Strategy guide

Strategy guides are instruction books that contain hints or complete solutions to specific video games. The line between strategy guides and video game walkthroughs is somewhat blurred, with the former often containing or being written around the latter. Strategy guides are often published in print, both in book form and also as articles within video game magazines. In cases of exceptionally popular game titles, guides may be sold through more mainstream publication channels, such as bookstores or even newsstands. Some publishers also sell E-Book versions on their websites.

Strategy guides marketed as "official" are written by game distributors themselves or licensed to a specialty publishing house; Prima Games and Piggyback Interactive specialise in writing official guides for various companies. There are also a number of publishers who make unlicensed, "unofficial" strategy guides, and many of today's mainstream publishers began by making such guides.

Detailed information, for example, maneuvers that are not detailed in the manual.

gameplay

Complete maps of the game, which show the placement of all items (including hidden and hard-to-find ones).

Detailed instructions for specific locations on how to proceed from there.

Explanations of puzzles.

Details of enemies, including techniques on defeating individual enemies (especially ), the segment for minor enemies is commonly referred to as a bestiary.

bosses

Checklist of collectible items.

Cheats and game editing, although this has been less common in official guides.

Walkthroughs to help the player complete levels.

Advice on tactics and strategies for use in multi-player (games with multi-player only)

The contents of a strategy guide varies between game genres. Typically, the guides contain:

Publishing before game release[edit]

In order to be released at the same time as the game, commercial strategy guides are often based on a pre-release version of the game, rather than the final retail version; BradyGames' guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas included misplaced item locations and a slightly different map, which made some directions impossible to follow. BradyGames rectified such mistakes by offering free errata pages for download from their website.

Strategy guides are sometimes published before the game itself is published. This can be risky because there is always the chance that a game will end up not being released. For example, in January 2001, Prima published a guide (ISBN 0-7615-3125-4) for the Dreamcast version of Half-Life, which was canceled late in development when Sega discontinued the console.

Containing only facts which should have been in the game manual, e.g. about the .

user interface

Failing to teach users how to improve their play.

Failing to provide information which helps them to make decisions, e.g. about the capabilities and costs of units and buildings.

Being inaccurate, often because the developers have tweaked the game during the publication .

lead time

Some companies make mistakes in the book about the game itself, such as stating that "Character A" has a relationship with "Character B", despite there being no relationship. In a strategy guide for Diddy Kong Racing they referred to characters with terms such as "The Dinosaur" and "The Octopus" instead of their names.

Games journalist and guide writer Alan Emrich has severely criticized recent strategy guides for:

The faults, he says, are mainly caused by the game publishers' and guide publishers' haste to get their products on to the market;^[5] "[previously] strategy guides were published after a game was released so that they could be accurate, even to the point of including information changes from late game 'patch' releases. The Master of Orion official strategy guide that Tom Hughes and I wrote is just that kind of book."^[6]