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I've changed my mind about strategy guides. I used to think they were a cop out if you couldn't complete a game, a way of cheating if you will. But when it comes to games today, which are mammoth in scale, I've now considered spending £10 on a 180+ page guide a good investment.
Take Final Fantasy X as a classic example. Played as a straight forward RPG, you'd probably never realise that there were Celestial Weapons to collect, or Dark Aeons to defeat, or that Remiem Temple even existed at all. And yet these sections alone will tack on another 40+ hours of gaming to an already 40+ hours long game.
Having purchased the AuthorisedCollection version (the 'official' Strategy Guide) for Final Fantasy X (226 pages of it!), I've come to realise that this game is going to last me for a good few months even though I've already completed it twice already, because there's so much to do and see, places to explore and people to speak to that I'd never have realised were there just by playing the game on its own.
The thing that struck me about the official guide was its sheer depth. There's absolutely nothing left out, every item in the game is located, every weapon discussed, every attribute, skill, aeon, enemy, you name it; everything is explained in huge depth, in a very simple to read format, with added information from the developers themselves that doesn't appear in the game's manual.
You can literally start at page 1, turn on the game, and play through the game turning a page every hour or so. It's a whole new experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who has bought Final Fantasy X.
Being a games collector, I'm now considering building up a collection of official guides for every game I've got, I think they're that good. There's games I've got that I can see straight away a strategy guide would pay off, like Kingdom Hearts, Dark Cloud, even the old Gran Turimso 3 A-Spec might get some life breathed back into it if there's a startegy guide out there with the perfect car setups for each track.
I still believe in playing a game through a couple of times first, because having it all laid out for you on a page does take some of the excitement out of the experience, 'learning' can be fun you know, but considering the way in which the Final Fantasy X guide was such a eye-opener for me I've now got no qualms at all about having a quick flick through a guide first just to make sure I'm not missing anything too vital.
Official guides don't just tell you 'how' to play the game, they give advice on all sorts of things, like alternative strategies worded in a 'you might like to try this and see what happens' sort of way, as well as giving you an abundance of background information on ingame characters, locations, items and so on that in no way detract from the gameplay, in fact they enhance it by feeding your imagination.
Worth every penny.
Take Final Fantasy X as a classic example. Played as a straight forward RPG, you'd probably never realise that there were Celestial Weapons to collect, or Dark Aeons to defeat, or that Remiem Temple even existed at all. And yet these sections alone will tack on another 40+ hours of gaming to an already 40+ hours long game.
Having purchased the AuthorisedCollection version (the 'official' Strategy Guide) for Final Fantasy X (226 pages of it!), I've come to realise that this game is going to last me for a good few months even though I've already completed it twice already, because there's so much to do and see, places to explore and people to speak to that I'd never have realised were there just by playing the game on its own.
The thing that struck me about the official guide was its sheer depth. There's absolutely nothing left out, every item in the game is located, every weapon discussed, every attribute, skill, aeon, enemy, you name it; everything is explained in huge depth, in a very simple to read format, with added information from the developers themselves that doesn't appear in the game's manual.
You can literally start at page 1, turn on the game, and play through the game turning a page every hour or so. It's a whole new experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who has bought Final Fantasy X.
Being a games collector, I'm now considering building up a collection of official guides for every game I've got, I think they're that good. There's games I've got that I can see straight away a strategy guide would pay off, like Kingdom Hearts, Dark Cloud, even the old Gran Turimso 3 A-Spec might get some life breathed back into it if there's a startegy guide out there with the perfect car setups for each track.
I still believe in playing a game through a couple of times first, because having it all laid out for you on a page does take some of the excitement out of the experience, 'learning' can be fun you know, but considering the way in which the Final Fantasy X guide was such a eye-opener for me I've now got no qualms at all about having a quick flick through a guide first just to make sure I'm not missing anything too vital.
Official guides don't just tell you 'how' to play the game, they give advice on all sorts of things, like alternative strategies worded in a 'you might like to try this and see what happens' sort of way, as well as giving you an abundance of background information on ingame characters, locations, items and so on that in no way detract from the gameplay, in fact they enhance it by feeding your imagination.
Worth every penny.
It depends entirely on the type of game really.
Strategy guides work excellently for RPG's, adventure games, or anything of that sort. However, they tend to be rather poor for most strategy games. Being primarily a strategy gamer, this annoys me.
The problem is, whoever is pusblishing the guide is insistant it be ready on or very shortly after the release date of the game. This means the final draft will need to be ready seveal months before this, which means that whoever is working on the strategy guide will have to rely on a beta version of the game for the vast majority of their info. This is fine for most games, but in strategy game there is constant tweaking of statistics being done almost right up to the release date.
This means...
No tables of statistics for different units attributes and effectiveness, and very few totally reliable strategys - any that unbalance the game having been addressed.
If these things *were* included, they'd most often be innacurate - which would bring huge numbers of complaints to the pusblishers of the guide. Far better to tell the writer "Um, nothing too detailed please."
Makes a mockery of the whole idea of it...
Strategy guides work excellently for RPG's, adventure games, or anything of that sort. However, they tend to be rather poor for most strategy games. Being primarily a strategy gamer, this annoys me.
The problem is, whoever is pusblishing the guide is insistant it be ready on or very shortly after the release date of the game. This means the final draft will need to be ready seveal months before this, which means that whoever is working on the strategy guide will have to rely on a beta version of the game for the vast majority of their info. This is fine for most games, but in strategy game there is constant tweaking of statistics being done almost right up to the release date.
This means...
No tables of statistics for different units attributes and effectiveness, and very few totally reliable strategys - any that unbalance the game having been addressed.
If these things *were* included, they'd most often be innacurate - which would bring huge numbers of complaints to the pusblishers of the guide. Far better to tell the writer "Um, nothing too detailed please."
Makes a mockery of the whole idea of it...
I've changed my mind about strategy guides. I used to think they were a cop out if you couldn't complete a game, a way of cheating if you will. But when it comes to games today, which are mammoth in scale, I've now considered spending £10 on a 180+ page guide a good investment.
Take Final Fantasy X as a classic example. Played as a straight forward RPG, you'd probably never realise that there were Celestial Weapons to collect, or Dark Aeons to defeat, or that Remiem Temple even existed at all. And yet these sections alone will tack on another 40+ hours of gaming to an already 40+ hours long game.
Having purchased the AuthorisedCollection version (the 'official' Strategy Guide) for Final Fantasy X (226 pages of it!), I've come to realise that this game is going to last me for a good few months even though I've already completed it twice already, because there's so much to do and see, places to explore and people to speak to that I'd never have realised were there just by playing the game on its own.
The thing that struck me about the official guide was its sheer depth. There's absolutely nothing left out, every item in the game is located, every weapon discussed, every attribute, skill, aeon, enemy, you name it; everything is explained in huge depth, in a very simple to read format, with added information from the developers themselves that doesn't appear in the game's manual.
You can literally start at page 1, turn on the game, and play through the game turning a page every hour or so. It's a whole new experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who has bought Final Fantasy X.
Being a games collector, I'm now considering building up a collection of official guides for every game I've got, I think they're that good. There's games I've got that I can see straight away a strategy guide would pay off, like Kingdom Hearts, Dark Cloud, even the old Gran Turimso 3 A-Spec might get some life breathed back into it if there's a startegy guide out there with the perfect car setups for each track.
I still believe in playing a game through a couple of times first, because having it all laid out for you on a page does take some of the excitement out of the experience, 'learning' can be fun you know, but considering the way in which the Final Fantasy X guide was such a eye-opener for me I've now got no qualms at all about having a quick flick through a guide first just to make sure I'm not missing anything too vital.
Official guides don't just tell you 'how' to play the game, they give advice on all sorts of things, like alternative strategies worded in a 'you might like to try this and see what happens' sort of way, as well as giving you an abundance of background information on ingame characters, locations, items and so on that in no way detract from the gameplay, in fact they enhance it by feeding your imagination.
Worth every penny.
Take Final Fantasy X as a classic example. Played as a straight forward RPG, you'd probably never realise that there were Celestial Weapons to collect, or Dark Aeons to defeat, or that Remiem Temple even existed at all. And yet these sections alone will tack on another 40+ hours of gaming to an already 40+ hours long game.
Having purchased the AuthorisedCollection version (the 'official' Strategy Guide) for Final Fantasy X (226 pages of it!), I've come to realise that this game is going to last me for a good few months even though I've already completed it twice already, because there's so much to do and see, places to explore and people to speak to that I'd never have realised were there just by playing the game on its own.
The thing that struck me about the official guide was its sheer depth. There's absolutely nothing left out, every item in the game is located, every weapon discussed, every attribute, skill, aeon, enemy, you name it; everything is explained in huge depth, in a very simple to read format, with added information from the developers themselves that doesn't appear in the game's manual.
You can literally start at page 1, turn on the game, and play through the game turning a page every hour or so. It's a whole new experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who has bought Final Fantasy X.
Being a games collector, I'm now considering building up a collection of official guides for every game I've got, I think they're that good. There's games I've got that I can see straight away a strategy guide would pay off, like Kingdom Hearts, Dark Cloud, even the old Gran Turimso 3 A-Spec might get some life breathed back into it if there's a startegy guide out there with the perfect car setups for each track.
I still believe in playing a game through a couple of times first, because having it all laid out for you on a page does take some of the excitement out of the experience, 'learning' can be fun you know, but considering the way in which the Final Fantasy X guide was such a eye-opener for me I've now got no qualms at all about having a quick flick through a guide first just to make sure I'm not missing anything too vital.
Official guides don't just tell you 'how' to play the game, they give advice on all sorts of things, like alternative strategies worded in a 'you might like to try this and see what happens' sort of way, as well as giving you an abundance of background information on ingame characters, locations, items and so on that in no way detract from the gameplay, in fact they enhance it by feeding your imagination.
Worth every penny.