WIKIBOOKS
DISPONIBILI
?????????

ART
- Great Painters
BUSINESS&LAW
- Accounting
- Fundamentals of Law
- Marketing
- Shorthand
CARS
- Concept Cars
GAMES&SPORT
- Videogames
- The World of Sports

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
- Blogs
- Free Software
- Google
- My Computer

- PHP Language and Applications
- Wikipedia
- Windows Vista

EDUCATION
- Education
LITERATURE
- Masterpieces of English Literature
LINGUISTICS
- American English

- English Dictionaries
- The English Language

MEDICINE
- Medical Emergencies
- The Theory of Memory
MUSIC&DANCE
- The Beatles
- Dances
- Microphones
- Musical Notation
- Music Instruments
SCIENCE
- Batteries
- Nanotechnology
LIFESTYLE
- Cosmetics
- Diets
- Vegetarianism and Veganism
TRADITIONS
- Christmas Traditions
NATURE
- Animals

- Fruits And Vegetables



ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Action game
  2. Advergaming
  3. Arcade machine
  4. Artificial intelligence
  5. Atari Games
  6. Atari Lynx
  7. Audio game
  8. Board games
  9. Browser game
  10. Casual game
  11. Christian video games
  12. Comparison of handheld gaming consoles
  13. Computer and video games
  14. Computer animation
  15. Computer-assisted role-playing game
  16. Computer graphics
  17. Computer role-playing game
  18. Console game
  19. Dr. Mario
  20. Famicom
  21. First person shooter
  22. Game
  23. Game balance
  24. Game Boy
  25. Game Boy Advance
  26. Game Boy Color
  27. Game Boy line
  28. Game Boy Micro
  29. Game classification
  30. Game controller
  31. Game design
  32. Game designer
  33. Game developer
  34. Game Developer Magazine
  35. Game development
  36. Game development tool
  37. Game mechanic
  38. Gameplay
  39. Game programmer
  40. Game programming
  41. Gamer
  42. Game server browser
  43. Game studies
  44. Gaming convention
  45. Golden Age of Arcade Games
  46. Handheld game console
  47. History of computer and video games
  48. History of video game consoles
  49. History of video games
  50. Hotseat
  51. Internet gaming
  52. Joystick
  53. LAN gaming center
  54. List of books about computer and video games
  55. List of commercial failures in computer and video gaming
  56. List of gaming topics
  57. Mobile game
  58. Multiplayer game
  59. N-Gage
  60. Nintendo 64
  61. Nintendo DS
  62. Nintendo GameCube
  63. Personal computer game
  64. Pinball
  65. Play-by-mail game
  66. Play-by-post game
  67. PlayStation 3
  68. PlayStation Portable
  69. Pong
  70. Programming game
  71. Puzzle computer game
  72. Real-time strategy
  73. Sega Dreamcast
  74. Sega Saturn
  75. Serious game
  76. Simulation game
  77. Single player
  78. Sony PlayStation
  79. Stealth-based game
  80. Strategy game
  81. Strategy guide
  82. Super Nintendo Entertainment System
  83. Synthespian
  84. Tabletop role-playing game
  85. Teamspeak
  86. Tetris
  87. Tokyo Game Show
  88. Video game center
  89. Video game console
  90. Video game crash of 1983
  91. Video game industry
  92. Video game publisher
  93. Wargame
  94. Wii
  95. Xbox 360

 



VIDEO & COMPUTER GAMES
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_guide

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Strategy guide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Strategy guides are instruction books that contain hints or complete solutions to specific video games. The exact meaning of a "strategy guide" these days is very vague, as most could be easily ranked as "walkthroughs" or "hint collections".

General information

The term "strategy guide" is widely used for printed, comprehensive walkthrough/hint collection — either a book or a booklet. Some video game magazines publish individual articles that are called "strategy guides", though these are typically better termed walkthroughs or hint collections.

The strategy guide books or booklets are typically sold through game retailers. In cases of exceptionally popular game titles, they are sold through more mainstream publication channels, such as bookstores or even newsstands. The strategy guides are often reasonably cheaply priced, and often sold at a lower price if purchased with the game itself. Sometimes, these bundles of game and strategy guide are very heavily marketed. Some game retailer chains, for example, have gained notoriety for trying as hard as possible to sell such bundles, even to the point where customers find it intrusive.

The strategy guides are not limited to strategy games; they are quite common with RPGs and action games as well.

Strategy guides may typically published by game distributors themselves, or licensed to a specialty publishing house. Prima Games, a division of Random House, is a well known example, known for their Prima "Official" Game Guides. Brady Games, a division of Pearson Education, is another publisher which is well known for their Brady Games Official Strategy Guides. These kind of guides are fully licensed from the game makers, and are thus marketed as the "official" strategy guides. There are also a number of publishers who make third-party, unlicensed, "unofficial" strategy guides, and many of today's's mainstream publishers, such as Brady Games and Prima Games, began their history by making third-party guides.

Typical contents

The contents of a strategy guide varies from game genre to another. Typically, the guides contain:

  • detailed gameplay information, for example, maneuvers that are not detailed in the manual
  • complete maps of the game, which show the placement of all items (including hidden and hard-to-find ones)
  • detailed instructions for specific locations on how to proceed from there
  • explanations of puzzles
  • details of enemies, including techniques on defeating individual enemies (especially "boss" monsters)
  • checklist of collectible items
  • cheats and game editing, although this has been less common in official guides
  • walkthroughs to help the player complete levels

Publishing before game release

In order to be released at the same time as the game, commercial strategy guides are often based on a pre-release version of the game, rather than the final retail version (a good example was BradyGames strategy guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It included slightly off locations for collectable items, included adrenaline locations which were removed before release, and had a slightly different map, which made it impossible to find the black van in Los Venturas used for break-ins using their guide). Until recently they could not be updated after they are published, however BradyGames has begun offering free updates to their official strategy guides via their website. An alternative are the free, fan-made FAQs or walkthroughs located online which satisfies a user's need to be accurate and up to date.

Strategy guides are sometimes published before the game itself is published. This can be risky because there is always the chance that a game will end up not being released. In January 2001, Prima published a guide (ISBN 0-7615-3125-4) for the Dreamcast version of Half-Life that was cancelled late in development when Sega discontinued the console.

Source Mistakes

Some companies, a notable one Prima, will, at times, make mistakes in the book about the game itself, such as stating that "Character A" has a relationship with "Character B", despite there being no relationship. A notable incedint that occured relating to this was when Prima Guides made a strategy guide for the game "Sonic Adventure 2: Battle", when they cited the character Super Shadow, they reffered to him as Hyper Shadow. This particular incedint has become an internet meme in the Sonic Community.

Guides and technology

The rise of the World Wide Web and the increasing availability of free online FAQs and walkthroughs has taken away some of the need for commercial strategy guides. Of special note are walkthrough sites (such as GameFAQs). However, there is still a large market for them. Strategy guides often feature extensive picture-by-picture walkthroughs, maps, game art, and other visual features that cannot be provided by a bare text online walkthrough.

Some publishers have tried combining the printed books with the Internet. In 2000, one of the most dubious examples of this was the Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide published by BradyGames, but much of the information was contained on Square's PlayOnline website. This seemed like a good way to promote PlayOnline, while creating a guide that would have updatable content, but it was widely panned. Players saw no need of buying a book if a significant part of the content was online; and there was no point paying for online content from one site, if it was available for free on another site. As a result, Square abandoned the online strategy guide concept and released complete printed guides for future games. [1]

External links

Wikibooks
Wikibooks has more about this subject:
Wikibooks:Computer and video games bookshelf
Strategy guide publishers
  • BradyGames
  • Game Guides Online
  • DoubleJump Books
  • Nintendo Power
  • Piggyback Interactive
  • Prima Games
  • Lunabean Guides
Online strategy guides and FAQs
  • GameFAQs
  • IGN FAQs
  • StrategyWiki
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_guide"