What are your thoughts/opinions on Strategy Guides?

[Segatarious1]

I like strategy guides, I thumb through them a stores, but never buy them because at $20 or $30, well that goes a long way or all the way toward a new game.

However, I am tempted to buy one for the New Mario game.

They are high quality. I know there is a sect here (myself included) who really like game manuals, do you ever or regularly buy strategy guides? I have only bought a couple, for used, years later.

[darkrage61]

Many years ago I used to buy strategy guides for games I didn't even own, it was just cool to read through them, then awhile later I would end up buying the game that I already had a strategy guide for, that's what happened with Sonic Adventure and Metroid Prime, both of those guides helped me quite a bit.  Also my library has some old guide books for SNES and Genesis games, I checked those out a few times, it was fun reading through them and discovering some older games that I had previously missed.

Nowadays though I don't buy guides anymore, i've found that using video walkthroughs on Youtube is more helpful and it dosen't cost me anything. 

[velcrozombie1]

Back in the NES days I bought a couple of truly terrible strategy
guides through my school's Troll Book Club. I didn't know any better
at 7 or 8 years old, but its now woefully apparent that they were
written by people who had barely played the games they were
trying to help you with. The only thing they offered were a few
screenshots of each game (both guides covered about 30 games
apiece) complete with confusing or nonsensical captions
and occasionally a password or code (like the Konami code),
which were the only bits of useful information the guides provided.

I did buy a few Nintendo Power strategy guides that were genuinely
awesome: Super Mario Bros 3, Final Fantasy and Ninja Gaiden 2.
In particular, I read the Final Fantasy strategy guide so extensively that
it eventually had to be held together with masking tape. They weren't
necessarily as pretty as some of the more recent guides I have seen,
but they had a wealth of information.

I haven't used a strategy guide in almost 20 years. I wouldn't mind collecting
a few of them from games that I enjoyed a great deal, but I'd never buy
one to play through a game on a first try. I make a great deal of effort to
complete my games now without any help, but if I'm stuck for more than
a couple of hours I will consult Gamefaqs or Youtube.

[Rev1]

Yeah, I pretty much stick with gamefaqs and youtube as well. For the bigger games you can sometimes find whole sites dedicated to that game or a particular series of games which gives you way more information then a strategy guide ever could as well. Now with wiki pages you can find huge guides to games like fire emblem on the web with great explanations of how the games work by experienced players. The only reason I get strategy guides is for collection purposes and I really don't collect them (thus I almost never buy them).

[Sut1]

I purchased strategy guides for the first two Metal Gear Solid titles, but haven't purchased any since. Like Sega I find them expensive and like Darkrage the information is freely available on YouTube/GameFAQs so I no longer purchase them.

However if they are good quality and can be obtained at a reasonable price, I think they are nice to have in a video game collection.

[darkrage61]

I've found that it's often not worth the trouble trying to complete a game without any kind of help, that usually means i'll just end up wasting time trying in vain to figure out what to do next, and that's no fun at all. There's no way I would've figured out that Rosetta puzzle in Dead Space 3 without using Youtube.

[scotland171]

I agree with our friendly neighborhood Darkrage.  I've bought guides first, then games second.   Browsing at a used book sale, and there is a strategy guide - colorful, its cheap, beckoning.  It plants the seed to get the game someday. I also agree that it often increases my enjoyment of a game to get cheats, helps and hints from somewhere.  Could anyone enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark on the 2600 without some help?   I too have many (many) old guides, going back to the pong era and the early arcade days.  They are just a hoot to go back and read entire books on beating Pac Man.   As Archie and Edith sang, those were the days.  As Velcrozombie writes, many of these were just catching the wave in the NES era, and can be basically a glorified catalog.  They are still fun, and when a recent question about guides concerning the original Legend of Zelda came up, I went to the shelves to see what was there.

Guidebooks are great, but has their time come and gone?  Pre-internet, awesome, but today they are so expensive when new. Many thanks to all those people who have written walkthroughs for Gamefaqs or make You Tube walkthroughs for relatively obscure games as a labor of love.    Who knew someone would be reading your walkthrough to warriors of the eternal sun a decade after it was written.

[Tron1]

I used to like strategy guides, but I recall being pretty disappointed in them. They would often explain the obvious while leaving out many of the secrets that you bought the strategy guide for. Some guy who had a deadline to write a guide often missed a lot of info. For a few of my absolute favorites I'd like to buy a guide simply for the cool artwork. I saw a book, not strategy guide, but hard cover book for Fallout 3 at a used game store. I thought about buying it, until I saw it was $30. I guess being cheap isn't going to help me get many strategy guides either. Gamefaqs here I come.   

[Steve1]

Despite using YouTube for a quick hint or a website for a walkthrough, I still love buying game/strategy guides. I would advise researching them first though either by reading reviews online or actually looking at them (if they are not sealed). I have a few 'collector's editions' but mostly not. Some of them are just nice to read through - Alan Wake and the Assassin's Creed guides being good examples. Even those that have a focus on multiplayer, which I don't play often, are nice to have for more specific single player walkthroughs than can be found online.

HOWEVER, for whatever reason, I got the Battlefield 4 collectors edition guide without researching it at all or looking at it. It was on sale for $21 which is good for a collector's edition. What a mistake. The book devotes about 5 pages of 400+ for single player and it's not even a walkthrough. It's just a weapons guide, a short description of the dog tags, and something else I forget. When I looked online, someone stated the single player campaign walkthrough was available through a download code which was included in the package. I downloaded it and while there are videos, there is nothing descriptive - so basically pointing towards YouTube. In my opinion, that's a crime to devote so little to single player in a game that pushed it as a prominent feature.

I'll still buy guides since I find it nice to have a hardcopy in most cases but I've learned a valuable lesson to research before buying.

[darkrage61]

I prefer Youtube nowadays because I keep hearing about how certain strategy guides have either inaccurate information about a certain game or are missing it altogether, that Battlefield 4 thing is a prime example, though thankfully that's one game I didn't have to depend on Youtube for.