A Strategy Guide for your Strategy Guides
As I sit here in the E3 Media Center, I’m thinking of what I can do strategy guide-wise for all of you while I play out here. So how does a strategy guide giveaway sound for inFamous 2?
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Drawing will be on Thursday, June 9th.
I created a second office in my son’s playroom last weekend, and this weekend I decided to make that my strategy guide war room as well as a, uh, second office for work. So finally, all of my guides can sit proudly in some decent shelves instead of the hand-me-down crap I had them in (that now houses all my anthologies from my English lit days). Check out how much the middle of the shelf bows downward. Them books–particularly the collector’s editions–be HEAVY.
I honestly thought that Arc Rise Fantasia was supposed to have a guide, but either I dreamed it or it got cancelled. Either way, there is no guide. Normally this isn’t that big of a deal outside of the fact that this blog loses some fodder, but in this case, I really really need one.
I’m reviewing the game for another site, and I’m not enjoying the game at all. The combat is unique and fun, but the characters and plot are JRPG generic and the voice acting and script are flat out TERRIBLE. I whimper each time I turn on my Wii. As such, I just want to burn through this game as quickly as possible. Dabble in sidequests as needed for leveling and review purposes and get through all boss battles quickly.
Unfortunately for me, I need a guide for this. The game is rather unbalanced in that the enemies are ungodly easy and the boss battles are ungodly hard. Nothing really prepares you to be strategic or to endure lengthy battles. Since I’m not enjoying the game anyway, I would like to know the fastest way possible to defeat the bosses and tromp through the story.
So I’m stuck with some poorly spelled online guides  available on GameFAQs that occasionally don’t make complete sense as what to do. I only use them after the fourth or fifth boss fight failure, so the game is unfortunately taking me longer than I would like. Then again, even if I did have a guide, the game would probably take me longer than I’d like anyway. It’s one of the downsides to reviewing games. I was due to review a game I didn’t like. So far I’ve only reviewed games I wanted to, so hey my time was obviously up.
I still wish I had a guide to make this trek more bearable.
Granted, this question doesn’t really matter, because a gig is a gig and you grin and bear it when there’s a paycheck at the very end. I know I’ve done it with a fair number of my freelancing projects (the Angel episode summary project comes to mind first), but it made it harder for me to open the laptop and write each time, even when deadlines were on the line.
However, when a guide writer dislikes a game, it’s more than a matter of just writing about it. They have to play the game they dislike for hours at a time for consecutive days, endure the bad gameplay, suffer through the poorly written dialogue and story, cringe at the sub-par graphics. At least when game reviewers suffer through a terrible game, they only have to spend an hour or two at most cranking out a review that reflects their utter (and tactful) disgust. Guide writers, though, have to spend several more hours constructing maps, writing every last detail of it, and basically relive it for another week or so. They have more to do each day than a journalist who is handed a crappy story that will fill 60 seconds of TV time or a small scrap of space on the sixth page of the Metro section.
As much as I love to write, play games and try to combine the two, I’m not sure I could be a cheerful participant on such a project. I grumble when I have to play and review PSP Minis I don’t like, and I can beat most PSP Minis within minutes. I can’t imagine giving that much time on playing and writing about a game. I suppose the paycheck at the end is worth it (it was with the Angel project), but I guess it depends on how much you really want to stay in the business. Take a few bad games and hope that the next one is a game you like.
Although when I asked Dan Birlew how he felt about writing guides for games he disliked, he said, “It’s all equally hard.” And no, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask which games he disliked, but I bet I could guess. 🙂