The Lost Art Of Strategy Guides

Hello dear readers and welcome back to the game room. Due to a bit of a hectic week I have to take a break from my game of the week segment this week, but hopefully I should be back on track by next week. For now, here's a quicky about my thoughts on strategy guides.

It’s hard to imagine, but there once was a time when you couldn’t just type in a question on your phone or at your computer and it would immediately generate an answer for you. No, in the olden days we had to rely on good old ink and paper if we needed guidance, and in the realm of video games this came about in the form of strategy guides. There was always a rack full of them at whatever game store you walked into, those huge colorful booklets with the game’s artwork plastered all over the cover.

Like many other mediums, strategy guides have been rendered all but obsolete by the digital age that has taken over all facets of life, and if I’m not mistaken they have pretty much died out altogether. However, just because they have become outdated doesn’t mean they have completely lost all appeal, and like vinyl records they can still be appreciated for their wonderful artwork and general feelings of nostalgia when using one.

I have a decent stack of strategy guides, having started collecting them not too long ago just for the fun of it, and personally I think there is still a lot of value in owning them. Like I mentioned before, I love skimming through them and looking at all the great artwork they have. Sure, you could just drop “Mario” into a Google search and get 10 million images of Super Mario Bros. artwork, but there’s something about having it printed on a page in front of you that’s just satisfying as hell.

Strategy guides weren’t just helpful for certain games; they were all but mandatory for some, especially if you were a completionist trying to unlock every bit of extra content and squeeze every little penny out of the game you just bought. For example, not only is the Metal Gear Solid 2 guide I have humongous (appropriate for such a complex game), it also goes into fine detail about the vast amount of easter eggs and secrets the game has to offer, which is something you would certainly never be able to tackle on your own in the days when the internet was just a mysterious far away land. 

One thing I loved about strategy guides were the detailed maps they laid out. I have a pretty bad sense of direction, even in simulated environments, and having an extra map for games like Silent Hill 2 where every little extra bullet and healing item helps really aided in the experience. 

The guides themselves even had their fair share of additional content you probably wouldn’t see in the game itself. For example, in the Resident Evil 0 guide I own, there’s many pages dedicated to the making of the game, including concept artwork and behind the scenes features. And I can’t forget that most guides would often come with a great poster of the game that you could tear out and hang up, which I did with almost all of the guides I owned. Unfortunately most of the guides I own now have had their posters removed, but the Resident Evil 0 one is still there and I just might have to hang it up one day when I have a large game room to put it in.

Of course, having strategy guides also took away a bit of the challenge from games. If you read them from page to page as you were playing along, it kind of felt like the game was being played for you, and that sort of ruined the experience a bit. I remember receiving one for Banjo-Tooie with the game for Christmas, and upon beating the game I felt a bit like the strategy guide took away a lot of the fun. I suppose it depended on the game you were playing, but from then on I would only use them sparingly when I was in desperate need of assistance.

Now, I haven’t played very many modern games for any of the newest generation of consoles (not owning any of them has something to do with that), but I feel like pretty much all guides have been rendered useless, even those posted on the internet. With the abundance of YouTube playthrough videos and just the general fact that most games are self-explanatory enough and don’t offer much extra content besides DLCs or whatever, having a strategy guide would kind of seem like a moot point. It’s a little sad to see the world you grew up with change so rapidly, and if you’re a Luddite like me it’s hard to let go of the past. But that’s part of the reason I started collecting guides in the first place- to keep the spirit of the old days alive for future generations, reminding old and new gamers alike of what things were like in the halcyon days of gaming.