Best and Worst Strategy Guides ever?

[Astrocade]

The best one I ever had was Mario Madness that was basically a guide for Super Mario World but had about fifty pages of history and photos. That guide rocked my world back in the day.

The worst was the very first edition of the first volume of How to win at Nintendo Games by Jeff Rovin. When the first edition came out I got it and felt totally gipped. In all fairness, the subsequent printings and following volumes had a lot of info, but the first edition was basically stock info reprinted from the instruction books. And for password games and games with secret codes, no info was given. I think for the section on Punch Out it actually said something like "There's passwords, even one that will take you straight to Tyson himself, but we're not going to print them because that would make things too easy..." WTF? The later editions always printed passwords and codes, and were very handy to have laying around. IIRC they printed the "Justin Bailey" code for Metroid way before Nintendo Power did. But that first edition was a lame rip off.

[koshichka]

The worst was the very first edition of the first volume of How to win at Nintendo Games by Jeff Rovin. When the first edition came out I got it and felt totally gipped. In all fairness, the subsequent printings and following volumes had a lot of info, but the first edition was basically stock info reprinted from the instruction books.

Yeah, there were a lot of crap non-informative Nintendo books in the day, the Jeff Rovin ones were pretty lacking, Ultimate Unauthorized was just completely useless, but the 'Secrets of the Games: Nintendo Games Secrets' series by Rusel DeMaria were amazing...or at least the first couple books were, I haven't seen beyond that.

[BetaWolf47]

The absolute worst I've ever owned is the Pokemon special edition Pokedex for the Ruby/Sapphire generation of games. It came with an art book and a Pokemon guide which is essentially useless. The guide doesn't contain anything that isn't common knowledge to the audience in question. It simply has a list of all Pokemon, their base states and move list, and a list of all of the items and attacks in the back.

This sounds useful at first, but here's the problem:
-The art in the art book was just a compilation of all of the 3D sprites from Pokemon Colosseum. This art book is equivalent to a soundtrack CD for an unlicensed NES game.

-The base stats were done in values of 25, 33, 50, 67, and 100. It was poor estimate values.

-There were ****ing typos all over the guide book! Some attacks had the wrong effect listed.

-It barely scratched the surface of the game. The only worthwhile pictures were the ones of the Pokemon, so they might as well have just printed it on cheap paper as text!

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For best, I have two to name: Mario Paint and the Pokemon Pokedex from the Gold/Silver gen. The Mario Paint book has amazing depth for how simplistic the game is, even having music sheets to replicate songs in the music maker portion of the game. The Pokemon Pokedex is simply amazing. It covers everything in the game except for the main story mode and EVs. It has every move, all items, all 251 Pokemon except for Celebi, an intuitive layout, and deep, deep coverage.

It even has steps to take to make Pokemon learn any move it can learn. Say, for example, you want to teach Rage to a certain Pokemon, but it can learn it only as an egg move. No compatible Pokemon learn it, so it tells you how to breed the move from a different line of Pokemon. I.E. teach it as a TM to a certain Pokemon, have it breed with a Pokemon compatible to yours, then have that Pokemon's offspring breed with the first Pokemon. It blew me away how deep and intuitive this book was.

Sad thing was that both Pokedex books were made by Primagames. The one for Gold and Silver was the most amazing strategy guide I've ever owned. I could read it every day and learn something new each time. The one for Ruby, Sapphire, and Colosseum was just a waste of money and paper.

[PentiumMMX]

The best I've seen is the Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow guide. Very informative, well-written, and it's smaller than your average guide (Being roughly the size of a paperback novel instead of a magazine).

The worst is a close tie between the Nintendo Power guide for Zelda: Ocarina of Time along with the official Final Fantasy IX guide.

The OOT guide was poorly-written; feeling more like a story than a strategy guide (Rather than saying "Go here and step on this switch, and something will happen", it was more like "Link went over and stepped on the switch, when something began to happen as a result") and it didn't get into great detail on the bosses. Now on the other hand, the Prima guide was far superior; covering the bosses in greater detail and pointing out a few shortcuts during timed events in the games.

The other one is the official Final Fantasy IX guide, which told you about 75% of the time to go to their website for more information.

[Lady Jaye]

I don't really have a favorite strat guide. However, nowadays, I rely on the IGN online walkthroughs when I need to.

The one I hate the most is Gamefaqs. Since I'm a visual person, reading "go here than turn left than right" doesn't work for me if I can't see a representation of the game area to have an idea where to do.

[Famidrive-16]

All the OOT talk reminds me of this funny guide I got for the game, some unofficial guide, and the writer swore like every other sentence.

At one point he talked about meeting Malon's dad or something and spends a whole paragraph talking about how fat the dad is. It was really bizarre.