/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.9075315]

What is the worst game walkthrough you ever read/watched? Be it in an old magazine, online, in video form etc. I once read one for Brandish on SNES where the guy clearly didn't speak English as a first or possibly even second language, skipped over large parts just telling readers to "figure it out themselves" and seemed to either give up playing or have a psychotic breakdown halfway through, giving advice on how to find items that simply didn't exist, blatantly wrong information, and going on weird unrelated tangents.

[Anonymous No.9075319]

>using walkthroughs
filtered

[Anonymous No.9075345]

>>9075315
90's guide books were full of shit, at least where I live. They were all unofficial and copypasted info from untrusted foreign sources or from each other. Real game secrets and tips were mixed with made up or straight up useless bullshit. A lot of grammar mistakes, untranslated names and terms (or translated, which somehow made things worse since the games themselves were often in English and you couldn't understand wtf does guide even mean)

I remember how these books kept telling you can enter a cheat combination to play as Splinter in TMNT2 for NES. Now, with release of Shredder's Revenge, you finally can.

[Anonymous No.9075373]

There was a old guide for Bubble Bobble arcade on someone's personal website that had a long section about how he played the game at a real arcade and was able to max out the score. Had a breakdown of every level telling exactly how to play it for score and what to watch out for. Seemed really good but there was a comment section where someone talked about fireball enemies the guide didn't mention, turned out the author based the guide on a version of mame where none of the enemy attacks worked so the entire guide was completely useless.

It was probably over 10 years ago I read it and sort of wish I could find it again so I know how much of it I misremembered or made up over time.

[Anonymous No.9075375]

>>9075315
I remember one for Streets of Rage 3 in a guide book, they only showed how to get the bad ending

[Anonymous No.9075387]

most GameFAQs pages were pretty bad but most of them were written by literal kids

>so yeah, to beat this boss you have to go back in the Cave of Rain and grind for a bit to reach level 5

[Anonymous No.9075395]

>>9075315
Not bad in any sense, but I never liked the built-in manual Vagrant Story had because it felt like wasted disk space that could have been used in more maps or enemies, as insignificant as it may have been.
Furthermore, the manual was intrincate enough to be sold physically with the disk and it could have included features that made you read it as your play the game, like Meryl's codec frequency at the back of the case in MGS2.

[Anonymous No.9075425]

>>9075387
Gamefaqs is probably cheating but still funny.

>I didn't have the manual so I made up my own names for the characters
>Outback Jack
>Boomerang Betty
>Abhorigine Ed

I wish I could have as much fun as this kid.

[Anonymous No.9075428]

>>9075395
>because it felt like wasted disk space
The ISO for Vagrant Story isn't even that big to begin with.

[Anonymous No.9075961]

>>9075428
You're right, but back then I thought the game could have been longer and that the manual was to blame for taking up space. It's a weird gripe of mine I haven't let go.

[Anonymous No.9075978]

[Anonymous No.9076079]

>>9075978
ffs anon did you have to blow the entire thread this early? I wonder if Dan Birlew has disowned that work, if I wrote that shitheap I would demand to go uncredited.

[Anonymous No.9077825]

>>9075978
is this the one where they just say to look online for everything?

[Anonymous No.9077841]

>"This part is pretty self-explanatory so I'm just going to skip over it."

EITHER MAKE A GUIDE OR DON'T FUCK YOU

[Anonymous No.9077947]

>>9075315
>What is the worst game walkthrough you ever read/watched?
This immediately came to mind.
https://youtu.be/47dGgW22ls4

From a mostly worthless "win at video games" VHS that you'd pay $15 for in 1988.
Tells you NOTHING. "Do tricks at the half pipe for big points." How, god damn it?
Aside from the one cheat on the high jump, the tips are useless and the game footage shows failure half of the time.

[Anonymous No.9078164]

>>9077841
>this boss is fairy easy, shouldn't be a problem. after you've defeated him...

>proceeds to write a detailed guide on everything there could possibly be in the room, how to fight an easy mob, every attack, weakness and data of said easy mob

>next boss can be tricky, so make sure you are prepared for it. moving on to a next area...
what's the POINT

But that's not half as bad as some guides for the graphic adventures
>you should have this item by now, use it here
>guide never mentions it previously

[Anonymous No.9078585]

>>9075315
I don't remember reading that kind of walk through although I've seen some technical file specifications that were amazing: very short explanation of the compression process followed by pseudo code in which variables suddenly changed names, you were invited to read bits from an undisclosed source, or supposed to read data twice from the same buffer location (a file) and getting different results somehow. Some specs on Wikipedia are also hilariously nonsensical.
I don't know why people publish that kind of stuff.

[Anonymous No.9078618]

The Final Fantasy IX guide was notoriously bad. If I remember correctly, it had a lot of stuff where you could look something up in the physical guide but then it just told you to go online for the actual answer. Absolutely fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.9078813]

>>9075315
I can't name a particularly notorious one, but certain 90's guides, and more specifically those that were produced by companies that were not affiliated with the original developers.
They were mostly written by teenagers and were filled with egotistical verbiage, that more often than not was more misleading than useful.
The magazines (or articles) that focused on eastern RPG's (especially the ones that came in the late 90s) usually had "guides" that consistently spoiled the stories of these games.
I know that people from countries such as Russia and Brazil got the worst treatment, but there were a few lesser known English magazines that I remember finding on Archive.org which had these particular qualities as-well.

[Anonymous No.9078852]

Dunno if this counts but the Darkseed 2 retsupurae always sticks out to me. A longplay where a huge chunk of the runtime is wasted because the runner is just going places and not making any progress.

[Anonymous No.9078881]

>>9075315
The dragon's quest guide that came with a certain nintendo power launch and giveaway was terrible. Gave terrible advice and started terrible gaming habits for me.

[Anonymous No.9078884]

>>9077825
Yes. The only use for this book was the maps and to know what could be found in an area, but it didn't show you where specifically anything was.

[Anonymous No.9079359]

>>9078881
What kind of habits?

[Anonymous No.9079460]

>>9075425
My favorite is the one where the kid made up a new (slightly more interesting) story for DKC3 since they didn't have the manual.

[Anonymous No.9079543]

>>9079359
Not playing a game at all, just reading a walk through and doing what it says. Beating jrpgs with the lowest possible level.

[Anonymous No.9079690]

I still have this somewhere, I must find it. This guide was the epitome of cashing in on a hot game without having any actual good advice.
Even the cover was a generic 'kung fu' scene instead of a shot from the game.
The whole guide had unofficial names for all the moves, many moves were missing and/or wrong and the advice was just really bizarre, like someone was writing it on a hard deadline. Things like 'One of Akira's most important attacks is the P,P string. It's a devastating two-hit combination attack that will leave your opponents in tatters'. Then all the match-up advice was to beat the CPU and had really silly advice like 'Use spinning attacks to confuse the opponent'.
When I first got it would read it cover to cover, just because I was so excited for VF3 and could only play at arcades rarely. As I got older I realised how bad it was and had a great laugh about it.

[Anonymous No.9079703]

>>9079690
I couldn't find any scans, but I did find this amusing review on Amazon.

[Anonymous No.9079715]

>>9078618
It's hard to understate just how bad that guide is
Like it doesn't just tell you at the start to look for the answers online, nearly every single page has a little blurb taking up space that says "want to know the thing we could have just written in this space? fuck you type in this stupid keycode on planyonline.com to find it out, btw thanks for the 30 bucks retard"

[Anonymous No.9079795]

Street Fighter II Turbo SNES VHS tape with advanced strategies like down quarter circle punch.

[Anonymous No.9080231]

The Amazon page for Persona 2's prima strategy guide has a review from the author saying it sucks.

[Anonymous No.9080256]

>>9075315
I was gonna post a BradyGames guide as well. My favorite part was how they listed all the berries you can get in the game at the back of the guide, except they listed out some berries that you couldn't obtain at the time without hacking (you were supposed to trade them in from other gen III games that didn't come out yet). I think Mirage Island was also mentioned in it without actually telling the player how to get to it, so for a long time we had various playground rumors of what is even on Mirage Island because none of us had the superior Nintendo Power guide for the two games. I'm glad autists on wikis and data miners ran publications like this into the ground over the years.

[Anonymous No.9081182]

>>9075387
I'm not sure how obscure this one is, but the Blaster Master Zero bosses have different names between languages despite being in plain English. When set to Japanese, the returning bosses have their names sourced from an official Metafight strategy guide book; when set to other languages, the returning bosses have their names sourced from, I kid you not, a decidedly unofficial Blaster Master walkthrough by Dingo Jellybean on GameFAQs. Not only does this cause some weirdness in the first game ("Underworld Lord" being another boss title and not a real name), but come the third game, it outright causes continuity errors when it's set on Planet Sophia and they have to add an explanation that Sophians know it as "GOEZ" despite the name being displayed by an advanced alien tank built by Sophians.

[Anonymous No.9082349]

>>9075315
I actually fell for pic related as kid, mostly because of thick it was. I remember it being chock of full poor, if not made up translations, spelling/grammar errors, and flat out bullshit.

[Anonymous No.9082756]

>>9075387
>This boss is really easy so I wont tell you how to beat it, figure it out yourself
>The boss gave me the most trouble.

[Anonymous No.9082758]

>>9077841
>>9078164
I'd also add that the creator gets bored and basically gives up 80% through.

[Anonymous No.9083515]

I read one for one of the Fire Emblem games that gave a detailed explanation of every move the guy who wrote it took. Because of the RNG nature of attacks hitting or missing and how strong your characters become due to stat boosts it was totally worthless to anyone else.

[Anonymous No.9083783]

>>9075315
Final Fantasy IX gets an honorable mention here, but this one is already well known. Let's talk about Earthbound, and how the guide tells you the wrong monster that drops the main character's most powerful weapon. It's a 1/250 drop rate to start with, so it didn't occur to me that something was wrong when I dumped ten hours into monster grinding before I finally conceeded. It still pisses me off thinking about it now.

[Anonymous No.9084492]

Don't remember the game or cheat but I had a few of those little cheat books, codes for a shit ton of games. Anyway, one code was false but kid me tried it for weeks, thinking "it'll work this time".
Utter retard.

[Anonymous No.9085494]

I remember the "official" guide book for Splinter Cell would tell you to go to some inaccessible part of the Oil Rig level. IIRC, right after crawling through a pipeline to reach the main platform there's a section where you're supposed to take a ladder to a catwalk, which in turn leads to a small pipe you can shimmy along to reach and jump down to another catwalk. If you have good timing you won't be seen by any AI. The guide, on the other hand, tells you after opening the trap door to dart towards some pipeline to walk along that's underneath the catwalk you're supposed to reach... which doesn't exist.

There was a similar inaccuracy in the official guide for the sequel, too. At the very end of the final mission you're supposed to escape a disabled elevator and shimmy up a cable to reach the room where you're supposed to neutralize the last terrorists. The guide tells you go to some ledge or pipe or something that was taken out of the final game. I remember I had a bitch of a time with that final mission because of that stupid guide.