video game strategy guides

Ideally, most people want to win a video game through their own effort alone. After all, with today's modern games, you can get some recognition for facing such a challenge.

Your friends will be very impressed with you if you don't have to consult a single video game strategy guide on the way through. Nonetheless, the reality is that today's video games have gotten so complicated that video game strategy guides are more than a luxury now. Nowadays, they are a necessity for anyone who wants to successfully navigate an adventure game.

As a matter of fact, I have been using video game cheats and strategy guides since I had an original 8-bit Nintendo. I remember the video game cheats we used back then. There were only eight buttons that you could push, so every video game cheat with a combination of up, down, left, right, b, a, select, and start. That made them pretty easy to memorize, and we were always trading them among our friends at school. Sometimes, we would even discover them accidentally.

We also had some video game strategy guides that we would use. They were the official video game strategy guides published by Nintendo or the maker of the game, and were pretty useful for games like The Legend of Zelda. These games would have a long series of riddles that you had to solve and adventures that you had to complete, so having a videogame strategy guide was great when you got lost. These guides didn't emphasize cheats so much as explain how to solve the riddles.

A lot of the PC games at the time required video game strategy guides too. I remember that I used to love playing the King's Quest games, and most of these games really took a guide to help you find your way through. A video game strategy guide for an adventure game like that could be 30, 40, or even 50 pages long. They were more like books than “guides.” The games were already so complex that it was like reading a novel to find your way through.

The trend has continued towards more and more complex video games with more and more complex strategy guides. I remember when I bought the Empire Earth strategy guide a few years ago. It must've been 150 pages long! I've heard that this is not exceptional for video game strategy guides nowadays either. Some of them are even longer. Still, I guess that's what you need to get through a complex video game.