Famicom game strategy guides!
Post Merge: July 19, 2014, 08:17:43 pm
Some of the best strategy guides around (in terms of amount of tips, artwork, and design) are for famicom games and I couldn't find a topic that talked about famicom guide books. So what Game guide books do you have for which games? Many guides could have also been made for one game (e.g. MOTHER)
You know, I'd see these at some game stores in Japan, but never bothered picking one up. They actually seemed more like collectors items.. at the time, I was only interested in inexpensive carts.
I'll probably grab one when I visit in the future.
Game guides are nice, I think sometimes they have info that you can't find on the internet.
I had a very nice colorful Gradius guide that showed were the extra lives were and what the letters spell at the end of the game.
I have a Bomberman strategy guide in black and white that shows all the enemies and power ups, pretty nice and will be useful if I ever try to play through the game.
The smaller Famitsu strategy guides are cool too. The cultural aspect, to think people bought these cheap guides and played all around Japan.
I had a guide for Mother and if I recall correctly it had an interview with one of the developrs too.... nice...
Most common famicom guides are probably dragon quest and wizardry.
Yeah rpg guides were more common because that's what everyone was playing. Especially dragon quest. I never got to see some of the mini famitsu guides actually. But yeah, guides were a big cultural thing back then because of how big the famicom was too. There are just TONS of them for famicom games.
In the "Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" DVD there's footage of a collection that has pretty much every strategy guide ever released in Japan. From old Famicom guides to latest stuff.
There were a lot of books, suffice to say.
The FC guides are pretty charming, but I can't really justify buying any. I'd just be able to look at the pretty pictures and most of the information is available online in English anyway.
I own a couple with my favorite being this one:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/FAMICOM-NES-FC-DRAGON-QUEST-III-3-GUIDE-BOOK-WARRIOR-/141308951749
Of course a couple of my stickers are missing, but just the text-only ones.
Yeah, famicom guides are sorta collectors items and are mostly collected for artistic value (since some of them are really nice with good manga like art) but since we have the internet and all the info we need is there for us and that's why guides aren't really popular any more.
Post Merge: July 22, 2014, 12:43:41 pm
DDCecil, I Iove the dragon quest games! Some of the best made rpgs to this day.