"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?" -- William Shakespeare
Dear old Will never had video games in mind when he penned the famous Hamlet soliloquy you've heard quoted by everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Klingons, but considering his day's idea of leisure concerned avoiding outbreaks of plague and not drowning in one's own diarrhea, I can forgive him this shortcoming.
I'm throwing something at the wall with this just to see if it sticks. "To Guide or Not to Guide" pieces will look at strategy guides I've collected over the years and rate them on their worth based not just on today's factors but also the time period in which they were published. Nowadays, of course, you can watch someone else systematically disassemble any game you can think of in high definition, courtesy of any number of streaming services. In the 80's, 90's, and even the early 2000's though, professionally produced strategy guides were the only way to see yourself conquering the game which preoccupied your mind.
Unless you wanted to practice, like some...some normal gamer. You aren't a normal gamer, are you? Of course not--you're reading my stuff, after all. Silly question. Forget I asked.
Some of these, of course, were better (and have aged better) than others. Some are collector's items in and of themselves, while others weren't worthy of lining my rabbit's litter box (back when my wife and I still had rabbits, that is).
Who's a handsome boy? (R.I.P. Valentine)
"To Guide or Not to Guide" will drag these artifacts of a pre-Internet age into the cold, harsh spotlight, where they will be judged upon their utility and either exonerated or found guilty. Our first victim, pulled from the dungeon of my bookshelves, is this tome here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Totally Unauthorized PlayStation Games Book, Volume 5 published by BradyGames in 1998 for the ultra-low price of $11.99 US, $16.95 CAN, and £10.95 Net UK.
Let's dig in, shall we?
Totally Unauthorized PlayStation Games Book, Volume 5 covers nine different games plus a variety of cheat codes in its 128 pages. Clearly BradyGames felt they were on the right track, since sales of Volumes 1 - 4 had to have been high enough to greenlight a fifth. I can see why, since a guide to nine games for a little under the price of a traditional strategy guide from this time ($14.95 US) would look like a great buy, especially to a kid on a limited budget.
The nine games covered in this edition are: Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Tomb Raider II, Madden NFL '98, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Fighting Force, Armored Core, Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi, Pitfall 3D, and Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha.
All in all, not a bad roster...a little bit of crap (seriously, who buys a guide for an NFL game?) mixed in with an otherwise decent selection of titles, with hints and strategies penned by some of the best writers in the business like Bill Kunkle, David Cassady, and also the unfortunate-but-hilariously-named Phaut Huang.
Nope, not kidding.
If you were looking for the type of visual walkthrough presentations you get with other strategy guides though, remember the adage, 'You get what you pay for.'
You probably noticed that 'totally unauthorized' on the cover. That means BradyGames wasn't getting any help from the game makers: no phone calls to the devs to talk strategy, no design documents to peruse for interesting tidbits, and most painfully no access to any art or video assets to enhance the book. That means no licensed images adorning the pages save what the art department put together, and any screenshots had to come from the editors themselves. Ergo, you get pages which look like this:
Mostly text with the occasional image if you're lucky. And while the entries on Fighting Force and Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha are reasonably laden with images, there's not a single screencap to be found in the sections devoted to Pitfall 3D, Armored Core, or Tomb Raider II.
Um, I can sort of understand the first two, but who in their right mind puts together a professionally printed guide to Tomb Raider II without a single screencap? This game, like its predecessor, was visually stunning for the time, but you'd never know it from this book. Add to that it's barely a walkthrough, just a list of key item locations which assumes familiarity with each level, and what you're left with degrades the value of the book simply by its inclusion. Given all the options available for Tomb Raider II books on the market from Dimension who got Zach Meston to write the official guide, and Prima who tapped Kip Ward to write the other official guide (I'm still confused about this), I'd have rather seen a different game appear here, or sacrifice the pages devoted to TRII and give them to Armored Core.
The fighting game sections are the most useful in the book, since they feature full move sets for all the characters, along with strategies for fighting as, and against, each brawler. In this respect, they've aged well--though if you're playing Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi in 2018, do like Obi-Wan instructed Elan Sleazebaggano in the Outlander Club: go home and rethink your life.
The codes section isn't bad for the time, though it does reprint some of the codes printed earlier in the guide. It features codes for games like Courier Crisis, Colony Wars, Nightmare Creatures, and Treasure of the Deep, which are often overlooked today, so it's pretty cool to see them get mention here.
To Guide or Not to Guide?
This should be obvious from the cover alone. BradyGames was still getting their feet wet at the time of this book's publication (they started in 1993, and hadn't built up much traction in the gaming world yet), and as a small business operating out of Indianapolis, they were doing the best they could in a hyper-competitive market, especially with the internet breathing down their necks. They scored some great official exclusives for their strategy guide library with games like Final Fantasy X, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and Xenogears, and in my opinion they produced better guides than their main competition at Prima when given the time and assets to do so.
That said, it's impossible to see this particular book as anything but a quick cash-in. Ultra-cheap production values, low-res and blurry screenshots, and an insulting treatment of one of the biggest games of 1997 (Lara Croft's name isn't even mentioned in the text, for crying out loud) combine to make this book somehow less than the sum of its parts. When the most visually interesting page of your guide is the ad for Pitfall 3D in the back, you know something's gone horribly wrong. Unless you're a guide-collecting fanatic or die hard fan of Cassady or Kunkle, one quick flip through will be enough to convince you it doesn't belong in your library.
Sorry, Phaut Huang.