Strategy Guide Reviews

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My Bayonetta Strategy Guide is Here!

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Isn’t the cover just beautiful?

It’s taken quite some time crossing the Atlantic, but now that it’s here, it appears to be worth every minute of the wait. For starters, aside from the gorgeous game artwork inside, the guide is a massive 400 pages. None of my guides are that long, not even Final Fantasy XIII Strategy Guide. According to the welcome page, the guide is so humongous because it includes strategies for all of the difficulty settings and strategies for obtaining Pure Platinum medals in each Verse. While I would expect a guide to contain all of these things, the way this guide handles it is quite interesting. Instead of lumping everything together, it has separate sections for those who want to blaze through the game and those who NEED those Pure Platinum medals. It’s basically two guides rolled into one.

On top of that, the guide also has a separate section with more detailed strategies for defeating bosses, which is something Future Press employed with its inFamous Strategy Guide as well. If I recall correctly, it worked very well.

I only wish I actually had time to play the game right now. I could go on ahead and start, but since I’ll be getting NIER next week, I don’t see a point. It would be Darksiders all over again. Hopefully NIER won’t take me that long or I’ll flat out hate it so I won’t spend too much time with it. I’ve been waiting to play Bayonetta for quite some time now, and I’m very eager to sink my teeth into this beauty the first change I get.

Will be reviewing Nier…and look, it has a guide!

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I’ve been asked to review yet another RPG for Kombo—another Square RPG called Nier—and what do you know…it also has a guide! So it looks like I’ll be making an unscheduled detour in my current schedule for Nier, which is okay as I’ve become more and more curious about this game the more I hear about it. (I really need to stop listening to podcasts and subscribing to gaming magazines.)

At least, I hope I’ll be able to review this guide as well. After what happened with Bayonetta, I don’t assume anything anymore. BradyGames is handling this one, and they’ve rarely canceled a guide, so I have hope. And a preorder. And the satisfaction of knowing that Amazon will not charge me until they ship the guide. The latter is possibly the most important.

And I believe that Doug Walsh is the primary author for this guide. I can’t say for certain, but I swear I remember reading or hearing somewhere that he was working on it. So I suppose, if the game absolutely sucks, at least the guide will be well done.

So no, I will not be playing Splinter Cell: Conviction or reviewing the guide, but if any of you out there would like to do so and submit a guest review, please feel free to do so!

Doh! Problem with Final Fantasy XIII Strategy for Boss Fight

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This will be spoiler free, I promise.

I reached the first troublesome boss of Final Fantasy XIII last night (21 hours in…not to bad for a FF game) and it gave me FITS. After five attempts, I gave up for the night and picked up the guide to get some tips for today. I did EVERYTHING it suggested three more times this afternoon just to get killed three times right before the damn thing died, due to the bastard inflicting a Doom curse on Lightning.

The guide also suggested maxing out everyone’s crystarium, but I thought that was a little ridiculous. You should NEVER have to max out everyone’s levels for a boss, especially a boss that isn’t a final boss. So no, I didn’t try that, and honestly, I don’t think it would have made a difference. So I went elsewhere for research.

I did pretty much everything the guide said not to do, from switching party members to creating paradigms to unleashing certain attacks at certain times. Guess what? I kicked some serious ass in TEN MINUTES. He didn’t cast Doom on me either, although we were rocking the damage so hard it would not have mattered if he did.

The guide has been doing extremely well up until this point, but damn it’s a shame that it failed me during a boss. Basically, its strategies for this boss were needlessly complicated and well, the suggested party members just weren’t strong enough for this task. This doesn’t give the guide an F by any means, but it has made me quite wary for future bosses, especially the final boss.

Those who own the guide and would like to know which boss I’m talking about, feel free to e-mail me.

Wanted: Bookshelves

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I honestly never thought this would happen: the need for a bookcase for my strategy guides.

I used to store all of my strategy guides in my entertainment center, under the shelves for my games and DVD boxsets. I think the space is supposed to be for a sub-woofer, but it stored my guides just fine. As of last week, I could no longer fit all my guides in there. I had to relocate them to my bookshelves in my office. I have one shelf open since we bought more shelves a few weeks ago, so I moved my guides in there this morning.

They even fill up that entire shelf! It’s a good thing that I don’t want any of the games coming out in April and May, because I have no space whatsoever. I’m actually going to have to invest in a bookcase strictly for my guides.

However, I must say that that one shelf in my office is the most colorful shelf out of all my shelves, even those with the children’s books.

It’s Strategy Guide Christmas!

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Check out my haul!

My new friends at Prima Games sent me a lovely early Christmas present in the form of five beautiful strategy guides, which includes the guide for Final Fantasy XIII. I flipped through that one immediately, and the guide is simply beautiful on the inside. They are pretty proud of their work with it, so I can’t wait to get my game (such a long story why I don’t have it) and try it out.

Thank you so much, Prima Games, for your generosity. And a few friends of mine thank you for including the Mass Effect 2 Strategy Guide, because now I’ll actually play the series.

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