I still prefer these to seo optimized, ad riddled articles with videos that are somehow 8 minutes long to show a 5-10 second part of the game.
Yeah it’s just like looking up a food recipe anymore. A lot of times, the guide isn’t even correct. Google has encouraged the internet to just pump out hot garbage.
Go to the wikis. Ideally the non-fandom ones, but even those are bearable with ublock set up.
I used gamefaqs for the latest Square HD2D games like Triangle Strategy. It’s actually awesome because it really completes the nostalgia and the games are kinda perfectly created for the type of guides, like the “Golden route” in that game. It’s so cool people still make these guides
These often were solo written guides, too. Not wikis.
Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you’ve ever seen.
I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.
I wonder if anyone has compiled a massive directory of these types of guides anywhere. It would be a shame to ever lose them for good.
When you dust off an old game and go look for guides.
Then see one you wrote.
Back in 97 my older sister got a both babe job at E3 and got extra tickets for me and my mom to take me. This is back when it was strictly a trade conference and not really open to the public. I was waiting in line for a new Gameboy game when a dude overhead me rambling to my mom about the Brady guides I loved to read so much back then (my mom is a patient saint haha) when a dude in line interrupted me and told my mom about his website that had free guides for all the new games online. My mom was pretty excited about free guides and he handed her his card which I looked at eagerly, it was Jeff Veasey, the creator of gamefaqs.com.
I can’t tell you how much of my parents toner i burnt through over the years printing from that website, it was probably cheaper to just buy the guides haha. Still one of my all time favorite sites.
Oh yeah that Gameboy game I was waiting to see was some new Japanese monster game called Pokemon.
