Put Guides Back in the Back!

Recently I was reminded about Square's mishap with their Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. In short, they didn't include all the information about the game in the guide, instead prompting players to use a password to access further (essential) information at Square's PlayOnline website. Now, assuming that you had internet access in 2000 (which was far from certain), you had to endure the frustration of having to pause your game, put down your guide, go to your computer, look up your information, walk back, and repeat. People who buy guides, outside of collectors, do so to have the information on hand as they play.

Which makes it odd, to me, that magazines, which used to be bimonthly 250-page strategy for everything monsters, neglect to include guides in their pages. The stated reason? People give them away for free on the internet. Ah...

Okay, okay, there are some not insignificant differences between the world of today and Square's FFIX fiasco. For one thing, everybody has internet access. For another, a lot of people have internet access through devices that they can set down in their lap when they unpause the game. Furthermore, game magazines have it a lot rougher than they did in the glorious mid-90s, forcing them to cut down on pages, rely more on freelance contributors, and really dig for stories that can't be found anywhere else, and strategy guides can be found a LOT of places else.

Still though, I think there's a place for them, if three conditions are met:

First of all, you'd only want to do guides for games that are guaranteed to be popular; Call of Duty yes, Saw II: The Game, no. You will not have a lot of space for strategy pages, so to best serve the largest segment of your readership, you need to provide coverage on the games they're most likely to play. It can't be like Nintendo Power in the 90s, unfortunately.

Second, you're probably going to want to stick with games that encourage the second playthrough and the score attack. You don't have enough space to cover basic information. The guide is there to help your players get the most enjoyment out of the game, and the 4-page strategy section is best positioned to highlight the stuff that might go over your head the first run through. For example, you're not going to want to waste pages talking about rolling, hovering, and the importance of keeping Diddy alive in a short Donkey Kong Country Returns guide; you're going to want to explain speedrunning tactics, the requirements to open bonus levels, and where to find the hidden stuff (or even cut that to the trickier to find hidden stuff) in each level, using little more than a small print paragraph and a screenshot or two. In a short Mortal Kombat guide, you're going to want to list the secret fatalities per character and provide a one page spreadsheet of all the unlockables in The Krypt. And so forth.

There's another benefit to focusing on "new game plus" guides: the magazine might not be on the stands by the time a player begins a new game, but it more likely will be by the time that he or she begins replaying it. There's a built-in lead time to second playthroughs that magazines can take advantage of. An expert guide can also encourage a player to pick a game back up, even if it arrives late (hell, if I had that DKC:R strategy guide I just made up I might think about going back and getting all those damned KONG letters).

Thirdly, you'd probably be focusing on single-player guides, simply because multiplayer is too immediate, with strategies evolving and changing fast enough to make a short, printed guide next to useless.

And there you have it: guides that serve the reader and the format. Now... I don't know how much work goes into guides as opposed to the other content magazines create, and I don't know how it would affect profits. It may just be a simple matter of more work for the same money. But we can say one thing for sure: all of this stuff was a bunch of things that I said.