Even if they were useless (though their usefulness varied, it seems like), your kids might have still liked them. I remember that in my childhood, getting things that referenced something I loved was enough for me to like it, even if it didn’t actually add anything itself.
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This doesn’t exactly make then worth buying; but in some cases that inaccuracy ended up being of historical interest itself:
Because of the lead time required to get it ready for paper publication, some of the inaccuracies were actually echoes of cut/modified content rather than just sloppy.
Not much help to the poor sap who just wanted useful advice; but sometimes a glimpse into an earlier iteration of the game.
Yeah. And eventually it got to the point where the “strategy guides” was just stuff that would have been in a proper manual if the games themselves had still come with proper manuals. This happened pretty rapidly, too.
I think the only strategy guide worth buying was the one for Civilization, or “Rome on 640k a day.” Subsequent “strategy” guides for later games in the series were pretty much just unit lists with little information on what the game was actually doing behind the scenes.
I got the Prima guide for Final Fantasy X. It was the first and last Prima guide I ever bought. Not only was it wrong in a bunch of places, but it omitted most of the information I’d actually want to find in a strategy guide, like the hidden attack/defense numbers on the monsters. It was almost completely useless. The Gamefaqs guides ended up being much more useful.
A big point of those things always seemed to be that they were sort of art books. Or what we’d call art books these days. Aside from the walkthrough and tips, which might or might not be useful in any given volume. The “official” ones were loaded with production details, lore that was undisclosed elsewhere, art, background info about the series as a whole. It was a secondary thing for sure. But I remember a friend had a guide or two that including sheet music for playing the games music and what have. Especially before the internets got big it was basically Strategy Guides and enthusiast magazines for that kind of shit.
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TBH, for me the takeaway from this post is the link to the custom tombstone-maker:
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