Areala

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! ❤️

Another awesome Genesis compilation book from Prima. Full-colour, just like the first, with a slew of new games, only a couple of which were looked at in the previous edition. Strategies and tactics for 35 games, with a bevy of cheats, passwords, and other goodies for 35 more. An excellent addition to your digital library, if I do say so myself.
Donated by ModernZorker.
Enjoy! ❤️

A great Sega Genesis compilation guide from Prima: full-colour, tons of excellent games, just an ultimate walk down nostalgia lane. For $15 back in the day, this was a solid book. As the name implies, this is a newer, more up-to-date version. I don't own the original release sadly, so I can't tell what all is new or updated about this version. Maybe someone else can provide that info?
My copy had a printing defect with the pages dedicated to Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, where the print portion pulled deeper into the gutter than on other pages. This means some of the text got cut off when the book was de-bound--it's still usable, and it affects only 2 out of the book's 112 pages, but I wanted to point it out, since this is a defect with the book itself, not my own scanning incompetence. I'm not a good enough graphical wizard to fix this, but if someone else out there wants to take the time, that would be awesome.
Enjoy! ❤️

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! ❤️

First we released Volume 2, then we released Volume 5, now we release Volume 3. I know you're all giddy with anticipation!
Presented in full color with minimal screencaps (since this was an unofficial guide, after all), this is a pretty ordinary, just-the-facts type of guide to a variety of best-selling PS1 hits. Average in almost every way. The text for Tekken 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 was lifted from Totally Unauthorized Fighting Secrets III: No Mercy, so if you already have that one, this was not as great a value as it seemed on the cover.
Still, ten game strategies for ten bucks, in colour, and on decent quality paper? You could do worse.
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! ❤️

These unauthorized compilation books from BradyGames really aren't that great. About the best thing you can say about this one is that it's in colour, and it covers nine different games, but even then there's just not a lot of content in those 128 pages. The strategies are fine, but there aren't any screenshots, just the occasional bit of artwork Brady could get away with including without obtaining an actual license to use assets. The code list which takes up the last few pages is honestly the best part of this. The Tomb Raider II section is just a list of where each item is found in each level, but it doesn't give you any help on actually beating any of the stages or anything. Boo!
At least with fighting games, it's pretty easy to nail down a move list and go from there. Then again, if one of the fighting games you're covering is Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi...well, do I really have to say anything?
The thing is, if these books didn't sell well, then it's hard to see why Brady would have kept cranking them out. I mean, five volumes of this stuff is about four too many, but Brady did a metric shit-ton of these compilation books spanning multiple eras and multiple platforms, so somebody must have been buying them.
This one was donated by ModernZorker, who isn't a member here (maybe think about fixing that, bro?) but who does write about video games and other nerdy things in various places around the internet, and who, according to him, made his wife's day by getting it out of his house. Now it's making my day by going into the recycle bin.
Enjoy! ❤️

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was a grand and confusing piece of art, with some excellent ideas and some utterly brain-wrecking puzzles which were clearly put there to pad out the play time and prevent people renting the game and beating it over a weekend. This was the first Tomb Raider released on the Sega Dreamcast, but aside from slightly better graphics than the PlayStation edition, it and the PC incarnation are all the same game, so this guide can walk you through any incarnation.
Much like Tomb Raider III, Last Revelation absolutely screamed for a strategy guide due to the aforementioned hair-pulling puzzles and some generally obnoxious gameplay elements which made things far more difficult than they should be. It's the most difficult of all the "classic" era entries, even harder than picking Nevada last in TR3, so if you managed to complete it without resorting to a walkthrough at any point, hats off to you. It's also the longest single entry in the franchise, comprising 42 stages in total, although some of these are re-visits to older stages with some minor tweaks due to story progression. It's the first Tomb Raider game to feature no hidden levels or special bonuses for collecting all of the in-game secrets (of which there are 70), although the British paper The Times teamed up with Core Design to release a special, PC-only downloadable level which celebrated the 75th anniversary of Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb. Interestingly enough, this level wasn't just DLC, it was a full-fledged mini Tomb Raider game all on its own which didn't require the full version of Last Revelation in order to run, and came with two other TR-themed puzzle games to mess around with. This guide doesn't cover that bonus level, but if you're interested in playing it, you can find it at Stella's Tomb Raider Page. Both the GOG and Steam versions of Last Revelation come with the Times bonus content, just FYI.
Anyway, at nearly 180 pages, this is also the longest classic-era Tomb Raider game guide Prima ever made.
Enjoy! ❤️

A fine guide for a middle-of-the-road game. Once again, Chronicles received a release on the PlayStation, PC, and Dreamcast, but since they're all exactly the same with no platform-specific differences other than control layout, you can use this book no matter which version you're trying to beat. What's interesting is that this game isn't a sequel to Last Revelation, but rather a series of non-connected mission packs showcasing some of Lara's past exploits
This is a compact book, and they could have started and ended with just the walkthrough bits, but Prima went above and beyond with a few extra pages at the end. The first bonus section is a short look back at the previous four Tomb Raider games, showcasing Lara's development and her biggest accomplishments along with some screenshots to refresh our memories. At the time, Chronicles was touted as being the last time we'd see Lara, at least for a little while, so this was a nice inclusion.
Following the retrospective, we then get four pages of notes on how to use the Level Editor which shipped with the PC version of the game. This tutorial comes from Nick Connelly, one of Core's level designers, and explains how to build, texture, light, and populate a room. It's a basic room, nothing to set the world on fire, but it's a nice introduction and explanation of what can be made using the level editor. There are much more comprehensive tutorials available online to explain the ins and outs of the level creator, but this is certainly a fine start.
Enjoy! ❤️

You were expecting Tomb Raider III, weren't you?
Isn't it just like Lara Croft to surprise us like that? The Divine Pony-tail is never where you expect her. Rather like this strategy guide here, which covers both the standard Tomb Raider II game and Gold level pack expansion. You would expect such a book would be larger than the stand-along Tomb Raider II guide, right? More levels = more pages, of course.
You might think this, but then, like Marco Bartoli thinking he could stop Pistols Spice, you would be wrong. Kip Ward re-wrote his entire manuscript into a format which would become the standard for Prima's Tomb Raider guides from this point on (a design standard which they almost certainly cribbed from Zach Meston's guides for Dimension Publishing): hundreds of screenshots, one after the other, each one accompanied by a tiny block of text explaining the next step to mastering the stage.
The layouts and paste-ups for these things must have been hell.
Because of this, we get 112 pages of pictures explaining exactly how to complete every level and find every secret. Just the way Lara would want it, don't you agree?
Of course you do.
Enjoy! ❤️

The second installment of the Divine Pony-tail's adventure takes her globetrotting polygons to the mountains of Nepal, the depths of the ocean, the Great Wall of China, and the mine-infested canals of Venice in search of the Dagger of Xian, which turns you into a dragon if you stab it directly into your heart.
That sounds painful. Don't do that, boys and girls.
This Prima guide is in full-colour, featuring a walkthrough by Kip Ward filled with copious screenshots and illustrations of Lara Croft adorning every single page! What more could a love-struck woman such as I, Areala fans of Tomb Raider II ask? So, while it pained me to put my beloved TR2 guide beneath the cruel guillotine for debinding, the ability to spread the Gospel of the Divine Pony-tail will hopefully more than make up for the sacrifice.
Enjoy, my beloved disciples! Enjoy! ❤️

This is the second edition of Prima's A Link to the Past strategy guide. This book was a massive best-seller for Prima. It was re-printed more than twenty times (this particular edition is a 22nd printing from 1997, which, it should be noted, is well into the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 era) and sold in excess of 125,000 copies.
The first edition of the guide contained strategies and walkthroughs for The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Those were dropped for this edition, but replaced with a walkthrough for Link's Awakening on the Game Boy. This lowered the page count, but not the cover price. Cheeky of you, Prima...
Enjoy! ❤️

The world was introduced to Lara Croft, aka "The Divine Pony-tail", with the release of the original Tomb Raider game in 1996, and I, Areala the world has yet to stop worshiping her for the goddess that she is. Oh sure, she's had the occasional makeover from time to time, to smooth out her polygon counts in her more curvy regions, or to increase her resolution to high-definition standards, but make no mistake, this was the Lara the world fell in love with, triangular boobs and all.
This was one of the last guides produced in black and white by Prima; by the time they did their Tomb Raider II book, everything was full-colour. It's a pity they couldn't have done it for this book, since sitting right next to it on the shelf was Dimension Publishing's official guide, which made this one look downright pedestrian with its greyscale gradients. But even in the mid-90's, going full-colour for a strategy guide was a luxury most publishing houses outside of Nintendo were not willing to spring for, except for the occasional mid-book insert like you got with Prima's Super Metroid and Secret of Mana guides.
On the plus side, there is a short interview with some of the Core staff which explains how they developed the game, which is neat from a historical perspective.
Nevertheless, whether you prefer Nick Roberts's stoic British sensibilities in this guide, or Zach Meston's irreverent, American, devil-may-care prose which graced Dimension's offering, you absolutely must download this book, and properly thank your Retromags Goddess for willingly sacrificing her collection of Tomb Raider goodies for your benefit.
Enjoy! ❤️

A larger format black-and-white guide from Prima's usual digest-size publications up to this point. This one has a nifty full-color section in the center, showing some of the game's excellent 16-bit sprite work and backgrounds.
Tom Stratton, Jr. wishes he was Rusel DeMaria and Zach Meston, but unfortunately for him, he's not. This is a fairly bare-bones walkthrough with its share of spelling mistakes and a wonky print job which cursed a number of those early Prima books to slanted text and screencaps on otherwise-straight pages. It doesn't help that my copy of this has some minor water damage to the bottom of the last 20 or so pages, so if you notice any wobbling or warping, that's where that came from. I pulled this off the rack at a Goodwill a few years ago for a buck, so I couldn't complain too much.
They really tried with this one, but there's just no matching Nintendo's own official game guide, which not only came in full colour, but also revealed a number of tricks and secrets that this book does not. If you're going to only get one guide, make sure it's Nintendo's. Prima's isn't awful, and it will still get you through the game, but there are a few technical mistakes in here, and despite the claim on the back cover, it doesn't really tell you how to get the so-called "real" ending. Nor does it reveal the little bonus you can earn by freeing the captive animals before the planet blows up. Boo!
Prima makes some quality guides for sure, I just don't think I'd classify this as one of their better offerings. Nevertheless, this one's pretty uncommon, so it's nice to get it archived here.
Enjoy! ❤️

This was the first book Zach Meston wrote for Prima without Rusel DeMaria's name associated with it. If the introduction is to be believed, DeMaria handed the project to Meston and told him to go forth and kick ass, which is what Meston did.
This is the first of two versions of this book published. This one contains the walkthrough for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but also contains a supplementary section that reprints the entries on The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link which previously appeared in their NES Game Secrets series. For $9.99, you get full walkthroughs for three awesome games, making it a great value for the money. Unsurprisingly, this book was a massive seller for Prima, reprinted over twenty times.
The second version, which was released in 1997, altered the title slightly, redid the cover art, and dropped the Zelda and Zelda II portion of the book, replacing it instead with the walkthrough for Link's Awakening which used the same format as similar walkthroughs from their Nintendo Game Boy Secrets line, and again sold a ridiculous number of copies. Don't worry; I'll have that one up for you here shortly.
Enjoy! ❤️

Some guides are worth their weight in (metaphorical) gold.
Some are cash grabs so blatant you find it hard to believe anyone willingly paid money for them.
Quake Game Secrets falls so far into the latter camp that it pitched a tent, got a fire going, dug a field latrine, and is now roasting marshmallows. 🔥
It is a book rushed to market, specifically to cover only the levels of the game which the game makers are giving away, for free, as Shareware, by a publisher who expected people to pay $10 for said book. Read that again: this is not a guide to the full registered version of Quake. It only covers the maps, enemies, weapons, and artifacts found in the first episode.
It is so rushed and so much of a cash grab that rather than explaining the game's storyline, or controls, or anything else important, it instructs the reader (ie: the person who just gave them ten of their hard-earned dollars) to literally open the MANUAL.TXT file which accompanies the game software and read that. Part of your ten bucks goes to someone cheekily telling you to RTFM. 
I cannot make this up.
Who, in 1996, was so desperate to get good at the shareware version of a game that they had to rush out and pay ten dollars for some hand-drawn maps and text-only explanations of how to beat each level and find the secrets? Identify yourselves. Show of hands. You, in the back: no slouching. Get out here and own your idiocy!
Now drop and give me twenty. 
Do not download this.
It is 42MB of shame and disgrace being offered here solely so I didn't have to look at it any longer. You will improve nothing about your life by acquiring a copy of this book. After your demise, some poor unfortunate soul will be scrubbing your hard drive, find your copy of this download, and their respect for you will diminish by a statistically-significant fractional amount. Not as much as by what they'll find upon viewing your porn folder (you degenerate weasel!), but why make things worse for your family?
Eff this book from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea, from Land's End to John 'o Groats and back again.
Or, you know what? Screw it. Just hit the 'Thanks' button once you're done adding it to your digital hoards.
Whatever.

Jeff Rovin might have figured out how to get the money from video game books flowing, but brother, Corey Sandler and Tom Badgett's output over the years stuck a vacuum hose into the pockets of America's youth, siphoning off birthday cash, allowance money, and everything else they could get their hands on. This here's the third edition of their already best-selling Game Boy book, and for a mere five dollars, it promised nothing less than total dominance and the latest info on the most recent games.
You've got to hand it to these guys for attacking their topics with such mercenary zeal. Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis...no system was safe from this daring duo and their game-addicted progeny. This edition was condensed down to a more portable mass-market paperback from the previous versions' trade paperback size, also resulting in a price cut ($4.99 vs. $9.99), no doubt making it that much easier to sell, while scaling down the size of both the text and interior images.
It's competent, accessible, and everything you would want something like this to be. Which is good, because it's the fifteenth book these guys churned out in four years, so you'd expect them to have mastered the formula. They don't disappoint.
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! ❤️

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! ❤️

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...) ❤️

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! ❤️

What's that? You want more ultimate, more unauthorized, more Nintendo, more strategies? Of course you do! Here's another 250+ pages of them!
Much like Volume 1, there's quite a bit left to be desired in this book. The images are still all in black and white, and still very low quality when compared to those in Prima's "Game Secrets" series. And there are some mistakes here and there (the image from Magmax showing up in the entry for Seicross being probably the most egregious offender). But look at all those money saving coupons in the back!
Well, they've long since expired, but you get my point. If you loved the first book, you're going to love the second. If the first volume did nothing for you, then I'm afraid I have some bad news...
Enjoy! ❤️
Edit: check out the discussion thread for this file for some more great info about the artwork by Bill Mayer used on this and other covers in this series, courtesy of @TresHombres:
 
 

Promising to be a complete walkthrough for ten games set in or around the world of Ultima, this is slightly misleading. After all, the book is only 320 pages, and surely there's a Hellsteed of a lot more going on, especially in the later games, than could be encapsulated by even the best team of editors and writers in so small an area.
Your suspicions are correct. There's a lot going on in the first few titles, and the guide devotes a mere few pages at best to the first two Ultima games (five pages for Ultima I, seven for Ultima II), along with Akalabeth, the precursor to the Ultima series. Ultima III is where the guide ramps up, with 21 pages worth of maps, gameplay tips, and charts. Fully half the book is given to Ultima VII and Ultima VIII content.
This book also comes with a double-sided, fold-out color poster which shows the overworld maps for all the games. This poster is bound in between pages 145 and 146, but sadly my copy of this is missing, so I wasn't able to include it (and I'm not sure I have the skills necessary to stitch together a giant poster from multiple image files in any case). All apologies.
Update: user @Xuio has graciously provided a high resolution scan of both sides of this poster map for us. You can download it here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/2dksw4m9upihhtt/UCmaps.7z/file
Enjoy! ❤️
 

Back in the pre-Internet days, Shay Addams ran an adventure gaming newsletter, later magazine, called "QuestBusters" which specialized in hints and solutions for computer RPG and adventure games. Shay parlayed his experience in the CRPG community into writing books which collected the hints and tips for a number of popular games. This, as far as I'm aware, is the second of three such books in the QuestBusters series, published in 1994.
All text, no screenshots, only the occasional piece of pen-and-ink artwork or hand-drawn map. But before GameFAQs, especially if you didn't have access to an online portal like CompuServe, this was the best you could do.
Enjoy! ❤️

Much like the previous Super Star Wars Official Game Secrets, only for the second game in the trilogy. Prima didn't get the rights to do the guide for Super Return of the Jedi, so the series for them ended here. Tons of black-and-white sprite artwork, along with preliminary sketches, movie poster reproductions from around the world, and a slew of stills pulled straight from the movie and promotional materials.
While it does contain full stage maps and walkthroughs for every area, it does not include any of the cheat codes. So if you're looking for those, keep looking, sucker! Otherwise, this is about as comprehensive as you could have hoped for back in the day. And, naturally, any Original Trilogy fans should have this in their collection just for the extra nerd cred.
Enjoy! ❤️