Strategy guide - Citizendia

Strategy guides (攻略本 in Japanese, literally "capture book") are instruction books that contain hints or complete solutions to specific video games. A video game is a Game that involves interaction with a User interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The line between strategy guide and walkthrough is somewhat blurry, with the former often containing or being written around the latter. A walkthrough is a term describing the consideration of a process at an abstract level They are often published in print, both in book form and articles within video game magazines. Video game journalism is a branch of Journalism concerned with the reporting and discussion of Video games. 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.

Strategy guides may be 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. Prima Games, a division of Random House, is the largest publishing company of Video game Strategy guides in the United States. Random House Inc is the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher BradyGames, a division of Pearson Education, is another publisher which is well known for their BradyGames Official Strategy Guides. BradyGames is a publishing company in the United States operating as an Imprint of Dorling Kindersley, which specialises in Video game Pearson Education is an international publisher of textbooks and other educational material such as multimedia learning tools 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 mainstream publishers, such as BradyGames and Prima Games, began by making third-party guides.

1 Typical contents
2 Publishing before game release
3 Source Mistakes
4 Guides and technology
5 Revenue Models
6 External links

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. For the television channel see GamePlay HD. Gameplay includes all player experiences during the interaction with game systems especially formal
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 bosses), the segment for minor enemies is commonly referred to as a bestiary. A boss is a computer-controlled opponent which is found in Video games Their purpose is to test the skills that the player has accumulated over the course of a game A bestiary, or Bestiarum vocabulum is a compendium of beasts Bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals
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. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is a sandbox-style action-adventure computer and Video game developed by Rockstar North 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. A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages 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. Events Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences hosts the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; inducts John Carmack of Id Software The is Sega 's most recent Video game console and the successor to the Sega Saturn. is a multinational Video game Software and Hardware development company and a former Home computer

Source Mistakes

Some companies 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 incident that occurred relating to this was when Prima Guides made a strategy guide for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, when they referred Super Shadow as Hyper Shadow. Sonic Adventure 2 is a Platform game developed by Sonic Team USA and published by Sega in 2001 as a part of the Sonic the This particular incident has become an Internet meme in the Sonic community. Also in a strategy guide for Diddy Kong Racing they referred to Tricky, Smokey, Bubbler, Bluey as "The Dinosaur", "The Dragon", "The Walrus", and "The Octopus" instead of their names. Diddy Kong Racing is a 1997 Racing game for the Nintendo 64 developed by Rareware. Taj was called "The Genie. " Wizpig was the only boss character to given his official name.

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. The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. However, there is still a large market for them. Print strategy guides often feature extensive picture-by-picture walkthroughs, maps, and game art, none of which is possible in the plain-text strategy guides published by prominent sites such as GameFAQs. In Computing, plain text is a term used for an ordinary "unformatted" sequential file readable as textual material without much processing Newer sites, such as pwnGuide, allow strategy guides to be published in various formats such as . pdf, . doc, and . ppt thus allowing for picture-by-picture walkthroughs, maps, etc. . , which further undercuts the main advantage that print strategy guides have: rich content.

Some publishers have tried combining the printed books with the Internet. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks 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. Events May 11 - 13 &mdash 6th annual E³ (Electronic Entertainment Expo the 3rd annual Game Critics Awards for the Best of is a Console role-playing game developed and published by Square (now Square Enix) and the ninth installment in the Final Fantasy series PlayOnline is an online gaming service created by Square Co (now Square Enix) and is used as a hub for all online PC PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 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]

Furthermore, the rise of video sharing sites such as YouTube has given rise to new video based guides. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload view and share Video clips YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees Entire games can often have video captured walkthroughs using programs such as FRAPs; allowing for an unprecedented ability of user to mirror exactly the strategies recommended.

Revenue Models

There are various different revenue models for current game guide publishers. The most common way of generating revenue is with targeted advertisements and sponsors on the website. Other companies charge the user a fee to be able to download and read a guide. This type of ad revenue is mostly looked down upon in the gaming community, since most guides are written for the public's benefit and not for-profit. pwnGuide however, has introduced a revenue sharing model which splits the profit between the guide writers and the site itself. Currently, no single revenue model has proven more successful than the rest.

External links

Strategy guide publishers

Online strategy guides and FAQs

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