Areala

The follow-up to 1,001 Secret Codes, released a year earlier. This book doesn't present any walkthroughs, guides, or strategies, it's simply a compilation of cheat codes, passwords, unlockables, and other goodies to help you get the most out of games you already own.
That said, they still manage to misspell the occasional game title, so that mid-90's Brady "quality assurance" is still alive and well. 😂
Oh well. At least it wasn't on the front cover this time.
Donated by ModernZorker.
Enjoy! ❤️

Another entry in Prima's ubiquitous "Secrets of the Game" series. This one talks about first-person shooters, and contains minimal, text-only walkthroughs and cheat codes for Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake. Beyond the walkthroughs for the solo campaign, you get some tips and tricks for deathmatch, a chapter dedicated to using level editors for some of the aforementioned games along with general tips for making your own levels as interesting and fun as possible, and a final roundup of cheat codes for some other 3D action titles such as Dark Forces and Magic Carpet.
All in all, this isn't a terribly compelling book considering the lack of even a single screenshot to add zest to the presentation. There are even a couple of times where it directs the reader to visit a game's FAQ on Usenet or some of the various fan websites in order to get more information, which is an odd thing to tell the person who just paid $20 for your book, but OK...
The games it covers all received better, more full-featured strategy guides, complete with artwork and screenshots galore, so all that information can be found elsewhere with better presentation. If you want to design levels for these sorts of games, there were specific books written for that purpose for Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, while larger and more advanced level design bibles like 3D Game Alchemy and Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus exist to better fulfill that niche.
It's not a bad book, per se, and it's great from a historical perspective to have it preserved, it's just not all that exciting or interesting to either peruse or use. But now that it's out there, you can explore for yourself!
Enjoy! ❤️

"More twisted levels and hellish horror!" declares the cover for this update to the prior year's Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus. And they are quite correct. This is not just Tricks version 2.0, this is an almost complete re-write from start to finish which, while almost 200 pages shorter than the previous edition, manages to contain more information between its covers. It does this by culling a good 75% of the empty pages from the first book (seriously, Tricks has dozens of pages which are completely blank compared to around 30 or so here), but also chopping out program-specific information and replacing it with generic how-to which explains the same concepts in a fashion more broadly applicable to whatever development tools you happen to be using. The end result is a tighter, more streamlined book which assumes you are familiar with how to use the software even if you're not that good at designing levels.
Despite the title, this book is still very much a DOOM-centric tome. While the designs discussed can be used with Heretic and Hexen, and there are tables and charts describing the quirks, enemies, and things specific to those games, make no mistake: the book's writers know you're here for the DOOM content, and they are only too happy to provide.
The CD-ROM which SAMS included with the book knows it too, coming packed with a fully registered version of the (now woefully obsolete) WADAuthor program for Windows and WADED program for DOS to build levels, along with its own graphical library of enemies, weapons, sprites, tiles, skyboxes, objects, and things to add spice to your own creations, and the DOOMShell 5 program which lets you point-and-click your way through level customizations easily. As if that isn't enough, you can bear witness to over two thousand levels created by talented designers, including several hundred DeathMatch-specific maps, either to use as-is or build off of for your own nightmares.
Given the release of numerous source ports and new level-making utilities, the software in this book is outdated and mostly unusable on modern systems, but the design concepts and general information within are still rock-solid bases from which to start your DOOM level design education. Included in this download is the 3dgamealchemy.iso which you can extract and burn to its own CD, or mount to a virtual drive and explore (which is why the file size is so large), and get the full 1996 experience!
Enjoy! ❤️

This book totally rules! Heh, heh, heh...
Yeah, so, you can, like, totally play the Beavis and Butt-Head game normally. Like, that's what Mr. Van Driesen would do. He'd call it "self-learning" or "acshulization" or some other stupid word that probably isn't, like, real and stuff.
Or you could use this book to, like, totally score with chicks and stuff. Like chicks, this book has nice tips. And it works with, like, all three different games. But, like, if you only have one or two of them, that's, like, fine too. You probably needed to save your money for, you know, GWAR tickets.
GWAR rocks!
But, like, if you need to beat the game--
(Heh, heh...I said 'beat'...)
--like, fast and stuff? Like, cuz a chick said she'd show you her boobs, but you had to, you know, beat the game first? I guess you could, uhhh, read the book and, I dunno, use the passwords and maps and things to see GWAR. And then score. Or at least, like, play with your butt-ons and stuff.
Beavis is into that. He once played with his butt-on so much that Mr. Buzzcut made him do pushups until blood came out his nose. That was cool! Huh-huh-huh...
Yeah, yeah, anyway, like, just read the book, uhhh, you know, FOR us. Cuz we're busy. Scoring. Yeah, scoring! With a chick! You, uh, you don't know her. She's from, like, Canada or some other state.
Enjoy! (Bungholes...) ❤️

Well, here's something completely different! Your beloved Retromags Goddess providing you (yes, you specifically!) with a book about games from the MS-DOS era!
Wait, sorry, I got my notes mixed up. This is actually just the next in a long line of books dealing with classic DOS games brought to you by yours truly.
In order, this book covers:
Duke Nukem 3D Quake MechWarrior 2 Crusader: No Remorse Hexen Heretic Star Wars: Dark Forces Descent Doom II Doom Earthsiege 2 Earthsiege Terra Nova Wing Commander IV Wing Commander III Fury3 Magic Carpet Renegade Now, you don't get full walkthroughs for all of these games. What you get instead for most are general, overall strategies that will serve you well throughout a playthrough, taken from articles and reviews written by the staff members of Computer Games Strategy Plus.
The book also came with a CD-ROM containing playable demos for nearly all of the games covered by the book, plus eighteen other games not covered between the covers. My copy, sadly, is lacking this disc, but the good news is that some other enterprising soul uploaded it to Archive.org, and you can grab your own copy of it to play around with!
Now, enough words! Download this book, enjoy the nostalgia, pay me my tribute by kicking that 'Thanks' button like you're Duke Nukem's mighty boot, and prepare for the next awesome release from your Retromags Goddess! ❤️
*huggles*
Areala

Follow-up publication to Tricks of the Nintendo Masters, which was itself followed by Winner's Guide to Sega Genesis.
Like other publications of the time, this one is almost entirely text-based, with only some neat art pieces for the interior pages to break up the words. Unlike other publications of the time, this one contains a forward by sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card, author of the Ender's Game series of books among others.
At only 148 pages, it's much smaller than many of its contemporaries despite being the same price. The Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo Game Strategies books offered over 100 more pages for the same cover price, and also included screenshots. In addition, the authors either were told not to give too much away, or just plain couldn't get too far into some games. The strategy section for Metal Gear, for instance, goes up to the point where Snake can locate the rocket launcher. It tells you to contact Jennifer on a specific frequency before you enter a certain room, then offers this nugget: "Which room? You figure it out." I'm sorry, I thought that's what I was paying you for...?
Another me-too cash grab which is all-too-blatant when viewed through adult eyes.
This copy was fairly beat up on the covers, and had some writing on the front title page which I simply blocked out in GIMP. I edited it up slightly, but again, my background is in writing, not graphic design, so my apologies if the obvious edits are distracting.
Enjoy! ❤️

Unless you were alive back then, it's almost impossible to understand just how massive the adventure genre of gaming was for personal computers. Exhibit one, were I attempting to make a legal case, would have to be this book right here. It covers seventy-seven adventure programs released across various computer platforms, everything from Adventure to Zork III, and had a cover price of $19.95. Twenty bucks probably seems like an average price for a strategy guide, especially a 350-page behemoth like this guy, but in 1984 that was the equivalent of sixty US dollars in today's currency. How on earth could publisher Arrays, Inc. get away with charging that much for a black-and-white, mostly-text guidebook?
To put that a bit more in perspective, purchasing a copy of Zork I: The Great Underground Empire for your Apple II home computer back in the halcyon days of 1981 would have set you back $39.95 (or roughly US $120 in today's money). Computer games weren't just costly, they were downright extravagant. And that was after you factored in the several thousand dollars that buying the home computer itself had already set you back. Sure, there were deals to be found when shops were looking to clear out last year's inventory to make room for the next wave of software, but there was no Steam Summer Sale where you could pick up a bunch of AAA-blockbusters for 75% or more off their list price. If you wanted to play Zork, or Wizardry, or Ultima, it was going to cost you. Minimum wage at the time was $2.75/hour, so you can do the math.
Nobody wanted to dump $40 on a game they couldn't beat, there was no internet where you could consult a FAQ, and while BBS systems were a thing, modems were not a part of the typical home computer installation. So the notion that, for half the cost of a typical adventure game, you could get puzzle solutions and maps for over seventy-five of the most popular titles from the last few years? That was a no-brainer. It was such a no-brainer that one year later, Kim Schuette put out The Book of Adventure Games II, which covered forty-five more adventures that had either been left out of the first volume, or had come out in the meantime, and it too sold like gangbusters.
I've had this book for almost as long as I've been alive. It (and its sequel) are long out of print, expensive on the second-hand market, and highly sought-after by retro adventure game enthusiasts and collectors. Chopping this one up was hard. But putting it out here, so it can have a new life and be seen and appreciated by others who may never have even known of its existence before now, gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I hope you enjoy looking through it as much as I have done over the years, back when I was just a little girl, doing her best hunt-and-peck typing on her TRS-80 keyboard, trying to figure out how to beat The Sands of Egypt.
This isn't just a piece of gaming history. This is a piece of my history. I hope you'll treasure it with me. ❤️

A relatively rare guide for a relatively unknown game.
Chaos Island is sort of like Jurassic Park meets the RTS genre. It tasks you with guiding various characters from the film The Lost World around Isla Nublar to accomplish a variety of tasks to protect the dinosaurs from hunters, gather eggs and other resources, and avoid dying while you're doing it. Of all the games made under the JP license, this is one of the strangest. That, combined with the guide's own obscurity, made it an obvious choice for archival here.
Enjoy! ❤️

Holy cow, you guys, this book.
This is one of the most ridiculous guides I've ever owned.
Back in 1994, Final Fantasy III was released in the US, and like many people, I went absolutely ga-ga over the game. It's my favorite entry in the series, and I've beaten it multiple times and on multiple platforms, including the Game Boy Advance version with the extra content. In my obsessive quest to learn everything I could about the game though, I bought every magazine and book I could find about it, including Nintendo's own official guide and Peter Olafson's full-colour guide. And then...there's this one...
Part strategy guide, part fanfic, Complete Final Fantasy III Forbidden Game Secrets is a nearly 500-page tribute to absurdity and lies.
The author's name, "Hayaku Kaku", is written as '早く書く' in Japanese. This isn't actually a name, it's a fragment meaning "fast write", and it's a clue to why this guide is so bizarre. See, Final Fantasy III (or Final Fantasy VI as it's now known) is a massive game, and as noted in the introduction, not one you can finish over the course of a three-day rental. Writing a guide to a game that large requires an exceptional lead time if you're planning to match the game's release date, and from the contents of the book, it's easy to ascertain that the author (in this case, Bill Kunkel, aka "The Game Doctor" himself, with assistance from another writer named Ken Vance) was working off pre-release materials.
One of the necessities for squeezing all of the story into the cart, as related by translator Ted Woolsey in an interview, was re-naming the bulk of the enemies, items, spells, and Espers in the game, in order to fit into the character limits imposed by the game. What's odd about this book is that it gets almost all of the character names and spell/Esper names correct, even when it comes to the bizarre spellings imposed by Woolsey to comply with the aforementioned character limits ('Fenix' instead of 'Phoenix', etc...). But the items? Almost all the item names in this guide are completely incorrect--it's likely the item list was among the last things Woolsey worked on, since the majority of his effort was likely focused on the game's massive story. If that's the case, it's almost certain Kunkel and Vance were working off incomplete information and a near-zero knowledge of the Japanese language. More credence is given to this theory since one of the screenshots includes the original Japanese "Bar" sign, which was censored by Nintendo, and read "Cafe" in the US edition of the game.
'Spears' are translated as 'spheres' for some reason. Item names, as noted, often bear no resemblance to their final forms. What's more, the explanations of item abilities and magic spells often read as though someone gave them a very basic, machine-like translation from the original which were never edited for clarity. (Edit: see the update below, but this is exactly what happened).
The maps, maps, and more maps hyped on the back cover are likewise odd. These are not maps, exactly...more like someone took pictures of the screen, printed those pictures out, then placed a sheet of tracing paper over them and drew over every building, tree, hill, stream, and other feature, but never bothered to fill in any of the information. Thus, what you get are a bevy of hand-drawn maps that show the entire area...but are almost completely worthless for all the work put into them, since they don't point out any useful features.
Even as a walkthrough or secrets guide, the book is deficient. It will point out what items can be found in each area (well, most of them at any rate...Kunkel and Vance didn't find a lot of the off-the-beaten-path goodies), but it does not explain where any of them actually are in relation to the map, or what steps might be necessary to uncover them. In addition, a lot of the walkthrough is just plain incorrect in literally dozens of places. It's impossible for anyone well-versed in the game to go more than 2-3 pages without finding another mistake, whether it's a simple mistranslation or flat-out misinformation like: claiming you can earn experience in the "Beastfield" (the Veldt), when in fact, battles there don't earn you any XP; claiming it's possible to get Shadow back into the party via betting items at the Coliseum if you didn't wait for him on the Floating Continent; claiming Locke gains the ability to pick locks as the story continues; saying Celes can use her 'Runic' ability to learn spells faster; a screenshot of a character suffering the 'Imp' status effect incorrectly labeled as 'zombified' by the caption; claiming the 'Quartr' spell reduces the target's HP by 1/4th, when it actually results in a 75% reduction...the list goes on and on.
Speaking of lists, while the book impressively details the Items, Magic, and Espers available in your quest, it also omits an awful lot of other useful lists which other guides did not. These include a list of Gau's available Rages (and the enemies he needs to fight in order to acquire them), a list of items bet & won at the Coliseum, and a list of enemies from whom Strago can learn his different Blue Magic spells.
Also omitted are seemingly obvious things you'd want to point out in a strategy guide: while it explain that calling the Merton esper in combat causes a raging inferno to scream across the battlefield, it neglects to mention this afflicts both the enemies and your party. Now, sure, you're going to learn this as soon as you use it the first time, but knowing an attack could nuke my team BEFORE I use it is kind of the point of a strategy guide, right? Likewise, there's no indication that the Cursed Shield (or the "Bloody Shield" as this book refers to it) can be un-cursed, or that you can equip a Ribbon in order to remove nearly all the negative effects your character will suffer while trying to do so. The book assumes Cid will die, when it is in fact possible (and rather easy) to keep him alive.
I seriously could go on for pages about everything wrong with this guide. There are a lot of books over the years which I have no problem labeled shameless cash grabs, but the level of hyperbole this book builds on its back cover compared to the results it delivers between the pages is a disconnect of truly epic proportions. Download this and read it to understand the nightmare which was the world of video game strategy guides in a pre- (or at least very young) Internet age, marvel at its inconsistencies, and boggle at the fact they were willing to charge $14.95 US (or 2.89 gold flemkes in "East Domo").
In an old forum post at the J2Games website, which is no longer accessible since they removed their forum, Bill Kunkel spilled the beans about writing this book, and how much of a nightmare the project was. I almost feel sorry for him, and got the impression from reading it years ago that this project very quickly spiraled out of control in terms of the time they assumed it would take to write, and the results here speak for themselves. The good Game Doctor is no longer with us, but it's a shame his spirit is forever associated with this absurdity.
Enjoy! ❤️
Update: I discovered, to my delight, that Kunkel's recollections about working on this game guide in that old forum post on J2Games were collected in one of the chapters in his autobiography, Confessions of the Game Doctor. I've corrected some things in the above writing which I got wrong due to my own faulty memory (chief among them: his co-author was not Rusel DeMaria, but Ken Vance), but I'm reproducing this part of the book so you can see exactly what went into the creation of this guide.
It was actually worse than I remembered!
So, there you have it. A strategy guide written by two guys who cribbed all the relevant information about the game by having a local Japanese professor translate bits and pieces of Japanese guide books which Prima imported instead of actually playing through the game (something they apparently didn't even have access to).
You really can't make this up.

Another 500-page tome of PC gaming goodness. Compute's Adventure Game Player's Handbook provides walkthroughs for 37 games which are (mostly) of the point-and-click variety from the mid-90's catalogue of DOS offerings. And these are some top-notch games: some Leisure Suit Larry titles, a couple of Space Quest entries, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, both Ultima Underworld adventures, the CD-ROM sensation that was The 7th Guest, Laura Bow's first outing in The Dagger of Amon Ra, the H.R. Geiger inspired Dark Seed, the second Tex Murphy adventure Martian Memorandum, Sierra's Rise of the Dragon cyberpunk tale, and even Steve Meretzky's comical final entry in the Spellcasting trilogy...seriously, some of the best PC adventure games available at the time.
Once again, not as outdated as you might think, since many of these titles are easily available and accessible from digital services like GOG and Steam, meaning you could re-play many of them today with minimal hassle and put this book to good use. Mostly text, but there are an awful lot of screenshots and computer-rendered maps along with other things like item lists and even the occasional cheat code or two which make this a great reference work.
Enjoy! ❤️

The Deathmatch Manifesto is a fascinating book for a multitude of reasons. Published in 1997, really the dawn of the internet era for many home computer users, it's the first book of its kind to really dig in to the strategies used by gamers for fragging one another instead of the monsters. While competing against other human players itself went all the way back to the likes ofTennis For Two, Pong, and Space War, the concept of the "deathmatch" as it pertained to 3D gaming was in its relative infancy. Popularized by Doom, expanded on by Duke Nukem 3D, and levelled up by the release of Quake, there was a massive, untapped audience for this kind of thing, and Sybex sought to fill this void by publishing a guide not to beating the likes of those games, but rather beating the likes of those who had already beaten those games and were now looking for fresh blood to spill.
Much of the book is devoted to covering basic and advanced Deathmatch tactics which have long since become staples of the FPS genre, especially in the aftermath of the success seen with Quake 3 and the Unreal Tournament franchise, but what makes this book important from a historical standpoint is the snapshot in time it offers the reader. Documented within is the genesis of FPS gaming, the rise of online gaming, snapshots of popular gaming culture like cartoons produced using Quake's graphical engine and a listing of a number of different Clans who existed at the time, and even a look at new and upcoming gaming peripherals, like the SpaceOrb 360 controller, the VooDoo graphics card, and the MMX instruction set for Pentium-class computers.
I've included an .iso rip of the CD which came with the book. This includes a slew of deathmatch levels for your favorite games; demo file walkthroughs for every level in Quake, Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D and the Atomic Edition/Plutonium Pak; a utility for converting Doom levels into Duke 3D levels; and a "secret Quake bonus" hidden somewhere on the disc for you to find. (No, don't ask me what/where it is--I'm not telling!). The DEATHMATCH.ISO file is included in the .cbz file, so open that with your favorite file compression utility, extract it, and get to playing around!
As usual for books like this, pages which were completely blank were omitted in order to reduce file size.
Enjoy! ❤️

There were multiple versions of this guide published and updated by BradyGames over the years. This particular edition is keyed to the Lord of Destruction expansion pack which came as part of the Diablo II Battle Chest boxed set. Since the guide makes no references to skill synergy bonuses but it does reference "the first patch", it likely corresponds to v1.08 of the game. Given the game's current edition is v1.14d, much of the information in this file will be outdated and inaccurate except to someone playing a pre-v1.10 copy in a solo campaign.
Enjoy! ❤️

A reasonably decent guide to DOOM II, written by Ed Dille in the voice of an annoyed drill instructor trying to whip a new recruit (that's you, the reader) into fighting shape. It includes a number of strategies for co-operative play, which game guides often lacked back in the day, especially for First-Person Shooter titles. No Deathmatch strategies beyond "always be running, don't stand in one place, and fire the biggest guns you've got", but the amount of time spent discussing fire team formations and other co-op strategies is really cool to see. Also includes a short interview with John Romero which is worth reading by itself, although much of the information in it you'll already know if you've read Masters of DOOM.
This should have been a black-and-white guide, but Prima for some reason chose to go with a spot colour printing approach, infusing red ink into virtually every page, and even into the black-and-white screenshots. It's an interesting look, but it also jacked the price of this guide up to $20 US when it really should have been $15 or thereabouts. Prima must have realized this price might turn some people off, because they released a stripped-down, 96-page budget hint book called The DOOM II Survival Guide which contains the basic item, enemy, weapon, and map info from this book, but none of the level strategies, multiplayer info, interview, or cheat codes.
But here's the big, bad mama in all its glory. Enjoy! ❤️

Come get some!
The man with the mightiest boot in all of FPS-dom is in town with a few days to kill. But who wants to waste all their time bumping into walls and burning through jetpacks to find all the secrets, easter eggs, and crazy loot? So do yourself a favour: use this official strategy guide, with all its excellent walkthroughs and maps, to make those alien bastards pay for shooting up your ride.
This is a fun guide, with some extra developer commentary packed into the Appendix, and the obligatory CD-ROM on the back cover, stuffed with level maps, shareware, the entire first episode of Duke Nukem 3D, and other goodies.
The CD-ROM isn't a part of the .cbz archive, but you can download your own ISO of The Exclusive SYBEX/3D Realms Duke Nukem Companion CD to play around with, because your Retromags Goddesss loves you and ripped her copy so you could have the complete experience.

What are you waiting for, Christmas?
Enjoy! ❤️

Final Fantasy III / Final Fantasy VI is, hands down, my favorite Final Fantasy title. And this right here just might be my favorite strategy guide of all time. Presented in full colour, flush with screenshots, along with copious artwork by artist Yoshitaka Amano, and a section at the end featuring some gorgeous full-size in-game maps, Olafson's guide is written more like a story as opposed to a walkthrough.
At $12.95, this was an absolute showstopper of a book. It may be less complete overall than Nintendo's own game guide, as it doesn't contain things like monster stats, weapon and item lists, Gau's Rage tables, or other in-depth information one might expect to see in an RPG guide. But the sheer quality of Olafson's prose guides the reader through the story so well it feels like playing the game. It's one of the few guides I've read from cover to cover multiple times. It's just that good.
This book is generally very expensive on the second-hand market. Copies on eBay routinely sell for $50 or more, and copies in excellent condition can fetch upwards of $100. For Final Fantasy III fans, it's a highly-sought collector's item. If you've ever looked at a listing and wondered why, I hope a flip through this book explains everything. If every guide followed Olafson's example, strategy guides would be regarded as works of art instead of simple cash grabs.
Enjoy! ❤️

An unofficial, text-only strategy guide produced specifically for the PC edition of Final Fantasy VII. This is a pretty odd beast, considering virtually every other FF7 guide on the market is both full colour and packed with screenshots. Even though this was meant for the PC release, there's really nothing preventing you from using it to play through the PS1 version, since they're almost entirely identical.
Not a particularly common guide, but also not a terribly interesting one thanks to its bland presentation. Ronald Wartow is a good writer though, and even if you've played through the console version many times, you may enjoy reading his take on the adventure.
Enjoy! ❤️

Another solid game compilation guide, this time from Prima, who seemed to do better at these kinds of things than Brady much of the time. This covers a slew of great games that most people would be interested in playing: top-notch stuff like Link's Awakening DX, Donkey Kong Country, two Wario Land titles, and even contains a bit about the Game Boy Camera peripheral. It's nothing mind-blowing, but the production value is high, there are plenty of full-color screen captures, and the writing for the walkthroughs is on point and descriptive. Well worth the download, IMO.
Donated by ModernZorker.
Enjoy! ❤️

The second book released by Jeff Rovin under his "Gamemaster" moniker, this time aimed at helping you whittle down that backlog of Sega Genesis and Sega CD games you'd built up over the years. Like the rest of his video game books, this one's all-text, all the time. Like the Super Nintendo book, it dispenses with reviews and other unnecessary bits to focus entirely on cheats, Game Genie/Pro Action Replay codes, tips, and strategies to get you as far into the games as possible. There are some extra pages in the back where you can take notes, write down passwords, or draw maps.
My version of this book has the previous owner's name and date of purchase inscribed on the first page. I thought about editing this out, but decided against it since it was part of this particular copy's history. Susan Forman, wherever you are, if you should run across this file some day I hope it makes you smile to know we've immortalized your specific book in our archives.
Enjoy! ❤️

After teaching everybody "How to Win" for five years, Jeff Rovin adopted a new moniker for himself: "Gamemaster". A bit ironic, since Rovin himself never actually played the games for which he was writing down strategies, but the 90s were nothing if not the "fake it 'til you make it" era, so there you have it.
The book's broken down into two separate sections; the first features varying degrees of secret codes and strategies for 90 different titles, although nothing terribly comprehensive for any of the games no matter how complex or long said games might be. A little over three pages devoted to Final Fantasy II, about the same for Zombies Ate my Neighbors, but only one page or so given over to most action, platformer, and sports titles. The second section is literally nothing but cheats, passwords, Game Genie and Pro Action Replay codes, and the like; stuff you'd find in any magazine's cheat column. At $5 for a solid 230 pages of content, this isn't a bad deal. Rovin's introduction and afterward are also interesting reading, with Rovin making the case that the government has about as much reason to come after video games as they did with comics books back in the 1950s. Nice to see a guy who is a parent opining that it's really up to the parents to be responsible for what their children play instead of assuming an involuntary rating system will do anything except give kids a reason to rent the more mature titles on Friday night.
There are a lot of errors, omissions, and mistakes in this book though. The back cover claims Super Metroid is covered inside, when it doesn't appear in either section. The table of contents labels the second section of the book as "NES Short Takes" instead of SNES Short Takes. The front cover refers to the Zelda titles as "Link Games" (which makes it sound like carts you could connect to other carts a-la Sonic the Hedgehog 3), and the back cover mentions a game called "Streetfighters II".
There are also oddities in the presentation of some material. Rovin sometimes offers up passwords without explaining where they put you or what they'll give you (see Wings 2: Aces High), and does the same with Game Genie codes (see Final Fantasy II). Yeah, it doesn't take long to type in a couple of codes and see what happens, but maybe I'd like to know what I'm getting into before plugging in the ol' Game Genie. Especially if one of the codes you're going to give us is a "Gunslinger" code which can be used to change any item in the game into any other item in the game. If you don't explain what that code does, and how to use it, you haven't done anybody any favours, Jeff.
Anyway, my copy of this book has some slight water damage on the first couple of pages, but everything came out legible. Enjoy! ❤️

If you downloaded the first incarnation of this file, please re-download this one. The initial release was complete, but had a pagination problem which has been fixed.
Regardless of your feelings about GamePro the magazine, there's no denying this book is awesome. While the competition was going the black-and-white-only route, either with text only, or the occasional monochrome screen cap, the GamePro editors went all-in on this 220-page, full-colour beast of a book printed on high-quality paper, and sold for the same price as the less-cool-looking book right beside it on the shelf.
GamePro only did two books of this sort, this one for Adventure games, and a second for Sports titles. Unfortunately I only have this one, so @E-Day will have to wait, quivering with anticipation, until one of us gets ahold of the other one.
As with other scans, I've left out the completely blank pages so as to lower the file size.
Enjoy! ❤️

Written by Ed Dille, who was responsible for a number of guides for Prima, including Doom II: The Official Strategy Guide. In fact, a number of the Deathmatch and Co-op tactics in this book are lifted straight from that guide. In fairness, Heretic runs on a slightly modified Doom engine, and the goals revolve around shooting things until they're no longer moving so there's no real need to re-invent the wheel here.
What hasn't carried over is Dille's frustrated drill instructor persona, replaced here by one of Mustafa, a powerful wizard and historian out to offer you, his novice trainees, the information to succeed in their dangerous quest. He's dialed it down a notch here, which will either be welcoming or disappointing depending on how you enjoyed the style of the Doom guide.
Aside from that, every level gets its own map and walkthrough, and the book ends with a series of appendices describing everything from running Heretic from the command line to setting up a service like DWANGO for modem-to-modem play. Oh, how far we've come...
 
Enjoy! ❤️

Now this is a piece of retro gaming history. While not the first book written describing strategies for winning in the arcade, Michael Blanchet was among the earliest authors putting pen to paper and explaining the ins and outs of video games as he saw them. A recent college graduate, he worked in an arcade by day, dispensing both quarters and tips for fellow gamers, and picking up strategies from his regular customers. It didn't take long for him to realize there was a thirst for this kind of knowledge, and after winning top marks in an arcade gaming tournament for his performance in Battlezone, he got noticed by an agent for Simon & Schuster. They were looking for a book about arcade games, since "Mastering Pac-Man" by Ken Uston and "How to Master the Video Games" by Tom Hirschfeld had both become recent best-sellers. Blanchet said he had some ideas he'd been kicking around, and the result was the publication of this book in 1982, which reportedly sold over 80,000 copies.
Blanchet was able to parlay the success of this book (and its successor, "How To Beat Atari, Intellivision, and Other Home Video Games") into a regular newspaper column which ran twice a week up until the industry crashed, at which point Blanchet left video games journalism and moved on to the next phase of his life.
Your Retromags Goddess is pleased as punch to be able to bring you this awesome piece of early video game history as her first scan for 2024.

Jeff Rovin and his sons branch into the portable gaming market with this book. Like the others in this series, this is an all-text, all-the-time format.
My copy of this book had a few pages where the print seeped dangerously close to the margins. I don't know if this was a problem solely with my copy, or if every book looks like this, but if it looks like the margins jump around at some point, it wasn't anything I did on my end while creating the file, I promise. There was also a corner gouged from one corner on the second-to-last page in my copy which shall remain immortalized in this scan. I try to take good care of my books, but accidents happen, alas.
Enjoy! ❤️

Volume 2 of the series which keeps on giving gave everybody more of what they already got last time, and we were all delighted by that, thank you very much!
While this series wasn't specifically aimed at children, the ad in the back for a bunch of books in the "Truly Tasteless Jokes" series seems...well, tasteless. Then again, it's not like Rovin had half a dozen of these guys under his belt for St. Martin's Press to advertise, and crass humour likely sold just as well as video game books, so who knows: maybe they made a fortune off the cross-promotion.
Now I want to get one of those dirty joke books and see if they advertise Rovin's material in the back.
Enjoy! ❤️

After three successful books covering Nintendo games of all genres, Rovin turned his roving eye to a sports-centric edition of his best-selling series, and thus, How to Win at Nintendo Sports Games was born. While some games, like Ice Hockey, were covered in previous volumes, even these titles get an expanded treatment, often re-measured against other games about the same sport. There's also a short section on some Game Boy sports titles, and a very short "Sports Shorts" section with a half dozen tips for sports-themed carts.
As with all of Rovin's other material in this series, this is all-text, all the time. Of course, the upside to this was they were inexpensive as well: four or five dollars as opposed to the ten or twelve other, more graphically complex guides could command.
Enjoy! ❤️