sense that it doesn't ever really punish you for failure, you don't die for good or anything, but it's not at all simple and can be very challenging to achieve many things.
Perhaps it's just more of a PC gamer thing, but I can think of plenty of hit PC games (say The Sims) which are quite complex and certainly aren't interactive movies.
By the tone of your post, one would think that people "cheating" their way through games was causing you some sort of pain. If so, I recommend Tylenol, though not if you have any liver problems. I'd also recommend not taking it with alcohol, but I suspect you're drunk enough on your own importance that you don't need further inebriation.
1) Some people do like "blasting" through a game fast with the use of a strategy guide. If that's their thing, I say go to it.
2) Some people use the actual "strategy" portions of a strategy guide (most have them) in order to figure things out that the modern, anemic game manual doesn't tell them.
3) Still other people buy a strategy guide so that if they're stuck on a game for an hour or more and can't figure out what the hell they're supposed to do next, they won't have to make another run to the store to buy the guide they could have bought while they were there the first time.
4) Finally, some people know that they're going to want the strategy guide so that they can do all the weird crap that they missed their first time through, and they buy it with the game so that they can get the discount that you described.
Personally, I fall into categories 3 and 4 (plus, in some games a big map - provided with most strategy guides - is very nice to have) and, every once in a while, I buy a strategy guide along with the game, especially if I get a deal on the combo.
As a final note, retailers encourage the purchase of game guides because they have a much higher profit margin than videogames (especially console games). It's no different than the old "Do you want fries with that?" ditty, and if that still annoys you then you should probably consider psychiatric drugs in addition to the Tylenol I recommended above...
The second step I would say is to create interesting AI personalities. If the AI is able to "act" effectively, you can create a storyline.
See Civ 4 for example. It's possible to talk about religious wars, grudges, xenophobia, and tributes without needing to refer to a static storyline.
If there were events going on in the background and each AI agent were to react to events, it would be possible to create an interesting RPG sans storyline writers. (This is personal interest of mine, and I'd love to write it someday).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
If you lack a force power to deal with the Jedi in the tubes (I'm guessing that's what you mean) it just takes a lot longer. Just keep beating Malak's ass until he runs out of Jedi. There's a reason the game throws an almost never ending supply of life support packs at you in the final level. Besides, if you didn't buy ANY of the powers that would work (Force Breach, Lightsaber Throw, Shock, Drain Life, and Force Push all work) you should have sufficient points spent in other powers like Heal, Force Immunity, Master Speed, etc that you can do a good hold and engage kind of battle and wear him down while you keep yourself up.
I know you are trying to sound cool and all with that leet Gametester job, but you are high if you think NG is a one button mash fest. Basically, leads me to believe you are making it all up. Good try though.
For others reading, Ninja Gaiden is throw the controller through the TV, ass-raping HARD.
Walk into the forest, and take some honey. Now place this honey on the ground, and place a golden coin in the honey. Now when the little munchkin runs out and tries to take the coin, he is stuck. NOW you can finally interact with the little bastard. How did you not figure that one out?
Just playing with you Sierra, you know I love you.
You take it, I don't want it...
I bought the oblivion strategy guide just because of the beautiful look to the guide. I never cracked it open.
A well informed finacial decision.
You take it, I don't want it...
A lot of games are getting simpler, at least on consoles. Or at least easier to figure out how to play. Compare instruction manuals today to those from even 5 or 6 years ago. The instructions used to be mini-books, now they're just pamphlets with 2 or 3 pages of useful information. Look at the Madden manual from this year: 4 pages. So many games are either simpler or incorporate detailed tutorials these days that long instruction books are just being treated as a cost. Of course I find this appalling, since I so enjoy reading a good instruction manual while on the toilet.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. There must be a lot of people here who have missed the revolution that was the Internet.
Why buy a strategy guide when you can go to gamefaqs.com or any one of hundreds of fan sites and download walkthroughs, strategy guides and modifications that will enhance your gaming experience much, much more than the $20 book EB tries to foist on you?
The 1st Prince of Persia was released many, many years before the Xbox was concieved
Just got to gamefaqs.com. They're free.
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Quick, somebody please post an online racing game strategy guide so that I can win all my races in Live for Speed.
Excuse me for not holding my breath. Real life race strategy books seem to be the best alternative here; I'm so glad to have found a PC title that uses real world skills in such a fashion.
ISO certified == THX certified
The beauty of the internet is that you can hyphen-ate any pre-fix, suf-fix or compound word...
Incidentally, I prefer "misspelt."
--
I just finished playing through Suikoden V—superb game, btw. But for everyone who doesn't know the series, each game contains 108 playable characters (characters you can put in your main party, entourage party, or live in your home base and serve a purpose). Collecting them can be as simple as just walking up to them at any time, and talking with them... or it can be as complex as having gotten another character, followed by another character, and then talking to another character 5 times, once each after a major event happens, and then you have to go to a certain room at a certain point in the game, and you'll get them. Even one of the biggest side characters, who actually appears in the plotline and has one of the greatest backstories (the detective and his crew), requires talking with him 5 times, once after each main event... and there are only 6 major events in the phase alotted.
Getting the ending in which something terrible DOESN'T happen at the end (I'm not spoiling it), requires getting ALL 108 characters. I played the game WITH the guide, determined to get all 108... but I was only able to get 105: one mysteriously DIED during a fight sequence, another was tagging along with her, so he left, and a third I couldn't get due to a glitch in the game! This is the second game in the series I've played, but from what I've heard, ALL of them are insane to complete 108 with. I logged 115 hours on the thing on my first time through, it's a LONG game. Huge commitment, but one of the best (if not THE best) RPGs for the PS2.
After that, I'm replaying Zelda: Wind Waker... a series that's known for having some really tricky and brain twisting puzzles, even when replaying them... and yet somehow, I'm not feeling as aggrivated as I once did.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
By mapping each character's special moves to the same buttons. The Smash Bros. series does a very good job of this.
*sigh*
Replace "," with "for". Happy?
I agree and disagree. Yes, manuals have become thinner than they used to be, but there has been a marked moved in recent years towards "training levels" within the game itself where you are guided through the main functions of the game and its UI while actually enjoying the game experience. I think this has little to do with separating this material off into a strategy guide. It's because game manufacturers understand that the majority of gamers (particularly the teen and younger variety) simply don't have the patience to read through a thick manual before they get to grips with the game itself, and want to dive straight into the action, the moment the plastic wrapper comes off.
That's why I only play shmups.
I still think that part of the reason the Diablo games have done so well is because of the wonderful manual that came with the original Diablo.
That wasn't a manual, it was a book. And a good one at that. I always read the manual and that one had me creeped out before I ever installed the damn game.
And yet it's a hidden unlockable in The Sands of Time! Guess how I knew that? It starts with "Strategy" and ends in "Guide".
Go figure, huh?
But but but... school's not about learning academics! It's about learning to socialize! Just ask all the anti-homeschool crowd.
I don't think they are actually manuals. Most of the ones I've seen are walkthroughs, and they include information on how to find various secrets, what the correct way through this area is, and so on. And strategy. The ones I've seen spend maybe 2 pages on the controls and basic gameplay -- the same kind of stuff you'll probably learn on your own with an in-game tutorial level.
I have seen some recent games with incredibly thick manuals -- Final Fantasy XI, for one -- because the game itself was way too complex in how it handled some simple things. Took me long enough just to get the hang of moving around. But in the same genre, there are also games like Nexus TK, which requires memorizing quite a few keystrokes to be reasonably competent. More can be done with the mouse now, but you don't want to be using the mouse in the heat of battle. I'd have appreciated a manual here, except that I was taught by my roommate -- so, Nexus doesn't need a manual, because if you can make it through the training area, you'll find plenty of people willing to help you, especially because there's an in-game reward for helping newbies.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
With bizarre logic like that which he parades around in his article, you can bet that the author is also so unerringly objective that he believes in the Tooth Fairy and Santa and a whole pantheon of other improbable things... simply because believing it makes him feel special.
As the author admits, strat guides have been around almost as long as computer-based games. However, the simplest answer is almost always the correct one, just as water follows paths of least resistance: strategy guides got more complex because the games themselves became more complex, driven purely by consumer demand for uniqueness and avoidance of boredom. There's no conspiracy here between strat guide authors and game developers (well, maybe there is a conspiracy, but not this sort).
Game developers like to do what game developers do best: design games that challenge people. The bar gets raised every time an existing game becomes routinely easy. Strat guide authors like to do what they do best: ride the coattails of the game developers making piles of cash from impatient dupes from whom said cash is easily parted.
Snakemeister should have selected his SECOND, alternate topic and written about that instead.
The only strategy guide I've ever paid money for was the GTA: San Andreas one. Not because the game's complicated (gameplay is for all intents and purposes the same as the previous ones, with some new vehicles and tricks) but because it's so frickin' big. (And the guide is still full of mistakes - try finding all the horseshoes in Las Venturas using the map in the book and you'll be searching until the end of time.)
For everything else, there's Gamefaqs. Which I mostly use to find out how to beat bosses, because I hate, hate, hate boss battles. The whole rigmarole of 'puzzle out weak spots by repeated trial and error then shoot each of them in a specific sequence 17,000 times' is a cancer on gaming that should be carved out right now.
You must think in Russian.
I need GameFAQs because I'm an idiot.
The games wave Big Freaking Hints in front of my nose, and while I'm personally able to duly note each and every one of them, I sometimes fail to make sense of them. Or, when I repeatedly fail at following the clues, I start to wonder if what I deduced was right. "Okay, I did a, b, and c; why isn't this boss dying?"
In a sense, its good that there's something with which to confirm that yes, in fact, I'm on a right track with this one. That's one thing that increases motivation to play in case the thing is seemingly impossible to beat even when I know exactly what to do...
Puzzle solutions aren't strategies. Heck, they're not even tactics. They're recipes.
The classic strategy guide is probably the strategy guide for the old DOS game Master of Magic. It gave high level recommendations for approaching the game from different angles, recommendations for the most valuable spells, and described almost all of the internal calculations performed by the game.
Do the RPG guides published nowadays tell you how the combat system works internally?
We are the 198 proof..
Remember all the ----- Quest games from back in the day? I never used a strategy guide, but I remember writing the company for hints to get past certain areas. I still have some letters around my parent's house from where I asked them how to get past parts of one of the Manhunter games as well as Gold Rush.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I am not for removing the saved game feature, but I believe games are harder because of it.
On another note, I recently went back and played x-com refusing to use the save feature(at the 2nd easiest level mind you).
Much more suspense and drama and personally alot more fun.
I remember reading The Official Book of Ultima. http://http//www.notableultima.com/collectibles/Bo oks_OBOU.html It had interviews with Lord British as well as hints for completing I-V1. The Ultima games always had great documentation as well as nice cloth maps.
Back in 1997 when I had no internet, I had to buy my first guide for Banjo Kazooie, the game is designed for kids but the dificulty is made for geniuses. That was my first and last guide I bought, now that I have the internet I use gamefaqs.
FF7 Fans Fight Back, Vote against FF7 sucks and Pass it on.
http://ff7sucks.blogspot.com
Seriously. I recall being stuck for 3 days on Ocarina of Time trying to get into the Dodonga Caverns (second dungeon). Then, one the 3rd day, bam, suddenly it hit me, I saw the bomb. It felt great! Those are the little revelatory moments that I love in games like Zelda and Metroid. It's so worth the effort. I've regreted pretty much every time I've used a stratagy guide rather than trying to figure it out myself.
That's a nice story. Unfortunately, its rather clearly wrong.
The use of "she" in that role (or alternating he/she, or using "he" for certain classes of subjects and "she" for others where identity and sex of the referent is indefinite, or using neologism like "hir") is, in fact, a much newer (rather than "earlier") phenomenon, rather than "earlier".
The cool thing about people using absolutes like "invariably" is that a single counterexample suffices to demonstrate that the claim is false. But one can more than a single example of singular they/them/their that is not indefinite in number, but only in identity and sex of the referent. Rather than list the counterexamples here, though, I will point you to this page which (among other things) lists the numerous examples cited in the Oxford English Dictionary that rather thoroughly debunk the claim that the use historically has been only for indefinite number.
The most common use, you will note, is with a singular universal antecedent of the form ("some-", "no-", "any-") + ("-one", "-body"), etc., like the use (supposedly) at issue here with "someone".
My experience with text adventures back in the 80's was usually along these lines:
...a few days later after getting help
>Put key in lock
I see no "lock"
>Unlock lock
I see no "lock"
>Open door
You cannot open that
>Fuck this game!
I do not understand "fuck"
>Put key in keyhole
You put the key in the keyhole
> Turn the key
You unlock the door
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What I think is driving the increase in difficulty and hidden secrets are the players themselves. Games were originally designed as a diversion, something you did in your spare time for fun. Now it's an entertainment industry and we have players who will stay awake 72 hours straight to be the first to beat the game, and they will try any and every assassinine comination of putting rock #42 on top of the innkeeper's head to reveal some hidden secret. The developers must make the games harder to prolong the game's longevity and replay ability.
One of the first strategy guides I remember was "How to Beat Home Video Games." It had numerous cheats, hints, tips and easter eggs for Atari 2600 and Intellivion consoles. (Anyone else remember the transmolecular dot in Adventure? :-) At that time the games were mostly reflex and endurance testers so whatever "strategies" these books imparted was only the tip of the iceberg.
Once I started on computers (1983, Apple II) I found new guides, namely the Infocom books. What really impressed me about these books was the multi-level hint system. If you just needed a nudge, you only revealed the first clue. If you needed further help, you revealed the second. If you just couldn't get it and you needed it handed to you, you revealed the bottom spoiler. THAT'S how I believe ALL strategy guides, hint books and game websites SHOULD be. I think a few Zorks and other adventure/RPG games incorporated this into their help system.
I've purchased my fair share of guides. WoW had a surprisingly simple manual as is expected in a dynamic MMO these days. The game is going to change with the first patch, so why bother with a book describing the details? I played for months before finally purchasing the Brady Games guide. What impressed me was that as much as I felt I had done, the book revealed details that I had overlooked, little things that made a big difference in how I played. That, too, is what these guides should do.
I'll buy the books for the artwork, for filling in the details and for providing nudges in the right direction. I do not buy the books for spoilers, hacks and cheats. That's what the user community on the internet is for, and I only need access that if I'm desperate.
What I'd like to see is an online book from a source like Brady games. You pay for it (much cheaper than paper version), and you download a PDF (or proprietary reader). If you want to print it, that's up to you. When the game changes, the book changes and you're free to download it again (included in original purchase price). Brady has made an attempt to provide updated content to their original WoW guide, but it doesn't work for all versions of the book (my friend's does [bought 2 months after mine], but mine doesn't) and they've already fallen far behind. Hosted on the website where you download the book, the publisher could provide hint sites or an online system like the Infocom books ("Still need a hint?")
If the strategy guide companies are smart, they'll partner with these subscription based games to get a share of the income. Pay an extra $0.50 a month and receive access to the online strategy guide, constantly updated with hints from the developers. I honestly wouldn't want to see a model like this, but I like the concept of it.
I knew it too, and guess how? It's called the Internet, and I didn't pay $16 for it just to find that out. Man, you strategy guide whores really got your panties in a bunch, didn't you? :-P
Go ahead, mod me down, -1 Flamebait; my life is more interesting than Slashdot's mod system.
I never really liked to use strategy guides to beat a game. I felt a greater sastisfaction if I was able to beat a game/solve a puzzle without the help of a guide. Like, some of the puzzles in the Silent Hill games which took awhile for me to figure out but the great feeling of actually figuring them out instead of looking online for the solutions. The only time I would use a guide would be to 100% complete a game like GTA:Vice City, Castlevania, Zelda and would usually use an online source. The only good printed strategy guides I think are from VERSUS books. They don't make many guides (FF7, Zelda:OOT, Zelda:MM, Mario Sunshine, and some couple others I am forgetting) but they are extremely well done. They never spoil the story for you and their maps/directions/etc are very precise and easy to understand.
And I am sick of going to pick up a new game and the employee is trying to shove a guide down my throat saying "You get 15% off the guide if you buy it with the game".
Not only are there tons of spoilers online, you also get the source code; and source code diving is nethack "sport" in its own right. Not to mention the in-game spoilers that are free (or only a few zorkmids): the fortune cookies, the oracle, the grafitti all over the place, those uneasy feelings you get.
After 17 years of playing its still fun, still unpredictable, and I am still occasionally surprised when something unexpected happens. The replay value of this game is on par with that of chess; although you get to kill and be killed. Even so, nethack is enjoyable and quite playable even if you don't use the spoilers/source with about the same percentage of success (0%).
I like the book I've looked through it a couple times, but I don't actually use it in the game, is that so poorly informed that I got something I wanted because it would be nice to look at?
It may not be the highest value item I bought all year, but it's one of the best looking strategies I've seen.