Anyone else remember the days when you bought a rpg for your console system and you had to play without a strategy guide? Before the internet and gamefaqs when you were lucky if the game was featured in Nintendo Power or other game magazine?
Playing rpgs before strat guides
Anyone else remember the days when you bought a rpg for your console system and you had to play without a strategy guide? Before the internet and gamefaqs when you were lucky if the game was featured in Nintendo Power or other game magazine?
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You don't "play" a game with strategy guides. It is more like following instructions.
I remember those days like it was yesterday. Oh wait, it was yesterday.
I tend not to use strategy guides, at least not on the first playthrough.
I loved those days, it was a great feeling when you finished one game with your own skills.
Even games like The Legend of Zelda were focus for discussions with friends at school to give ourselves hints and tips to finish them.
Today i still prefer to play without guide but i have been tempted a few times to uncover some secrets like in Final Fantasy Tactics when i unsuccessfully tried to get Cloud .... until i checked a magazine :P
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Strategy guies to me are kind of like using cheats. You do not do it the first time, but if you need/want to when playing the game again its alright.
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"FAQ-ing out" is the term I've used for when someone gives up and goes to a FAQ for how to do something. Generally I'd beat my head up against something until I figured it out or spend hours trying different things. If I couldn't get it I'd ask friends for advice or put it away and come back another day.
Good game design for me means you should never have to refer to a FAQ to complete something. I was incredibly frustrated recently by a sequence in Bionic Commando 360 where it is impossible to hit a helicopter without using the rocket launcher's lock-on feature. Notably, this feature was never mentioned anywhere in game - though I suppose I could have checked the manual in hindsight.
After talking about it with a friend I remembered a similar sequence in Metal Gear Solid... and having figured this out, completed the whole boss fight easily since at that point I knew the whole area inside and out.
Modern RPGs with the "collect 5,000 secret stars" and the like are practically unattainable without playing through the game 20 times... and at that point I have to use a FAQ or sink another 40 hours into a game. And it feels dirty. The ones with "recipes" are the worst for this. You can either waste all of your best equipment or just FAQ out.
For the first time, I bought a guide for an RPG the first time I played it - Dragon Quest 8. With the hint book, I had recipes for equipment that made the game a breeze. And looking back, I wish I'd skipped the guide entirely. I spent the whole time resisting its charms, then sneaking a peek now and then and feeling horrible for it. It was like sleeping with an ex-girlfriend you'd broken up with time and time again.
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Originally Posted by Daltone
skarr said what I wanted to better than I could.
Older RPG's didn't really require a guide to 100%... now it's as though the games are made with too many unrealistic (for a game) secrets... the "How would I ever think to do that without a guide?" types.
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I usually gave up when I got stuck but talking with kids in school was a big help. I remember half of the boys in my 7th grade class were all playing Shadowgate at the same time and we'd always meet up during recess to discuss our progress.
There would be parts everyone would get stuck at. Like throwing the blue orb into the lake to freeze it and clicking on the crack in the waterfall to move behind it. Eventually someone would figure it out though or call the Nintendo tip line and pass the info along. I kinda miss that.
it takes me back to dragon warrior on the nes... i tried every combination possible to make the rainbow bridge across the channel. i used the stones of sunlight and the staff of rain over and over again. i kept going to the cave in the south, only to have the old man kick me out before i had a chance to read what he said. i finally found the hidden man in castle town behind the barriers that gave me the location of erdrick's token and away i went. but dam, that crap took me weeks
final fantasy on the other hand, was a longer game, but i managed to finish it a week before the NP strategy guide arrived in the mail
I'm still stuck playing Beggar Prince.
My friends and I would do the same thing with Shadowgate.
My Gaming Collection (Now at Google Drive!)
And I had an onion on my belt, `cause that was the fashion at the time.
Hey kiddies, stop googling your tweeters for a minute and gather `round old Grampa. I’ll tell you what it took to get an RPG hint way back in the old days of the Spring of `92.
Back then, `tweren’t no books or FAQs or websites to help you out. You either sussed it out on your own or you had to call something called the “hint line”. I remember having call Nintendo’s 1-900 hint line during my first time playing through Final Fantasy Legend II for the Game Boy. It cost something like $3.50 a minute. To make matters worse, I was in the military at the time and didn’t own a phone (and cell phones were still too expensive for a grunt back then). So I had to use a phone credit card for the call, from a payphone*, with Game Boy in hand. Took about three minutes to explain where I was and get the solution to the problem. Suffice to say I really needed that hint.
* - And to which, per the cliché, I had to walk uphill a quarter mile in the dark to find. No, seriously.
Last edited by Pantechnicon; 11-17-2009 at 03:18 PM.
In 1988, my friends and I used the maps and tip sheet that came with The Legend of Zelda. We also used the maps in the black Official Nintendo Players Guide and the maps in Nintendo Power #1.
We did the same thing with Metroid, Dragon Warrior, and Metal Gear.
At the time, we were used to straightforward arcade-style games like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and saw nothing wrong with using various resources to guide us in those large, sprawling games...especially if some of those resources came inside the game box, like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Metal Gear.
Last edited by Rob2600; 11-17-2009 at 03:37 PM.
My brother and I each played Might & Magic separately - I played on the Apple 2 and he played on the c64. He came home from college for Xmas and had almost the entire game mapped out by hand on graph paper. There are TONS of dungeons in that game, it must have been a huge effort. Not quite a strategy guide, but almost.
For most of those older computer RPGs I just mapped things out as I went along, as-needed, which is probably why I finished very, very few of them. Definitley Dungeon Master on the Amiga and maybe The Bard's Tale on c64 - that's about it.
On consoles I pretty much relied on either talking with friends, old school brute force, or the very rare call to a help line (I only remember doing this to find that hidden final dungeon in Miracle Warriors on the SMS - no way you could find it without some help - it was in the middle of the desert). Console RPGs were much easier to finish then the traditional 8-bit computer RPG. Much more linear, and they gave you a lot more direct hints, which was actually really refreshing at the time.
If you can't do it with 8 bits, you don't need to do it!
I remember so many RPGs that I've played w/o guides because they didn't exist for that game or didn't exist as a mainstream item yet. I would have killed for a strategy guide for Phantasy Star 1. It was a treat for me to see the sequel came packed with a mini-guide. I remember my brother and I wearing out that book until it was a ragged lump of paper.
It mildly dumbfounds me at how many RPGs I played with no guide in sight. There was Neutopia, Golden Axe Warrior, The Magic of Scheherazade, Lunar: The Silver Star (there was a guide made for it but I didn't pick it up till years after), Cosmic Fantasy 2, Super Hydlide, Ys Book I & II, and the list goes on and on....
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I miss the good old days when I had the TIME to figure everything out in a game on my own. I'll still try to now, but I only have very limited time to play games at all, so I really can't spend the time wandering around trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do. Takes away some of the fun, sure, but I also now have a lot more money than I did back then, which means I have a mountain of games to play, rather than being stuck with just one (which also meant I used to force myself to play bad games as long as I could stand to).
I've never used a FAQ.
I love guides! If you dont use the guides thats cool. I used to get guides, but now i'm too cheap and then they go out of print. Oh well. Plus alot of them have some neat pictures : D Like my FFXII guide book had a spiffy double sided poster of the world map and the license stuff and a neat artbook.
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I always thought of FF7 as kind of "popularizing" strategy guides (despite being one of the easiest RPGs), but I've been surprised to find out how many older games had them. I found an official strategy guide for Heimdall on Sega CD, and that game's downright obscure. I also only recently noticed that Crusader of Centy has a form in the back of the manual to send in for the official strategy guide. I wonder how many copies of that strategy guide are floating around -- if that was the only way they sold them, it's not many. Although, if you're talking all the way back to the 80s, then I'm sure few if any had them.
I don't generally use strategy guides, but they have their place for certain games. I definitely prefer a "real" strategy guide to an FAQ, but I don't buy many.
to this day I only buy strategy guides if theres a poster in the back. Then I cut the pictures out of the guides and hang them on the wall or glue them to binders and crap, lol.
god damn was I pissed when the star ocean "poster" was just a stupid ass crafting chart.
the only strategy guides worth purchasing , poster or not, were the Working Design ones because they had other interesting stuff in em like interviews/facts/stuff.
and stickers!
I always found it pointless to play a game if you have a magical book telling you where to go. Why even buy the game, just buy the strategy guides and read them.
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