RPG Companion: An Insider's Guide to PC Roleplaying Games

For all the time I've spent giving Brady Games guff about the quality of their mid-90's content, this is a pretty darn cool book. Maybe because it's aimed more at PC gamers, maybe because it's written by Ronald Wartow (who could both write about games and play them with equal skill), maybe it's because he solicited input from some of the industry's top designers, but this is a badass tome: 500 pages of knowledge, lore, and history all wrapped into one big bible-thick slab.

With the resurgence in availability of these games on modern systems thanks to services like GOG and Steam, the usefulness of books like this has come 'round again. Twenty-five years later, we can play through these games again without the need to hack around with boot floppies, CONFIG.SYS files, driver mishaps, IRQ conflicts, and restarting in MS-DOS mode to free up memory. This one contains walkthroughs for twenty-six different games, and while they aren't step-by-step, hold-your-hand sorts, they (along with the principles Wartow introduces in the early chapters) will get the job done while still leaving it up to your skills to actually play the game.

Lots of tables, interviews, screenshots, hints, cheats, and other information is dispensed about each game as well. Some of this stuff gets downright hacker-esque, with tips on hex editing, mucking around with your save files, where to find update patches, and other things books of the day didn't often comment on.

It also shipped with a free issue of "Interactive Entertainment", a magazine-on-CD which lasted for about 25 or so issues before it was folded in to become the cover disc for "Computer Games Strategy Plus" magazine. My copy was missing this CD-ROM, but Archive.org has more than half of them available for download if you want to see what they were like.

Anyway, this is an awesome book, and it belongs in the library of anyone who grew up a classic era PC gamer, or who is interested in that era of PC gaming history.

Enjoy!