It's ok to use a strategy guide - gamers have been using them in some form or another since the dawn of gaming. If you get lost and don't know where to go or are having trouble clearing a certain section, there's no shame in seeking for help.
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hello ESL
I'm a native English speaker
There's few better ways to ruin your appreciation of a game than to read a guide.
If you're getting desperate or walking around in circles for hours or worried about ruining your save file, it's understandable, but it cheapens the experience. Beating a game all by yourself is much more satisfying.
I've also used a number of guides before that gave information that was misleading or flat out wrong, so resorting to a guide is no guarantee of getting good help.
Playing games is about having fun, so if you enjoy using guides, you should, but if you don't you should avoid them like the plague.
Getting stuck without knowing what to do or where to go is never fun
I agree, but if a game is putting you in that situation regularly, you should just stop playing it.
If a game puts you in an endless unwinnable battle, or abjectly, listlessly, hopelessly lost, I think it's reasonable to forgive that, say, once or twice. Retro games in particular come from eras where "No child left behind" was not a priority. The commitment you make when you decide to play an old game like that unfortunately does include taking a couple softlocks on the chin. You may well need a guide to unstick yourself when that happens to you.
But if a game is so broken that you need to reference a guide over and over and over again, and you aren't doing something fundamentally wrong as a player that's creating that situation, you're almost always going to be better off switching to a different game that respects you and your time more.
So when I was 14 I was able to go to EB Gamez and spend some cash for my birthday. I picked up RE3 which had just come out and a the game guide. Re1 and 2 took me weeks to beat, I beat RE3 that afternoon in like 6 hours and was never ju.p scares once because I read ahead. I gave up guides after that
Some games are nearly unbeatable without a guide.
The example you posted is of a game that comes with this warning on the back of the box:
>WARNING: EXPERT LEVEL SCENARIO!
>The Return of Werdna is an EXPERT level scenario for experienced Wizardry players ONLY. Novices will rapidly become totally frustrated - this game is VERY difficult! First-time Wizardry players should play the first scenario, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, before playing any other Wizardry game.
If you buy a game with that written on the box and get stuck, you really only have yourself to blame.
even Wizardry experts found it hard as balls
a guide in the context of something like pacman should be pretty inoffensive. it's more of a sport than something with a simple solution that can be spoiled.
>gamers have been using them in some form or another since the dawn of gaming.
People who say this these days don't seem to realize there is a world of difference between the the amount of information you can get these days, and the kind of information you could get back then. These days you have information centralized from many sources, with people able to use savestates, hacking, or even looking at the code of the game, to gather such information; and all of that, free, no hassle, available in a second.
Back then EVEN if you bought a strategy guide, which granted you found one for the game and which paid for it, there was no way it was as complete as what you can find these days. An piece of equipment in a JRPG has a special hidden feature like reducing dmg from certain spells? Sure, these days the hackers will know. But again, no guarantee a paying guide would have told you that back then.
And then there was the internet sure, with restrictive access if you had one, and again more limited information or erronous. Just like magazines printing cheats and tips that were flat out wrong either because some troll was having fun seeing his bullshit on paper, or because the publishers flat out sent fake cheats and tips to magazines just so their games would be talked about.
And all that was only for popular games. If your game was just a little obscure, there was nothing.
tl;dr no, all the different methods from the 90s even grouped together isn't the fricking same as looking stuff up online these days.
Nobody said it was the same.
Except tons of people did, especially on this board
>I'm looking up a guide online when playing this hidden gem SNES jRPG which sold 10k copies in the US which combined knowledged from savestates, romhacking and 20 years of back knowledge together
>see it's totally the same as back in the day because you see Final Fantasy 6 and Earthbound had guides in big city stores!
It's more accurate than suggesting kids in the 90's had no access to guides at all or that they would have refused help for fear of ruining their gamer cred.
You didnt beat the game.
im kidding, but i do enjoy not using them. even if they expected you to
read the strategy guide? then you didn't actually beat the game
>World's First Published Strategy Guide
I swear to God I ran into this book in a US Navy Ship's library of all places.
Zelda back in 1990 was my biggie
the guide made it more fun
I agree, if you beat the game using guides you didn't really beat it.
But as an adult with way less free time, I don't care about what you think about me beating it or not.
Also, as a kid, I liked them because I liked the pictures and bestiaries in jRPG guides. Also because my dad would take me to the book store to read magazines for half an hour, and it was almost like I could play the games without ever being able to own them at that time.
Some of the Square Enix guides are works of art unto themselves.
Square Enix guides were telling you to go to some internet site to get essential information instead of just putting it in the guide itself.