Originally Posted by
Tanooki
As a habit I download faqs for any game I own that one has been made for, and I've had a habit of picking up 1st party Nintendo guides for the SNES era stuff and a little beyond. I find no matter how someone writes stuff in text, you end up still losing quite a bit of substance depending on the game. Something like a FPS or a racing game it's fairly easy to use crude ASCII art or general descriptions of the stage/track and you'll know what they're getting at. The thing is when you get into deep and convoluted stuff like a Zelda style or a RPG type game it just really is never enough. It's very easy even with someone saying go south, road splits, go east, to still get lost, but picture guides have map pictures and that helps get the feel. It's a great time saver when you don't have dozens of extra hours to get murdered in the game over so you can still enjoy it, or because for years now since really 3D games got going people have been making so many games essentially require a free guide or they prefer a paid guide to get it all, sometimes even things you need which stinks. I rarely will buy a video game that is a Zelda or RPG type anymore unless there is a guide, or at the very minimum a well detailed internal map (like new3DS Xenoblade has) as I don't like feeling lost or like something is being left out that'll screw me over later.