Loyal subscriber to Nintendo Power, bought quite a few of the official guides. I became gamer tech support amongst my friends, they would call me when they got stuck and I would consult the sacred texts.
You think that was bad, try Tomb Raider 3. With limited saves on PS1.
I played the remaster recently and I’ve no idea how I completed that shit back then with no guides.
I love Ocarina of Time but my god they didn’t provide a whole lot of instruction.
And don’t even get me started on that little flying bastard that’s supposed to help you.
Hey!
Listen!!!
You talking about Navi or the owl? Navi was kind of annoying but I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle that owl.
I was talking about Navi, I think the owl was in Majora’s Mask, which I haven’t had the chance to play yet.
(I haven’t even had the chance to finish Ocarina of Time)
Owl is definitely in OOT. He talks forever in that slow typing dialog, but in the final dialog box, he’s asking if you understand. Default option is no, so if you’re trying to click through all his bullshit you then hit that option and he goes through all of it again.
Majora’s is more fun but oot is the better game.
Hey! I had that one.
Good times.
Supposedly there was an other floor planned for the water temple you could raise water to but devs scrapped it because they thought it’d be too confuting.
The end of strategy guides was Final Fantasy X. Most of it was filled with “Go to this web address to see the solution!”. And the game even has the website featured on the title screen with as much space as the game title.
FFX came out in 2001. GameFAQs was started in 1995. If you had the internet as a kid back then there was no reason to pay money for strategy guides any longer!
I have my Final Fantasy X still, even used it when I played the remastered version recently. It didn’t ask me to use the website for anything. I thought it was the Final Fantasy IX guide that required you to use PlayOnline for the actual solutions.
I guess so. This was twenty years ago lol
I don’t recall that, although you’re more or less correct on timeline. FFX-2 I used a strategy guide, no website links and the damn thing was practically mandatory. I’m glad there’s better guides from fans, now.
Completely agree. The Internet has been great for that sort of thing. The advent of per game wikis, especially. You tube and even steam guides are good too.
Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire mini guide was the goat in quality.
The Versus Books guide was better.
This kind of thing really turned me off adventure games. I’m here to have fun, not reverse engineer what some dude thought was the solution to some random problem.
huh. I think I’m the exact opposite. I don’t go looking for just “action” in my adventure games (I have fps and rts for that). I literally want to stop battling for a few minutes to try and reverse engineer something lol. I guess my experience comes from tabletop games and the adventure games are the closest to that but still lacks… something.
I really like TTRPGs because I can try literally anything and the GM will adjudicate on it. Computer based puzzlers feel very constrained because it always seems like there’s a right answer and I don’t know what it is.
