It's An NBA Jam Thing Official Player's Guide

Thanks!

(on a side note, by the time NBA Jam was a thing, it was a rare occurrence for me to see any Arcade machine that was less than 50 cents a shot, usually it was the odd Galaga machine in the corner. )

A MUCH more interesting guide than it should be (for basketball, I know Michael Jordan, Muggsy Bogues, and... The Chicago Bulls were good?  I'm from Georgia, Basketball is something that occurs briefly during March for College teams...  )

In seriousness, this is more interesting as a time capsule than an actual guide to the game.

Excuse me, there were clearly fireballs.

My favorite Game.

This reminds me of the strategy guides that accompanied THQ's WWE games for a while. I loved that series for a good 15 years, and there was a while there when some of them were SO good, and I SO into them, that I picked up the accompanying guides just to have a sort of paper-based companion to them. It was only after buying a couple that I realized that 20 percent of the books covered the comparably involved story modes and the other 80 percent was dedicated to lots and lots and lots and lots of screenshots showing the (many) wrestlers doing their various moves.

As a non-interesting aside I was such an enthusiastic fan of these games on THQ's forum that they actually singled me out for it by name in one of these very same guides. Ironically it was for the first of their games that I wasn't interested in buying. SCREW YOU THQ, AND YOUR STRATEGY GUIDES!!!

10 hours ago, Areala said:

I've got to ask: which game was it that made you stop buying WWE games from THQ?

Oh it was less about the game itself than a combination of things that happened simultaneously. The game WWE 2K14 was released as a love letter to the second golden age of wrestling, the late 80s and early 90s. That's when I was a big fan. 2K14 was also the last game overseen by THQ as they would file bankruptcy within the year. 2K games took over after that. Between 2K15 being criticized as a much worse game that was really stripped down, the game's renewed focus on modern wrestlers, and my continued disinterest in modern wrestling as a whole, I figured that it was time for me to quit. 2K14 had basically been tailor made for old-school fans like me, and was a strong entry overall as well as being the one that THQ asked me out to playtest as sort of a capper on my involvement with them before they folded. Everything just sort of combined to make WWE 2K14 a proper goodbye.

As to why I didn't buy the specific game that was accompanied by the strategy guide, it was actually just because that was a weird action-oriented spinoff wrestling game that I wasn't really interested in ("WWE All-Stars").

4 minutes ago, Areala said:

Oh yes, I remember when that came out. I enjoyed a number of the Smackdown! games, but once they hit Smackdown! vs. Raw 2k6, they started getting a little too complicated for my tastes. Here Comes the Pain was the series pinnacle, IMO.

Many people still feel the same to this day. For me the epic highlight was the game immediately before it, Shut Your Mouth, primarily because of the introduction of the game's sprawling nonlinear "season" mode. That mode is actually directly responsible for my involvement with THQ: They eventually phased the mode out in favor of the MUCH more linear "Road to Wrestlemania" mode by about SVR07 or so, five years later. That game started a downward trend for the next few years which, combined with the contemporaneous decline of wrestling in general, had me more or less giving up on the entire series.

But then they announced "Universe" mode for SVR11, which was the closest thing to a return to my beloved Season mode, and I embraced the series all over again. I was so excited about it that I joined the THQ WWE forums and constantly talked up both modes, begging for a merge of the two. While this never happened it was my enthusiasm that led me to being noticed by the higher-ups and given the various moderating and playtest opportunities by the company.

For these reasons and more SYM (the fourth game in the Smackdown series) will always be my close personal favorite, though HCTP (and SVR06, which you mentioned) are right up there as well. I'd say that those plus SVR11 and 2K14 are my top five.