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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.

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").

I own this one, only saw it once and snatched it immediately as I had MAJOR Mortal Kombat fever between 1994 and 1996. It's a very thorough and well-illustrated guide. It's also an interesting product of the time - namely that very specific window that defines "mid 90s". You could tell that the authors were in love with the exploding Gen X and burgeoning internet cultures, what with their liberal use of digital art and an incredibly weird "glossary" of hip arcade slang that no one has ever heard in their life. I remember something like "Side False Johnson". You know, as in "Yo man, that was a really unfair move. Don't be a Side False Johnson"! What!?

I still have my original copy of this, I remember it being a really great strategy guide. Nintendo's official guide was very neatly organized and rich with tips but it felt kind of cold and businesslike in a way. This one felt really engaging and colorful (and also about twice as thick if I recall correctly). One of the better unofficial guides in my possession.

Those "truly tasteless jokes" really struck me as odd too. One minute you're reading about how to get the good ending in Bubble Bobble and the next minute you're reading about drug-fueled necrophilia. Read the room you guys!

Nice, I never had the SNES entry in this particular series.

I actually always find it interesting when some old item shows up somewhere with someone's name written on it. It makes me wonder who that person was, how they came to be in possession of the item in question, and what shaped their life in such a way that it intersected with mine.

"...you can print her out, dress her up, and take her on all sorts of adventures outside of her video games. Where will you travel? What treasures will you discover? It's all up to you!" These descriptions are so fun.

Stray observations: 1: "How to Win at Super Nintendo Entertainment System Games" is really kind of an awkward and unwieldy title. In fact "how to win at games" is sort of awkward all by itself. It reminds me of when I used faulty nomenclature to tell a friend back in grade school that I "solved Super Mario 2" and a nearby, unknown kid corrected me with "you don't say that you 'solved' it, you say that you 'beat' it". I hope that kid is dead now. 2: "Walk right and punch people" is useful advice that can be applied not just to games but to everyday life. 3: That "MEGNMIKE" thing is a neat catch. I also had a girlfriend named Megan in the Super Nintendo days. Only the third girl I ever kissed! She wound up being the most wretched, deceitful, manipulative, vindictive, psychologically warped person I've ever met in my life. 4: I love Nintendo!

This is another one I still have an original copy of. I found this one on clearance at a mall bookstore for like three dollars and snatched it immediately knowing that I would love it just like I loved the first entry. Well, not JUST like, since I got the original when I was 11 and got this one when I was...15, I think?...and Nintendo was "dumb" as a result of Sega being SO KEWL AND IN YOUR FACE, but I knew I would love it nonetheless. This was really a solid series.

Awesome. Never had this one.

Oh my god, now this - THIS is a crown jewel. I received this book as a Christmas present in 1989. I loved it. LOOOOOOOOOOVED it. I had never seen such a lengthy, detailed, relatively mature exploration of not one, not two, not ten, but four hundred billion NES games. As an 11 year-old who consumed Nintendo like the highest grade street crack (which I also consumed) this book was mind-blowing. There was just SO much information, SO many pages, SO much game coverage, that I couldn't put it down. It was almost like the Wikipedia of Nintendo gaming before Wikipedia. I still have my copy (picked up the next two editions as well) and will never get rid of it. I TREASURED this book. This couldn't have been easy to scan but man, thank you so much for doing so. I am so thrilled to have a digital copy of it.

Willy Beamish? Wow, I've never seen that one pop up in any strategy guide before. This one's a grab even just for that alone.

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!!!

This is what I love about a "totally unauthorized" video game strategy book. I mean yeah, I get the term as it relates to something like politics. You want unbiased news from someone who's not close to the source. Or a biography, you want the warts-and-all treatment instead of some glowing fluff piece, right? ...What the hell is the inherent benefit of writing an unauthorized account of how to input a fatality?

That's what happens when you're totally unauthorized.

I actually miss the golden era of strategy guides, when I could walk into a Waldenbooks (remember those? Remember bookstores in malls? ......Remember malls?) and see 30 totally random books of totally random quality for all the big new games, including boring all-text ones like these.

LOL I bought this book back when it was fresh on the shelf and I still have it to this day. I can absolutely confirm, without downloading, that Areala's description is correct. I know this because I vividly recall how mystified I was when I read it. It's a stout, thick book and as a MASSIVE 90s fan of the FF series I too was eager to scoop up anything and everything about the games. While Nintendo Power did a great job with the first one there was hardly anything at all here in America for the subsequent games until FF6, which got several guides. I grabbed each and every one of them, and was giddy with excitement upon seeing this particular tome. But yeah, as I went through it I kept thinking "what the hell is this? This is totally wrong yet they're acting like it's all true. Who are these liars? How can anyone get away with publishing something like this?" And now I know. After years of remembering the book as likely something that was not intentionally dishonest but maybe just incorrect information based on a pre-release copy of the game, I now know that it was just a morally questionable rushed cash grab. The copy that I own is the only one I ever saw in the wild, and this new knowledge makes owning it that much more interesting. Glad to see that it's up for others to laugh at, even if they aren't able to relate to just how befuddling (no pun intended) it was as a reference when an accurate reference really would have come in handy.

But it's so 90's! So extreme! Looks like you can't handle the extreme extremeness of its extremities!

Thanks for the info!!! That matches what I have, always was amused that I tended to get a different version when I ordered it on Amazon...