Areala

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! ❤️

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! ❤️

Wow! So ultimate! Such strategy! Many unauthorized! Much Nintendo! Oh no!
So, yes, this is the third volume in Sandler and Badgett's series devoted to NES games. I don't know if this was just my copy or what, but the printing on this was some of the worst I've ever seen, with some pages printed at an angle, and some margins running straight to the bleed with seemingly little rhyme or reason. But, you know, back in the day, you paid your money and took your chances.
If you like these books, and their bizarre cover artwork, then you'll want this one in your collection, no doubt. If you don't? Then don't download it, I guess... You do you, Retromags peeps.
My final complaint? They rate the difficulty of Castlequest at "Apprentice", when it's one of the most punishingly brutal NES cartridges ever made. Seriously, the game comes with its own map showing you exactly where you need to go to rescue the princess, and also gives you fifty lives. Then it sits and laughs at you as you lose them all, one by one, and have to restart the game. What the hell were you smoking, Corey Sandler? Explain yourself!
Enjoy! ❤️

The 90s kept rolling on, and like clockwork, Corey Sandler and Tom Badgett cranked out yet another volume of this best-selling series. While this one's a pocket-sized paperback, it's still rocking over 300 pages of content, though like the rest of the series, the bulk of it is text, and the screenshots are both minimal and monochromatic.
This, as best I can tell, is the final book in the Bantam Game Mastery Series worked on by Sandler and Badgett. The early 90s was the peak era for game books like this, which were already starting to get squeezed off the shelves in favor of large-format, single-game guides which often came in full colour. Prima was on the rise, Brady was cooking up trouble in the basement, and traditional book publishers like Random House and St. Martin's Press scaling back operations on video game books. Still, I think there's a lot to like in this one, and if you were a kid on a limited budget, the fact this was $6.99 vs. $12 or more for a full-sized, single-game guide didn't hurt.
Like some of the other books in this series, the margins get pretty tight in my copy, so you'll see text running almost to the edge of the page in a few instances. Once again, this is a printing issue in my particular copy, not an issue with my ability to crop scans, but still it makes the overall file look kind of dopey, and for that, I apologize.
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! ❤️

This most excellent paper doll was included as an exclusive bonus for people who purchased the Tomb Raider I and II Official Strategy Guide from Prima back in 1999. The doll herself was printed on thick cardstock, with scoring lines, while her clothing came on high-gloss paper stock.
I've done a high-resolution 600dpi scan of the doll by herself, so you can print her out, dress her up, and take her on all sorts of adventures outside of her video games. Where will you travel? What treasures will you discover? It's all up to you!
Enjoy! ❤️

Jeff's a bit late to jump on the Super Nintendo train, since it had been out in the US for a year by the time this edition of his best-selling series was published. But if you thought the man had earned enough bank with eight prior game book releases, you had another thing coming. Still unofficial, still unendorsed by Nintendo, and still written by watching his kids and their neighborhood cronies play the game while he took copious notes. Why waste a perfectly good system?
Some of the games in here benefit little from Rovin's advice; the short write-up on Final Fight may as well be condensed to read, "Walk right and punch people." The Pilotwings strategy is literally just some passwords and a few tips on how to tackle the game's bonus stages (although the cheeky entry under "Enemies" made me giggle). On the other hand, games like Super Mario World, Link to the Past, and Wanderers From Ys get quite a bit more attention.
Methinks Jeff's son Michael had a girlfriend at this time in his life. The name used for all the passwords in Super Castlevania IV is MEGNMIKE. Awwwwww... 😍
Enjoy! ❤️

Another Sandler & Badgett production, so if you liked previous ones, you'll dig this one too. As always, blank pages have been omitted to reduce the file size.
I have to say, this might actually be the best of the bunch I've found so far. The quality of paper on this one is higher than previous editions, the screen shots look better, and there were no issues with dramatically shifting margins or other weirdness from Bantam's printers.
Lots of good games covered in this one; it's practically a "greatest hits" run-down of the NES's best series. Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, and more all get their due. If you're only going to have one of this series in your library, make sure it's this one.
There were at least 2 editions of this book printed. This is the first printing. I've seen pictures online of the second, which is slightly smaller, and says "2nd Edition" in the upper-left corner of the cover, but I don't have this version.
Enjoy! ❤️

A 1989 NES book published by Bantam, likely pushed out to capitalize on the success of Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo Games from St. Martin's Press. This is mostly text with the occasional screenshot or box artwork thrown in, but either their screen capture tech was too primitive, or Bantam's monochrome printing process wasn't set up to handle pictures, because the screenshots from this book look awful.
Also, the margins in my copy of this book are seriously wacky. You'll see text running almost straight to the edge of the page in some sections, while others give plenty of space for the text. This is an issue with the printing of the book, not me being a klutz with the cropping tool, but I still apologize for how the text waffles and flies all over the place as you're scrolling through.
That said, the book is amusing for Sandler and Badgett's witty asides and commentary on the games they are covering. It's one of the very few books from this era to cover Friday the 13th, and it also features write-ups with mock artwork for several NES titles which never came to fruition. I've never seen these games mentioned in any other publication of the era, so it's an important historical artifact from that perspective alone, confirming that Matchbox at one time was working on creating NES software (or at least paying someone else to do so).
In any case, this kicked off a successful series for Bantam, who followed this up with three additional volumes on NES games, along with books related to Game Boy, Genesis, Game Gear, and Super Nintendo hardware, many of which went through multiple print runs and editions.
Enjoy! ❤️

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! ❤️

Another totally unauthorized compilation book from BradyGames, this time aimed at the Sega Genesis, along with the Sega CD and 32X attachments. This is a pretty good book, all things considered. Lots of screenshots, printed in full colour on high-quality paper stock. Sega groupies will eat this right up!
Donated by ModernZorker.
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! ❤️

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! ❤️

What's more extreme than an unauthorized guide to the sequel to the biggest FPS on the planet?
NOTHING, THAT'S WHAT!
We've got black-and-white pages, we've got computer-drawn maps, we've got all the cheat codes, we've got an all-text walkthrough, we've got multiplayer strategies, and we've got an interview with John-F&@$ing-Romero's girlfriend-to-be-soon-to-be-ex-, the terror of the DeathMatch arena, Stevie 'KillCreek' Case herself! SHE IS A WOMAN, AND THIS TEXT IS AS CLOSE AS MOST OF YOU WILL EVER GET TO A GIRL, SO YOU HAD BETTER DOWNLOAD THIS GUIDE RIGHT NOW OR E-DAY WILL PERSONALLY DEFILE YOUR VERTICAL SMILE WITH A STEEL-WOOL-WRAPPED TOILET BRUSH!
*ahem*
Enjoy! ❤️

Flying into 2023 with this first release of the year, what could be more epic than another strategy guide for the behemoth FPS known as Quake?
Yeah, yeah, I know, almost anything else.
But it's Quake, so you're going to download this, you're going to slap the 'thank you' button to pay me my tribute, and you're going to wait for the next strategy guide with baited breath, because you all love me.
Happy New Year!
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! ❤️

Sorry for the sticker and damage to the front cover. The book came this way when I bought it. Otherwise, the rest of the guide's in fine shape.
Except, wait a minute, I'm sorry..."Unofficial Map Guide"? I mean "Strategy Guide", right?
Nope. This is literally just a book of stage maps that point out where all the goodies and secrets are located. There aren't any hints for actually tackling the various areas or anything like that, just maps and how to access the secret areas. Prima put out an unofficial strategy guide for the game too (along with that abomination of a guide to the shareware version which I already inflicted upon you) which also sold well for them, meaning there were some lunatics who forked out over $50 for those three different books because they just loved Quake so much.
Well, you don't have to do that now, because I got yer "Unofficial Map Guide" right here, fanboys!
Download it, smack that 'Thanks' button, and pay me my tribute.
Enjoy! ❤️

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! ❤️

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! ❤️

Of the classic, PS1-era Tomb Raider titles, Tomb Raider III is probably the most difficult, and not always for the right reasons. With Core Design's employees struggling with epic burnout after being forced to churn out two sequels in two years, this game had the largest design team yet behind it, but by now the cracks were starting to show. With the public clambering for more everything, and no time to build a new in-game engine, they still managed to pack in new moves, including crawling, hand-over-hand climbing, and sprinting. Lara's arsenal was upgraded. There were new outfits to wear and new environments to explore, new enemies to slay, and new traps to contend with. The devs put a major focus on the idea of multiple ways to reach the same goal this time around, something they briefly toyed with in a couple of places in the first two games; this time, it was practically law. Instead of linear level progression, once players beat the opening stages set in India, they could choose to visit London, Nevada, or an island in the South Pacific, before taking Lara to Antarctica for her final confrontation.
The other Tomb Raider games could easily be completed without a guide; you'd occasionally want to refer to one if you couldn't locate that last secret, or were having difficulty understanding one of the puzzles, but by and large, it was within most players' abilities to complete the game without one. Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II fostered level design that wanted to surprise and delight the player. Tomb Raider III, on the other hand, was designed in such a way as to be openly hostile, with massive, sprawling levels filled with death traps and obtuse puzzles, along with enemies placed specifically to force the player to waste resources. Picking the wrong location after finishing India, in fact, is tantamount to the game kicking you in the nuts/ovaries, and the "wrong" choice is not telegraphed in any way. If you ever flip through a strategy guide for Tomb Raider III that does not instruct you to go to Nevada upon finishing India, throw that book away.
Fortunately, this Prima guide does not make that mistake, and the path Kip Ward lays out is the "easiest" way through the game. That doesn't mean you get a cake walk, it just means you won't flip the difficulty switch to "screw you" without realizing it. Kudos also to Ward for providing a walkthrough of sorts for Lara's Home, explaining how to get into the secret treasure room, find the Racetrack key, and unlock the Quad Bike course. None of this is essential to beating the main quest, but it's possible to explore her mansion without realizing there's more to it than just beating the Assault Course and learning how to jump around.
Enjoy! ❤️

This is a much better multi-game guide than some of Brady's other offerings. Ninety-six pages of cheats, unlockables, and GameShark codes for Nintendo 64, Saturn, and PlayStation titles...this stuff was like GameFAQs before there was a GameFAQs, ya know?
Because of the way this book was printed, a lot of the text on the odd-numbered pages ran smack-dab against the gutter. I don't think anything got completely lost in the de-binding process, but you may see some white areas where I over-compensated for the close shave. My apologies; I suck at editing.
Donated by ModernZorker, who isn't a member here, but sent me this in a care package anyway.
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! ❤️

This is a testament to how useful a well-written game guide can be. Master of Magic is an incredibly complex and deep RPG/turn-based strategy hybrid, easily capable of overwhelming novice players before they've had a chance to get a handle on the rules. More than a simple walkthrough, this behemoth of a guide explains everything you never even knew you wanted to know about the game: its units, spells, weapons, monsters, diplomacy, missions, everything.
It was one of the most popular titles of its ilk in the 90s, and remains accessible to this day thanks to being re-released on platforms like GOG and Steam, which include a number of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. This is a gold-standard guide book, pretty much the opposite of Complete Final Fantasy III Forbidden Game Secrets, written in conjunction with people who actually made the game to ensure every bit of it is accurate down to the last decimal place.
Blank pages have been omitted in order to reduce file size.
Long out of print, commanding a price ten times that of the game itself, your Retromags Goddess has lovingly sacrificed her copy to the guillotine so that players everywhere no longer have to scrape together fifty bucks or more to access it. You can show your love by leaving her a like.
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! ❤️

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! ❤️