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Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was a grand and confusing piece of art, with some excellent ideas and some utterly brain-wrecking puzzles which were clearly put there to pad out the play time and prevent people renting the game and beating it over a weekend. This was the first Tomb Raider released on the Sega Dreamcast, but aside from slightly better graphics than the PlayStation edition, it and the PC incarnation are all the same game, so this guide can walk you through any incarnation.
Much like Tomb Raider III, Last Revelation absolutely screamed for a strategy guide due to the aforementioned hair-pulling puzzles and some generally obnoxious gameplay elements which made things far more difficult than they should be. It's the most difficult of all the "classic" era entries, even harder than picking Nevada last in TR3, so if you managed to complete it without resorting to a walkthrough at any point, hats off to you. It's also the longest single entry in the franchise, comprising 42 stages in total, although some of these are re-visits to older stages with some minor tweaks due to story progression. It's the first Tomb Raider game to feature no hidden levels or special bonuses for collecting all of the in-game secrets (of which there are 70), although the British paper The Times teamed up with Core Design to release a special, PC-only downloadable level which celebrated the 75th anniversary of Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb. Interestingly enough, this level wasn't just DLC, it was a full-fledged mini Tomb Raider game all on its own which didn't require the full version of Last Revelation in order to run, and came with two other TR-themed puzzle games to mess around with. This guide doesn't cover that bonus level, but if you're interested in playing it, you can find it at Stella's Tomb Raider Page. Both the GOG and Steam versions of Last Revelation come with the Times bonus content, just FYI.
Anyway, at nearly 180 pages, this is also the longest classic-era Tomb Raider game guide Prima ever made.
Enjoy! ❤️
877 downloads
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Tomb Raider Chronicles Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
A fine guide for a middle-of-the-road game. Once again, Chronicles received a release on the PlayStation, PC, and Dreamcast, but since they're all exactly the same with no platform-specific differences other than control layout, you can use this book no matter which version you're trying to beat. What's interesting is that this game isn't a sequel to Last Revelation, but rather a series of non-connected mission packs showcasing some of Lara's past exploits
This is a compact book, and they could have started and ended with just the walkthrough bits, but Prima went above and beyond with a few extra pages at the end. The first bonus section is a short look back at the previous four Tomb Raider games, showcasing Lara's development and her biggest accomplishments along with some screenshots to refresh our memories. At the time, Chronicles was touted as being the last time we'd see Lara, at least for a little while, so this was a nice inclusion.
Following the retrospective, we then get four pages of notes on how to use the Level Editor which shipped with the PC version of the game. This tutorial comes from Nick Connelly, one of Core's level designers, and explains how to build, texture, light, and populate a room. It's a basic room, nothing to set the world on fire, but it's a nice introduction and explanation of what can be made using the level editor. There are much more comprehensive tutorials available online to explain the ins and outs of the level creator, but this is certainly a fine start.
Enjoy! ❤️
639 downloads
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Totally Unauthorized Fighting Secrets III: No Mercy
By Areala
This book. Oh my gosh, this book.
I've seen a lot of strategy guides in my four decades on this planet. I've seen a number of books and guides which have typos in them. Sometimes in the text, sometimes (very rarely) in the table of contents or the index. But I want you to take a minute and open up the cover image for this book, and take a look at it. Because never have I seen a strategy guide so rushed to market that it misspelled the name of one of the games it covers on the front cover.
Can someone, anyone, please tell me about the game "Soul Egde"? Because I've certainly never heard of it. Soul Edge? Absolutely! But "Soul EGDE"?
SOUL EGDE?!
On the front and back covers of your book?
Please, BradyGames, PLEASE tell me someone lost their job over letting that one slip through quality control.
As if the black-and-white only presentation wasn't cheap enough. As if the text-only interior didn't already scream "we put this whole thing together the night before the deadline". But then you expected us to pay ten dollars, in 1996 money, for a book with the misspelled title of a game on the covers?
You, sir, are the cash-grab guide book to end all cash-grab guide books.
Debinding this book brought me nigh-on orgasmic pleasure. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Good day to you, strategy guide.
I SAID, "GOOD DAY"!
Enjoy! ❤️
278 downloads
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Totally Unauthorized PlayStation Games Book, Volume 3
By Areala
First we released Volume 2, then we released Volume 5, now we release Volume 3. I know you're all giddy with anticipation!
Presented in full color with minimal screencaps (since this was an unofficial guide, after all), this is a pretty ordinary, just-the-facts type of guide to a variety of best-selling PS1 hits. Average in almost every way. The text for Tekken 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 was lifted from Totally Unauthorized Fighting Secrets III: No Mercy, so if you already have that one, this was not as great a value as it seemed on the cover.
Still, ten game strategies for ten bucks, in colour, and on decent quality paper? You could do worse.
Enjoy! ❤️
445 downloads
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Official Sega Genesis Power Tips Book (New and Updated Edition)
By Areala
A great Sega Genesis compilation guide from Prima: full-colour, tons of excellent games, just an ultimate walk down nostalgia lane. For $15 back in the day, this was a solid book. As the name implies, this is a newer, more up-to-date version. I don't own the original release sadly, so I can't tell what all is new or updated about this version. Maybe someone else can provide that info?
My copy had a printing defect with the pages dedicated to Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, where the print portion pulled deeper into the gutter than on other pages. This means some of the text got cut off when the book was de-bound--it's still usable, and it affects only 2 out of the book's 112 pages, but I wanted to point it out, since this is a defect with the book itself, not my own scanning incompetence. I'm not a good enough graphical wizard to fix this, but if someone else out there wants to take the time, that would be awesome.
Enjoy! ❤️
872 downloads
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Final Fantasy VII Unofficial Strategies & Secrets for the PC
By Areala
An unofficial, text-only strategy guide produced specifically for the PC edition of Final Fantasy VII. This is a pretty odd beast, considering virtually every other FF7 guide on the market is both full colour and packed with screenshots. Even though this was meant for the PC release, there's really nothing preventing you from using it to play through the PS1 version, since they're almost entirely identical.
Not a particularly common guide, but also not a terribly interesting one thanks to its bland presentation. Ronald Wartow is a good writer though, and even if you've played through the console version many times, you may enjoy reading his take on the adventure.
Enjoy! ❤️
391 downloads
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RPG Companion: An Insider's Guide to PC Roleplaying Games
By Areala
For all the time I've spent giving Brady Games guff about the quality of their mid-90's content, this is a pretty darn cool book. Maybe because it's aimed more at PC gamers, maybe because it's written by Ronald Wartow (who could both write about games and play them with equal skill), maybe it's because he solicited input from some of the industry's top designers, but this is a badass tome: 500 pages of knowledge, lore, and history all wrapped into one big bible-thick slab.
With the resurgence in availability of these games on modern systems thanks to services like GOG and Steam, the usefulness of books like this has come 'round again. Twenty-five years later, we can play through these games again without the need to hack around with boot floppies, CONFIG.SYS files, driver mishaps, IRQ conflicts, and restarting in MS-DOS mode to free up memory. This one contains walkthroughs for twenty-six different games, and while they aren't step-by-step, hold-your-hand sorts, they (along with the principles Wartow introduces in the early chapters) will get the job done while still leaving it up to your skills to actually play the game.
Lots of tables, interviews, screenshots, hints, cheats, and other information is dispensed about each game as well. Some of this stuff gets downright hacker-esque, with tips on hex editing, mucking around with your save files, where to find update patches, and other things books of the day didn't often comment on.
It also shipped with a free issue of "Interactive Entertainment", a magazine-on-CD which lasted for about 25 or so issues before it was folded in to become the cover disc for "Computer Games Strategy Plus" magazine. My copy was missing this CD-ROM, but Archive.org has more than half of them available for download if you want to see what they were like.
Anyway, this is an awesome book, and it belongs in the library of anyone who grew up a classic era PC gamer, or who is interested in that era of PC gaming history.
Enjoy! ❤️
557 downloads
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Compute's Adventure Game Player's Handbook
By Areala
Another 500-page tome of PC gaming goodness. Compute's Adventure Game Player's Handbook provides walkthroughs for 37 games which are (mostly) of the point-and-click variety from the mid-90's catalogue of DOS offerings. And these are some top-notch games: some Leisure Suit Larry titles, a couple of Space Quest entries, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, both Ultima Underworld adventures, the CD-ROM sensation that was The 7th Guest, Laura Bow's first outing in The Dagger of Amon Ra, the H.R. Geiger inspired Dark Seed, the second Tex Murphy adventure Martian Memorandum, Sierra's Rise of the Dragon cyberpunk tale, and even Steve Meretzky's comical final entry in the Spellcasting trilogy...seriously, some of the best PC adventure games available at the time.
Once again, not as outdated as you might think, since many of these titles are easily available and accessible from digital services like GOG and Steam, meaning you could re-play many of them today with minimal hassle and put this book to good use. Mostly text, but there are an awful lot of screenshots and computer-rendered maps along with other things like item lists and even the occasional cheat code or two which make this a great reference work.
Enjoy! ❤️
381 downloads
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Deathmatch Manifesto
By Areala
The Deathmatch Manifesto is a fascinating book for a multitude of reasons. Published in 1997, really the dawn of the internet era for many home computer users, it's the first book of its kind to really dig in to the strategies used by gamers for fragging one another instead of the monsters. While competing against other human players itself went all the way back to the likes ofTennis For Two, Pong, and Space War, the concept of the "deathmatch" as it pertained to 3D gaming was in its relative infancy. Popularized by Doom, expanded on by Duke Nukem 3D, and levelled up by the release of Quake, there was a massive, untapped audience for this kind of thing, and Sybex sought to fill this void by publishing a guide not to beating the likes of those games, but rather beating the likes of those who had already beaten those games and were now looking for fresh blood to spill.
Much of the book is devoted to covering basic and advanced Deathmatch tactics which have long since become staples of the FPS genre, especially in the aftermath of the success seen with Quake 3 and the Unreal Tournament franchise, but what makes this book important from a historical standpoint is the snapshot in time it offers the reader. Documented within is the genesis of FPS gaming, the rise of online gaming, snapshots of popular gaming culture like cartoons produced using Quake's graphical engine and a listing of a number of different Clans who existed at the time, and even a look at new and upcoming gaming peripherals, like the SpaceOrb 360 controller, the VooDoo graphics card, and the MMX instruction set for Pentium-class computers.
I've included an .iso rip of the CD which came with the book. This includes a slew of deathmatch levels for your favorite games; demo file walkthroughs for every level in Quake, Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D and the Atomic Edition/Plutonium Pak; a utility for converting Doom levels into Duke 3D levels; and a "secret Quake bonus" hidden somewhere on the disc for you to find. (No, don't ask me what/where it is--I'm not telling!). The DEATHMATCH.ISO file is included in the .cbz file, so open that with your favorite file compression utility, extract it, and get to playing around!
As usual for books like this, pages which were completely blank were omitted in order to reduce file size.
Enjoy! ❤️
232 downloads
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3D Game Alchemy for DOOM, DOOM II, Heretic, and Hexen
By Areala
"More twisted levels and hellish horror!" declares the cover for this update to the prior year's Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus. And they are quite correct. This is not just Tricks version 2.0, this is an almost complete re-write from start to finish which, while almost 200 pages shorter than the previous edition, manages to contain more information between its covers. It does this by culling a good 75% of the empty pages from the first book (seriously, Tricks has dozens of pages which are completely blank compared to around 30 or so here), but also chopping out program-specific information and replacing it with generic how-to which explains the same concepts in a fashion more broadly applicable to whatever development tools you happen to be using. The end result is a tighter, more streamlined book which assumes you are familiar with how to use the software even if you're not that good at designing levels.
Despite the title, this book is still very much a DOOM-centric tome. While the designs discussed can be used with Heretic and Hexen, and there are tables and charts describing the quirks, enemies, and things specific to those games, make no mistake: the book's writers know you're here for the DOOM content, and they are only too happy to provide.
The CD-ROM which SAMS included with the book knows it too, coming packed with a fully registered version of the (now woefully obsolete) WADAuthor program for Windows and WADED program for DOS to build levels, along with its own graphical library of enemies, weapons, sprites, tiles, skyboxes, objects, and things to add spice to your own creations, and the DOOMShell 5 program which lets you point-and-click your way through level customizations easily. As if that isn't enough, you can bear witness to over two thousand levels created by talented designers, including several hundred DeathMatch-specific maps, either to use as-is or build off of for your own nightmares.
Given the release of numerous source ports and new level-making utilities, the software in this book is outdated and mostly unusable on modern systems, but the design concepts and general information within are still rock-solid bases from which to start your DOOM level design education. Included in this download is the 3dgamealchemy.iso which you can extract and burn to its own CD, or mount to a virtual drive and explore (which is why the file size is so large), and get the full 1996 experience!
Enjoy! ❤️
367 downloads
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Master of Magic: The Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
This is a testament to how useful a well-written game guide can be. Master of Magic is an incredibly complex and deep RPG/turn-based strategy hybrid, easily capable of overwhelming novice players before they've had a chance to get a handle on the rules. More than a simple walkthrough, this behemoth of a guide explains everything you never even knew you wanted to know about the game: its units, spells, weapons, monsters, diplomacy, missions, everything.
It was one of the most popular titles of its ilk in the 90s, and remains accessible to this day thanks to being re-released on platforms like GOG and Steam, which include a number of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. This is a gold-standard guide book, pretty much the opposite of Complete Final Fantasy III Forbidden Game Secrets, written in conjunction with people who actually made the game to ensure every bit of it is accurate down to the last decimal place.
Blank pages have been omitted in order to reduce file size.
Long out of print, commanding a price ten times that of the game itself, your Retromags Goddess has lovingly sacrificed her copy to the guillotine so that players everywhere no longer have to scrape together fifty bucks or more to access it. You can show your love by leaving her a like.
Enjoy! ❤️
736 downloads
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Duke Nukem 3D Official Strategies & Secrets
By Areala
Come get some!
The man with the mightiest boot in all of FPS-dom is in town with a few days to kill. But who wants to waste all their time bumping into walls and burning through jetpacks to find all the secrets, easter eggs, and crazy loot? So do yourself a favour: use this official strategy guide, with all its excellent walkthroughs and maps, to make those alien bastards pay for shooting up your ride.
This is a fun guide, with some extra developer commentary packed into the Appendix, and the obligatory CD-ROM on the back cover, stuffed with level maps, shareware, the entire first episode of Duke Nukem 3D, and other goodies.
The CD-ROM isn't a part of the .cbz archive, but you can download your own ISO of The Exclusive SYBEX/3D Realms Duke Nukem Companion CD to play around with, because your Retromags Goddesss loves you and ripped her copy so you could have the complete experience.
What are you waiting for, Christmas?
Enjoy! ❤️
631 downloads
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Complete Final Fantasy III Forbidden Game Secrets
By Areala
Holy cow, you guys, this book.
This is one of the most ridiculous guides I've ever owned.
Back in 1994, Final Fantasy III was released in the US, and like many people, I went absolutely ga-ga over the game. It's my favorite entry in the series, and I've beaten it multiple times and on multiple platforms, including the Game Boy Advance version with the extra content. In my obsessive quest to learn everything I could about the game though, I bought every magazine and book I could find about it, including Nintendo's own official guide and Peter Olafson's full-colour guide. And then...there's this one...
Part strategy guide, part fanfic, Complete Final Fantasy III Forbidden Game Secrets is a nearly 500-page tribute to absurdity and lies.
The author's name, "Hayaku Kaku", is written as '早く書く' in Japanese. This isn't actually a name, it's a fragment meaning "fast write", and it's a clue to why this guide is so bizarre. See, Final Fantasy III (or Final Fantasy VI as it's now known) is a massive game, and as noted in the introduction, not one you can finish over the course of a three-day rental. Writing a guide to a game that large requires an exceptional lead time if you're planning to match the game's release date, and from the contents of the book, it's easy to ascertain that the author (in this case, Bill Kunkel, aka "The Game Doctor" himself, with assistance from another writer named Ken Vance) was working off pre-release materials.
One of the necessities for squeezing all of the story into the cart, as related by translator Ted Woolsey in an interview, was re-naming the bulk of the enemies, items, spells, and Espers in the game, in order to fit into the character limits imposed by the game. What's odd about this book is that it gets almost all of the character names and spell/Esper names correct, even when it comes to the bizarre spellings imposed by Woolsey to comply with the aforementioned character limits ('Fenix' instead of 'Phoenix', etc...). But the items? Almost all the item names in this guide are completely incorrect--it's likely the item list was among the last things Woolsey worked on, since the majority of his effort was likely focused on the game's massive story. If that's the case, it's almost certain Kunkel and Vance were working off incomplete information and a near-zero knowledge of the Japanese language. More credence is given to this theory since one of the screenshots includes the original Japanese "Bar" sign, which was censored by Nintendo, and read "Cafe" in the US edition of the game.
'Spears' are translated as 'spheres' for some reason. Item names, as noted, often bear no resemblance to their final forms. What's more, the explanations of item abilities and magic spells often read as though someone gave them a very basic, machine-like translation from the original which were never edited for clarity. (Edit: see the update below, but this is exactly what happened).
The maps, maps, and more maps hyped on the back cover are likewise odd. These are not maps, exactly...more like someone took pictures of the screen, printed those pictures out, then placed a sheet of tracing paper over them and drew over every building, tree, hill, stream, and other feature, but never bothered to fill in any of the information. Thus, what you get are a bevy of hand-drawn maps that show the entire area...but are almost completely worthless for all the work put into them, since they don't point out any useful features.
Even as a walkthrough or secrets guide, the book is deficient. It will point out what items can be found in each area (well, most of them at any rate...Kunkel and Vance didn't find a lot of the off-the-beaten-path goodies), but it does not explain where any of them actually are in relation to the map, or what steps might be necessary to uncover them. In addition, a lot of the walkthrough is just plain incorrect in literally dozens of places. It's impossible for anyone well-versed in the game to go more than 2-3 pages without finding another mistake, whether it's a simple mistranslation or flat-out misinformation like: claiming you can earn experience in the "Beastfield" (the Veldt), when in fact, battles there don't earn you any XP; claiming it's possible to get Shadow back into the party via betting items at the Coliseum if you didn't wait for him on the Floating Continent; claiming Locke gains the ability to pick locks as the story continues; saying Celes can use her 'Runic' ability to learn spells faster; a screenshot of a character suffering the 'Imp' status effect incorrectly labeled as 'zombified' by the caption; claiming the 'Quartr' spell reduces the target's HP by 1/4th, when it actually results in a 75% reduction...the list goes on and on.
Speaking of lists, while the book impressively details the Items, Magic, and Espers available in your quest, it also omits an awful lot of other useful lists which other guides did not. These include a list of Gau's available Rages (and the enemies he needs to fight in order to acquire them), a list of items bet & won at the Coliseum, and a list of enemies from whom Strago can learn his different Blue Magic spells.
Also omitted are seemingly obvious things you'd want to point out in a strategy guide: while it explain that calling the Merton esper in combat causes a raging inferno to scream across the battlefield, it neglects to mention this afflicts both the enemies and your party. Now, sure, you're going to learn this as soon as you use it the first time, but knowing an attack could nuke my team BEFORE I use it is kind of the point of a strategy guide, right? Likewise, there's no indication that the Cursed Shield (or the "Bloody Shield" as this book refers to it) can be un-cursed, or that you can equip a Ribbon in order to remove nearly all the negative effects your character will suffer while trying to do so. The book assumes Cid will die, when it is in fact possible (and rather easy) to keep him alive.
I seriously could go on for pages about everything wrong with this guide. There are a lot of books over the years which I have no problem labeled shameless cash grabs, but the level of hyperbole this book builds on its back cover compared to the results it delivers between the pages is a disconnect of truly epic proportions. Download this and read it to understand the nightmare which was the world of video game strategy guides in a pre- (or at least very young) Internet age, marvel at its inconsistencies, and boggle at the fact they were willing to charge $14.95 US (or 2.89 gold flemkes in "East Domo").
In an old forum post at the J2Games website, which is no longer accessible since they removed their forum, Bill Kunkel spilled the beans about writing this book, and how much of a nightmare the project was. I almost feel sorry for him, and got the impression from reading it years ago that this project very quickly spiraled out of control in terms of the time they assumed it would take to write, and the results here speak for themselves. The good Game Doctor is no longer with us, but it's a shame his spirit is forever associated with this absurdity.
Enjoy! ❤️
Update: I discovered, to my delight, that Kunkel's recollections about working on this game guide in that old forum post on J2Games were collected in one of the chapters in his autobiography, Confessions of the Game Doctor. I've corrected some things in the above writing which I got wrong due to my own faulty memory (chief among them: his co-author was not Rusel DeMaria, but Ken Vance), but I'm reproducing this part of the book so you can see exactly what went into the creation of this guide.
It was actually worse than I remembered!
So, there you have it. A strategy guide written by two guys who cribbed all the relevant information about the game by having a local Japanese professor translate bits and pieces of Japanese guide books which Prima imported instead of actually playing through the game (something they apparently didn't even have access to).
You really can't make this up.
762 downloads
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Diablo II Ultimate Strategy Guide
By Areala
There were multiple versions of this guide published and updated by BradyGames over the years. This particular edition is keyed to the Lord of Destruction expansion pack which came as part of the Diablo II Battle Chest boxed set. Since the guide makes no references to skill synergy bonuses but it does reference "the first patch", it likely corresponds to v1.08 of the game. Given the game's current edition is v1.14d, much of the information in this file will be outdated and inaccurate except to someone playing a pre-v1.10 copy in a solo campaign.
Enjoy! ❤️
834 downloads
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3D Action Gamer's Bible
By Areala
Another entry in Prima's ubiquitous "Secrets of the Game" series. This one talks about first-person shooters, and contains minimal, text-only walkthroughs and cheat codes for Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake. Beyond the walkthroughs for the solo campaign, you get some tips and tricks for deathmatch, a chapter dedicated to using level editors for some of the aforementioned games along with general tips for making your own levels as interesting and fun as possible, and a final roundup of cheat codes for some other 3D action titles such as Dark Forces and Magic Carpet.
All in all, this isn't a terribly compelling book considering the lack of even a single screenshot to add zest to the presentation. There are even a couple of times where it directs the reader to visit a game's FAQ on Usenet or some of the various fan websites in order to get more information, which is an odd thing to tell the person who just paid $20 for your book, but OK...
The games it covers all received better, more full-featured strategy guides, complete with artwork and screenshots galore, so all that information can be found elsewhere with better presentation. If you want to design levels for these sorts of games, there were specific books written for that purpose for Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, while larger and more advanced level design bibles like 3D Game Alchemy and Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus exist to better fulfill that niche.
It's not a bad book, per se, and it's great from a historical perspective to have it preserved, it's just not all that exciting or interesting to either peruse or use. But now that it's out there, you can explore for yourself!
Enjoy! ❤️
308 downloads
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Chaos Island Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
A relatively rare guide for a relatively unknown game.
Chaos Island is sort of like Jurassic Park meets the RTS genre. It tasks you with guiding various characters from the film The Lost World around Isla Nublar to accomplish a variety of tasks to protect the dinosaurs from hunters, gather eggs and other resources, and avoid dying while you're doing it. Of all the games made under the JP license, this is one of the strangest. That, combined with the guide's own obscurity, made it an obvious choice for archival here.
Enjoy! ❤️
228 downloads
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Quake Unauthorized Map Guide
By Areala
Sorry for the sticker and damage to the front cover. The book came this way when I bought it. Otherwise, the rest of the guide's in fine shape.
Except, wait a minute, I'm sorry..."Unofficial Map Guide"? I mean "Strategy Guide", right?
Nope. This is literally just a book of stage maps that point out where all the goodies and secrets are located. There aren't any hints for actually tackling the various areas or anything like that, just maps and how to access the secret areas. Prima put out an unofficial strategy guide for the game too (along with that abomination of a guide to the shareware version which I already inflicted upon you) which also sold well for them, meaning there were some lunatics who forked out over $50 for those three different books because they just loved Quake so much.
Well, you don't have to do that now, because I got yer "Unofficial Map Guide" right here, fanboys!
Download it, smack that 'Thanks' button, and pay me my tribute.
Enjoy! ❤️
257 downloads
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Quake Authorized Strategy Guide
By Areala
Flying into 2023 with this first release of the year, what could be more epic than another strategy guide for the behemoth FPS known as Quake?
Yeah, yeah, I know, almost anything else.
But it's Quake, so you're going to download this, you're going to slap the 'thank you' button to pay me my tribute, and you're going to wait for the next strategy guide with baited breath, because you all love me.
Happy New Year!
Enjoy! ❤️
401 downloads
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Quake II: The Unauthorized Guide
By Areala
What's more extreme than an unauthorized guide to the sequel to the biggest FPS on the planet?
NOTHING, THAT'S WHAT!
We've got black-and-white pages, we've got computer-drawn maps, we've got all the cheat codes, we've got an all-text walkthrough, we've got multiplayer strategies, and we've got an interview with John-F&@$ing-Romero's girlfriend-to-be-soon-to-be-ex-, the terror of the DeathMatch arena, Stevie 'KillCreek' Case herself! SHE IS A WOMAN, AND THIS TEXT IS AS CLOSE AS MOST OF YOU WILL EVER GET TO A GIRL, SO YOU HAD BETTER DOWNLOAD THIS GUIDE RIGHT NOW OR E-DAY WILL PERSONALLY DEFILE YOUR VERTICAL SMILE WITH A STEEL-WOOL-WRAPPED TOILET BRUSH!
*ahem*
Enjoy! ❤️
314 downloads
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Heretic: The Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
Written by Ed Dille, who was responsible for a number of guides for Prima, including Doom II: The Official Strategy Guide. In fact, a number of the Deathmatch and Co-op tactics in this book are lifted straight from that guide. In fairness, Heretic runs on a slightly modified Doom engine, and the goals revolve around shooting things until they're no longer moving so there's no real need to re-invent the wheel here.
What hasn't carried over is Dille's frustrated drill instructor persona, replaced here by one of Mustafa, a powerful wizard and historian out to offer you, his novice trainees, the information to succeed in their dangerous quest. He's dialed it down a notch here, which will either be welcoming or disappointing depending on how you enjoyed the style of the Doom guide.
Aside from that, every level gets its own map and walkthrough, and the book ends with a series of appendices describing everything from running Heretic from the command line to setting up a service like DWANGO for modem-to-modem play. Oh, how far we've come...
Enjoy! ❤️
438 downloads
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Ultima Online Unofficial Strategies & Secrets
By Areala
Considering it's an outdated strategy guide for a version of a game that's been unplayable since the early 2000's, this book is oddly expensive on the second-hand market, with listings usually in the $20-40 range. Equally unusual, this guide was essentially co-authored by a bunch of members of the same guild, who shared their tips and techniques with Sybex, making it something of a curiosity for that alone. In any case, this is the very definition of a historical artifact of a bygone era, which is why it's so important for us to preserve it. Ultima Online is still around, and still playable today, but it looks nothing like it did in 1997 when this came out.
Use it as anything but a trip down memory lane at your own risk.
(Blank pages were omitted to save time and space, so if you notice page numbers skipping, don't worry, you aren't missing any content).
162 downloads
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Ultima Online: The Second Age Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
Ultima Online: The Second Age was the first major update/expansion to Ultima Online. Released in 1998, a year after Ultima Online's debut, it added a new swamp/marsh zone called "The Lost Lands" (which included two new cities), a plethora of new enemies to fight, and the ability for players to construct their own cities. A plethora of other mechanics were implemented and enhanced as well, including a real-time text translation service allowing players world-wide to break the language barrier, modifications to the user interface, and an expansion of in-game chat features.
For many, The Second Age is considered the definitive version of the game, as a massive number of players joined UO with this specific edition. This has led to a plethora of user-created servers (known as 'Shards') dedicated to running versions of the software that most closely mimic the look, play style, and features of this specific instance versus the version of the game running today. Indeed, if you want to see what all the fuss is about, the shard is free to play, with the software that can be found here:
https://www.uosecondage.com/
Because of that, this guide has actually retained its value on the second-hand market, making it a $20-30 acquisition for anyone wanting their own copy. After learning this, it pushed this book to the top of the preservation stack, and I'm delighted to offer it up for your perusal and digital hoard.
The only down side? My copy was acquired second-hand, and is lacking the full-colour poster map that came bound as a tear-out sheet between pages 144 and 145. If anyone else has a copy of this poster already scanned, please don't hesitate to contact me, and I'll add it to the file with full credit to you.
Otherwise, enjoy the download, smack that 'Thanks' button, and I'll see you with the next upload shortly! ❤️
155 downloads
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Ultima Online: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
This was published in 2002 to coincide with the release of the expansion, the fourth for Ultima Online, which was noteworthy for none other than Todd "You're Damn Right, I Created Spawn!" McFarlane joining the design team to populate a new zone within the now much larger map of Britannia with all sorts of twisted nightmares from his imagination.
For some reason, the two expansions that happened prior to Lord Blackthorn's Revenge (Ultima Online: Renaissance and Ultima Online: Third Dawn) both dropped without getting corresponding strategy guides, official or otherwise. Because of that, the guide to Lord Blackthorn's Revenge had to cover an awful lot of territory, as the playable world within the game had more than doubled since Second Age, with entire new continents now populated with extensive new dungeons. But in addition to covering all the updated content, this book offers a slew of extra content of use/interest to fans of Ultima who couldn't care less about playing the MMO. This includes an overview of the grand Ultima timeline featured in all the games which had released up to that point, a character glossary for major NPCs, significant events that had taken place both in the online and off-line games, a guide for new players, an interview with Todd "Did I Mention I Created Spawn?" McFarlane, and a bunch of other goodies. Even if you couldn't care less about a twenty year old expansion to an MMO, you'll probably find something worth reading if you have even a passing interest in the Ultima world or RPGs in general.
This is a remarkably well put together book, with a lot of great information. Obviously it's more useful if you're familiar with Ultima Online, but even if you don't know much (I never played the game myself, though I had friends in college who did, so most of my knowledge comes from their accounts), it's still a really cool book that deals with far more than just stat tables and skill progression lists.
Enjoy! ❤️
153 downloads
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Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo Game Boy Strategies, 3rd Edition
By Areala
Jeff Rovin might have figured out how to get the money from video game books flowing, but brother, Corey Sandler and Tom Badgett's output over the years stuck a vacuum hose into the pockets of America's youth, siphoning off birthday cash, allowance money, and everything else they could get their hands on. This here's the third edition of their already best-selling Game Boy book, and for a mere five dollars, it promised nothing less than total dominance and the latest info on the most recent games.
You've got to hand it to these guys for attacking their topics with such mercenary zeal. Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis...no system was safe from this daring duo and their game-addicted progeny. This edition was condensed down to a more portable mass-market paperback from the previous versions' trade paperback size, also resulting in a price cut ($4.99 vs. $9.99), no doubt making it that much easier to sell, while scaling down the size of both the text and interior images.
It's competent, accessible, and everything you would want something like this to be. Which is good, because it's the fifteenth book these guys churned out in four years, so you'd expect them to have mastered the formula. They don't disappoint.
Enjoy! ❤️
456 downloads
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Ultima Online: Age of Shadows Official Strategy Guide
By Areala
Age of Shadows was the fifth expansion for Ultima Online, released in early 2003, and like the previous year's Lord Blackthorn's Revenge, also featured a darker vibe. The primary purpose of this expansion was to add a crap-ton more land to help with the player housing situation. To that end, the team created a new land mass called 'Malas', an area that was essentially a giant, broken-up continent with hundreds of smaller island-like locations connected by bridges. Major changes came to the housing system, allowing players to customize and create structures of much broader and grander design than the small number of prefab options which had been available for the last five years. Established players who had already built and maintained homes were allowed to convert their old homes to the new design standard, ensuring they wouldn't be left out of the fun. In addition to alleviating the housing bubble, the expansion also introduced two new playable classes (the Paladin and the Necromancer), and added a Diablo-style explosion of magical item attributes and properties, allowing for a much greater range of possibilities for the loot tables.
But it wasn't all fun and games. All that extra stuff came with an increased monthly fee, and players discovered the new and powerful magic items turned the UO experience from a skill-based roleplaying experience into a loot hunt for the best gear so as to allow accelerated character growth. The combination turned off veteran players, who left the game in droves, and marked a significant downturn in the game's place in the much more crowded MMO marketplace.
This guide is an oddity, being mostly a reprint of the Lord Blackthorn's Revenge book (minus the Todd "Hey, I'm the Spawn Dude!" McFarlane interview), with only the last fifth or so being devoted to the new content unveiled in the expansion itself. Not bad if you skipped buying the LBR guide in 2002, but otherwise...
Enjoy! ❤️
163 downloads
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