With the new release barrage over, I’ve been spending a bit of time revisiting some of the games I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with. One such game is Resident Evil 5, which I am quickly discovering has a lot of post-endgame content and stuff to unlock. As much fun as it is grinding out levels to get new treasures and battle points to exchange for weapon upgrades and unlockables (I love my L. Hawk with unlimited ammo), I found myself turning to a play guide to find a better way.

This week, The Warp Pipe takes a look at the progression and usage of video game play guides.

A Guiding Light

We hardcore gamers are a proud breed and have conquered many challenges in our time. Mech-clad Hitler? Chaingun fodder. Zombies? 53,594 in one sitting. Master computers? Assisted suicide. Sometimes even the best of us need help with a maniac boss or a completely obtuse puzzle. Some choose to take it out on themselves, tearing their hair out. Others choose to take it out on the game or something nearby, cursing its name or launching peripherals at equipment/loved ones. The other option is to swallow your pride and turn to a video game play guide.

Earning the Infinite Magnum ammo unlock makes life easy

The Internet has made play guides much easier to obtain. Prior to the rise of sites like GameFAQs, one had to sit around and fumble for a solution, call an expensive 0055/1902 number, hope the answer was in the manual or hope that one of the then widespread video game magazines published a play guide. Now average Internet users write play guides for fun – the solution to your problems is just a few mouse clicks away. If you look hard, you might even find the two game guides that I wrote in my younger years (and the three I’ve been meaning to finish since 2001).

Sometimes a gigantic wall of text just doesn’t cut it, and while we appreciate the efforts of the few who sacrifice their time to write guides, sometimes they’re not quite as clear as you need. Random House and Dorling Kindersley have made a name of their respective Prima/Piggyback Interactive and Bradygames divisions by producing full colour, illustrated guides for the majority of new release games. These guides are usually pretty good, but sometimes they too fail the gamer with baffling instructions and major omissions – anyone who bought the official Halo 3 guide can testify to the absence of information regarding the skulls (done at Bungie’s behest, apparently).

These hardcover strategy guides are ridiculously good

Lately, play guide publishers have been stepping it up a notch, releasing limited edition hardcover versions of their guides which contain extra info, behind-the-scenes development information and extra concept art. Piggyback Interactive is leading the charge here; although these hardcover play guides run upwards of $AU50 (though some specialist retailers will provide a discount if you purchase the guide with the game), the quality of the materials used and the information inside is unparalleled - and they tend to hold their resell value very well. Unfortunately, they’re so good that you don’t want to actually use them for assistance in a game in case they get damaged.

With print media on the decline, the format for play guides in the future is going to change. Currently the major play guide publishers offer eBook versions of their guides, but the price isn’t very competitive. One future possibility was raised in a recent patent filing by Nintendo, where the game would basically roll a video of what to do when a player got stuck. I could see Microsoft and Sony selling play guides through their respective online stores, maybe even with embedded video walkthroughs for the trickier parts. Perhaps that’s something for the next generation of consoles.

Required Assistance

Twilight Princess would only take about 25 hours with a guide

My partner is an avid fan of Japanese RPGs and has a considerable collection of play guides – she often won’t tackle a new RPG unless she has some form of assistance. I’ve often joked at her expense that she’s useless because she won’t play a game without being told what to do and how to do it. There is a certain necessity to playing Japanese RPGs with a play guide, particularly in modern times where developers have created very elaborate quest strings to hide the best equipment in the game. Many other gamers take a more holier-than-thou approach to guide usage, suggesting that even the most minor usage of a guide constitutes cheating.

Guides are pretty helpful to the working gamer crowd – not everyone can spare 40 hours to play through the latest Zelda epic, and having an accompanying tome can cut that time down considerably, not to mention prevent players from getting lost when they’ve taken extensive breaks between play sessions. Folks with extremely large backlogs can power through games with guide assistance.

Good luck getting the best stuff without a guide

At what point does the use of a play guide overshadow one’s personal achievement? One certainly can’t suggest that they’ve conquered a game when a guide has held their hand through the experience, but on the other hand, the guide isn’t exactly playing the game for you, and sometimes the instructions are vague, incomplete and sometimes wrong. There’s a level of variance tied to the genre of the game too – getting instructions for solving a puzzle in a Zelda game is completely different to finding a weak point of a boss in Devil May Cry; knowing what to do is one thing, but doing can be something else entirely.

Many gamers use guides to help them find the best equipment and secret stuff in a game. You could argue that the secret items and ultimate weapons are put into games to reward the players who were prepared to spend the time looking to find them or discovering how to earn them. On the flipside, modern Japanese RPGs have ridiculously long Xanados Gauntlet-style quests to get these items that it’s impossible to discover them without a guide. Just ask any Final Fantasy XII player about the Zodiac Spear.

It’s unreasonable to suggest that usage of play guides is cheating, but I do think that a lot of gamers would do well to only rely on them when they’ve exhausted all other avenues. Does it really matter if you don’t get every single awesome weapon on your first time through? We should play games to enjoy them, not to turn them into laborious tasks of obsessive completion.