miketheratguy

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!

I remember the first time someone told me that "totes" was a thing. I was horrified. When the same person continued to tell me that "totes magotes" was also a thing I went out and punched a baby. A really cute one.

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.

Oh my god, I've been looking for this for a long, LONG time. I remember buying this magazine at a Walgreens when I was 12 years old back in my hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. I'm sure I bought it because of the cover story of the TMNT arcade game, which I loved greatly and was hotly anticipating being able to play at home. But that quickly became secondary to the story on The Secret of Monkey Island. I didn't have a computer at that time and only knew one person who did, a friend with an Apple IIe. Being used to Atari and NES games - as good as some of them were - I was amazed at how much more complex and visually impressive computer games seemed to be. They were like some advanced form of entertainment from a distant world, and this Monkey Island thing was the most noteworthy example I'd seen yet. It seemed so unique, so rich and compelling and unbelievably interesting. I was aching to play the game but knew that I couldn't. It felt like some faraway dream for only the richest of video gamers. I vividly remember sitting on my bunkbed, munching some Act II brand popcorn (back when it was new and tasty) and being mesmerized by the thought of this game. Then, three years later, I was doing odd jobs for the manager of a local mom and pop video rental store when one day he decided that he'd capitalize on the constant presence of local youths who hung out in his store by setting up various game systems and charging them a dollar to play games on it for half an hour. One of those machines was the Sega CD, not a system I'd paid much attention to but one that was sort of a bridge between affordable consoles and still prohibitively priced computers. I thought I'd look into it and was stunned to see that Monkey Island was available on the system. I begged the owner to let me try it for just a short while and was almost shaking with excitement. I didn't know how to advance very far into it though, and wanted to get to the parts of the game shown in the old Game Players article. Remembering it, I went home and found my copy. And, in a move that I would always later regret, I cut out the Monkey Island article and folder it up, packed it into my pocket, and went back to the store. I don't even know what I thought the article would achieve (it was just that - an article, not a walkthrough) and I lost the pages shortly thereafter, never to see them again. This issue of Game Players is one of the things I've searched for on a pretty much yearly basis ever since discovering this site in 2009 or so. It was so frustrating that this particular issue seemed so evasive for so long. While the first two dozen issues of Nintendo Power will always be my gaming magazine nostalgia hotspot, Game Players Nov. 1990 is pretty close because of the laser-focused memories of what it was like to imagine some far-off day in which I could use these amazing, untouchable rich people computers to play these advanced, fantastical, almost mythical "grownup" video games. Those memories - as well as the general memories of what life was like at that point in my childhood - are ones that I always wanted to revisit. Now I'll finally get to read that damn Monkey Island article again for the first time in over thirty years. Thank you SO much for uploading what is, to most people, just some forgettable entry in some B-tier gaming rag but which to me is a special little nugget of my gaming life.