- Hey, y'all. Scott here. Well, I've done it. I've finally mastered the
art of beating video games. All thanks to cheating. Now that I've got that out of the way, I'm going to use my newfound
knowledge to beat games under different circumstances. I've been working on my chili run lately. Every time I hit a button, I have to eat five spoonfuls of chili. I'm not even past the menu! We've all been there. Playing Price is Right Decades and going, what do I do? I've gotten lost in my fair share of games whether I have no idea
where it should be going, no idea what my next objective is, I just simply didn't understand
the directions given to me, I can't find anything. Video games are easily the quickest way to realize I'm an idiot. I remember playing
Bioshock Infinite in 2013, you could activate an arrow showing you where to go by hitting up. After one play through, this
controller is useless now. I just don't always make
time with some games. I don't want to screw up and
take longer than I should to beat it, I just want to do exactly what I'm supposed to do. That's just not going to happen. Everybody makes mistakes. Just look at everybody. Everybody gets stuck at
certain parts of games or can't complete portions of them without a little bit of help. And apparently helping desperate gamers is a lucrative business. Strategy guides and walkthroughs
are the most shameful thing I could ever look at. I don't want to be told
the solution to the puzzle, I got to figure it out myself. I'm no (bleep), I'll beat
this game with my eyes closed. (8-bit music) I am completely lost. I've looked up solutions to
problems I've had with games a good number of times, but I always feel this
overwhelming sense of shame trickle down anything but my spine. When you figure out a solution
to a puzzle on your own, that's pretty much why
you play video games. That's where a lot of the
satisfaction comes from, from doing something all on your own or just having that a-ha moment. And it feels amazing to
be on a winning streak to constantly figure out
solutions with no hesitation and then you get to that
stupid part in Uncharted 3. What the hell do I do here? That's when I usually call it quits and just look up a guide. When the rest of the game is like this and then I'm stuck trying to figure out this part for like three hours. Oh wow, I can't figure out
this puzzle in Resident Evil 2, I want to piss my pants
not think critically. If I can't get the solution quick enough, I have to lay out my options. Do I swallow my pride
and Google the answer? Or do I swallow my pride
and play video games? Even just Googling the solution
to a puzzle can be tricky. Sometimes it's hard to put
your situation into words but most of the time, what I'm looking for immediately comes up. Yeah, that one thing in Link's Awakening. Oh, there it is. It interests me that tons
of other people run into the exact same problem I do in games and brings up the question is the player admitting defeat
by looking up a walkthrough or did the developer fail
to make that certain area more understandable? I played Hellblade and
within the first hour, there was this. What? You have to line up these
things to form diagrams by standing in certain
places but that requires finding certain places to
stand in and trudging around the environment to find
these certain places. It's hard to explain, let alone do. I gave up trying to
figure it out on my own. And lots of other people
did too, apparently. So (bleep) it. Time to whip
out the strategy guides. This'll help with my Hellboy play through. Online walkthroughs are one thing, most of these are fans helping other fans get through a game. Strategy guides are video game companies monetizing the fact that their
games were designed poorly. As nice as guidebooks can be, the more I think about
it, I do have to ask, why me of the stuff wasn't
included in the game itself? Why do I have to buy a book to know what the hell to do here? I mean, it wouldn't be considered a puzzle if everybody would be able to figure out the solution immediately. I guess at that point,
I might as well ask, what's the point of buying a thesaurus when the dictionary should
just straight up tell me what another word for upset is? For some people, they don't need it, they can find another word for upset by reading the dictionary some more and finding one on their own. But for people who just need answers, and they need them now,
crack out the thesaurus. The strategy guide is the
thesaurus of video games. I have said that so many times today. Strategy guides primarily began
life as video games became more complex in the 80s
when games actively required explanation or strategy to complete. One of the only things you needed to ask when playing most Atari games is how much longer can I keep this up? High score based games
definitely had strategies to them but players rarely got stuck in them. When games started
offering worlds to explore and get stuck in, you bet
they set up hotlines to call. The Nintendo Powerline was
a quick and dirty solution for players who got stuck in games. Call this number and you'd be
directed towards an expert. They'd have binders full of
walkthroughs to reference and be playing games right
then and there to more easily assess the problem you were having. It seemed like the best way to get past tricky points in a game. Just call the hotline. The only problem is, it was a hotline. Yeah, sure, if you want to
spend more money on the phone than you did on the game, go for it. I've called hotlines for much less. - [Robotic Voice] Thank
you for calling Nintendo, for assistance in English, press one. - What's up? The Nintendo Powerline was
kind of an immediate solution to problems players had
but it did well enough to be operational until June 2010. I am shocked. However, if you needed help with games, most just primarily checked out the latest tips and tricks in magazines. Nintendo Power offered
loads of maps and hints for games in the '80s and '90s and that's what the original issues were primarily all about. Sometimes it just threw out
little tips here and there and other times, they pretty
much explained the whole game. This is the entirety
of Dr. Wily's Revenge. Secret codes, direct answers
to popular gaming questions, sometimes they told you how
to fix your game systems. Nintendo Power and other
magazines were how many players overcame all kinds of obstacles back then. Some of the problems with
getting help by magazines though, was that these things
only came once a month and it wasn't a guarantee
the game you were having problems with was
going to be featured. But when your game was
featured, it was great. It wouldn't always spoil the game and just supplement the gaming experience by giving players tools to
create their own strategy to beat the game themselves. That's a great (bleep)
idea, strategy guides! Why not just specifically release guides dedicated to specific games? That way, if you need help,
you know exactly what to harass your mom to buy! Now, there was a Super Mario
Brothers 3 players guide, strategy guides covering
loads of NES games, alongside certain guidebooks
you could get bimonthly in the mail through Nintendo Power. However, one of the first
specific ones I think many remember is Mario Mania which is not only a full
Super Mario World guide but doubles as a retrospective
of Mario up until that point. We have a timeline of the games, character profiles, artwork,
Mario and other media, it's an interesting read,
especially comparing how these things were described
as back then to nowadays. But looking at the strategy guide portion, it goes into insane detail
for a game like Mario World. It may be because many of
the moves you can pull off in this game are second nature to me now, but they go crazy in
depth with pretty much every single thing here
from the start of the game all the way to the end. There's nearly an entire page
dedicated to what you can do with shells. Every area has a comprehensive guide alongside big, fat pieces of artwork you don't see an awful ton today. Full spreads of levels. This is an incredibly comprehensive guide of not only Mario World, but
all things Mario at the time. Now, I may have said Mario
Mania is one of the first guides many would remember, but that
doesn't mean they didn't exist before Nintendo hit it big. Oh no, no, no. I may have said Atari
didn't require guides as much as NES era games did. (loud crashing) It doesn't mean they didn't get them. Gaming books from the 80s. These were probably the most
comprehensive gaming material you could get at the time. This one focuses on
some of the more popular Atari 2600 games featuring
a catalog of them and a brief history of
Atari at the beginning. They couldn't capture
screenshots from the game so instead, they would recreate them and focus on explaining
the best strategies for obtaining a high score. I mean, I go about my day
asking this all the time, "What would video Frank say?" These publications were
all about telling you how to become a video game master, to know anything and everything
about gaming to impress somebody. Yes, I'd like the definition
of sex in the 80s, please. (bell rings) These paperback books
dedicated to the ultimate tips on how to win at all things video games remind me of the for dummies books. These were marketed to
people who just wanted to win something for once in their lives. But for anybody playing games at the time, they made sure to back these
books up with enough content to make them enjoyable
to a wide array of fans. There's even a preview section
at the end talking about how things are looking
bright for Atari in 1983. (buzzer beeps) Yes, the video game crash of
1983 due to the video game market being oversaturated with (bleep). The market crashed around that time due to a variety of reasons, but the game everybody points
to that supposedly caused it was ET the video game. It was hyped up, they expected
it to be a wild success and when people played it, they didn't understand what was going on and mass returned them. That spread the claim that
ET was the worst video game of all time because people
didn't understand it, they returned the game to the stores, one thing led to another,
Atari said we're (bleep), video game market crashed. This game wasn't the sole reason and compared to most other Atari games, is it really that much more
confusing than Adventure? This game is considered one
of the best Atari 2600 games ever made. Is this that much worse than that? I'm not saying ET was great or anything, but I feel like it's misunderstood, it really just required
more of a knowledge of what exactly to do in the game. And would you look at that,
am unofficial strategy guide that tells you exactly what
you have to do in the game. This is one of the earliest
dedicated strategy guides I could find and of all Atari
games, ET needed it the most. Most games on the console were based around getting a high
score while ET had more of a specific goal in mind. You effectively wanted to beat
the game, finish the quest. It's just not apparent what
the hell that quest is. So a cheap little strategy guide, yeah, it made a whole lot of sense. They actually give
pretty decent screenshots and a cube you can put together
of the different screens. And the idea of more complex games needing more complex forms of
explanation and strategy held true as the next couple
of generations came forward. It was no longer not only
about getting the high score, rather finishing the game. But these two forms, the
dedicated one game guide and book of secrets, were
some of the easiest methods of obtaining this kind
of information for a bit. How to Win at Nintendo Games
was one of the most popular books for NES players, but
it's nothing special nowadays. Just a simple book full
of strategies and tips. It's simply all about mastering the games that can't be beat. This book has a chapter
about Mickey Mousecapade. This was a pretty popular series of books as in I have two of them. But the video game magazines
were still how most got their information
on this type of stuff. And some magazine publications
decided to combine the tip books with magazines and we have oh (bleep), oh (bleep), oh (bleep). The dedicated magazine-esk book of guides. We had a lot of unofficial ones but Nintendo Power made quite a few like Top Secret Passwords. Primarily a guide
comprising of cheat codes or a couple of ones
dedicated to the Game Boy including one for the Super Game Boy, the adapter for the super Nintendo. It's pretty much just a standard guide for the more popular Game
Boy titles in the context of playing them on a Super Nintendo. The Nintendo players guides
are my favorite to go through. They almost always had
extra sections in the book dedicated to just talking
about the games at the time. Also the formatting of the
pages, it's just really nice, big and bold screenshots
and some of the most well-written video game
blurbs of the time. It's a little weird to enjoy
going through these guides for games I already know how to play. But this is the kind of
stuff I'd do as a kid, I'd read the same magazines
over and over again on car rides. Why did I need to skim through
this issue of Nintendo Power for the ninth time? Because it's enjoyable consuming media about an industry you enjoy. I don't know why. If you come up and tell me Wii Play was bundled with a Wii remote. Yeah, I know that, but I'm
going to eat it up anyways because I'm a sucker for
video game information. Or I have short-term memory loss. Throughout the '90s, it
became more commonplace for specific video games to
get their own dedicated guides instead of simply compiling information from a bunch of games
into one magazine or book. When you have a game as
big as super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time,
they definitely require their own walkthrough instead
of squishing tips for them into one short paragraph. And this was the birth of
a video game tradition. The release of the strategy
guide alongside the game. Magazines started to shift
over more to news and reviews and the tips and tricks
portions became its own product with the strategy guide. No problem, I'd love to
spend a couple of bucks on a guidebook for my favorite games. What the (bleep) is that? Right around the time these things started to burst in popularity, that pesky little thing
called the internet started to become more widely
used for more than just. If you were having a problem with a game, you can just hop on a message board and ask how to get past a certain section. Just look up the solution on Google, find a walkthrough another fan made. All for free. You didn't even have to drive to the store to pick up a walk through,
it was all instant. So this should have
been the immediate death of all things this, but
physical strategy guides kept living on to this very day. They were more of a
tradition than a necessity. Something that people definitely
continue to use, no doubt, but the practicality of them
has been dwindling by the day. In the late '90s, early
2000s, sure, you could look up this stuff online, but
internet speeds were a big fan of the word of abysmal
and there weren't as large of a database of video game
walkthroughs as there is now. Plus, you couldn't
always trust the internet when it's giving you helpful hints. IGN still tells me all you have to do to turn the stars into birds
in Mega Man 2 is hold A. But no, you have told A and B, you're a company, you should know better! So strategy guides still
had their place in gaming but as the internet
became more widespread, it was the one-stop shop
for gaming everything, they started to become
so much less prevalent. Eventually, Nintendo and other companies stopped making them themselves
and licensed their titles out to companies that
specialize in strategy guides, most notably, Prima Games. See, I personally feel like
something was lost a bit when others started making
guides for the big guys. See, here we have an official
Nintendo walkthrough. I'd be concerned if they
didn't know what I should do. When you have an outsider make the guide, things get a bit iffier. That's not to say we haven't
gotten some top quality works from companies like Prima
or BradyGames or Piggyback. I mean, they do officially
licensed walkthroughs after all but they can definitely
be a bit lame sometimes. Like the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide in which a good chunk of information you had to visit a website to obtain. Why the (bleep)? This was when guidebooks were trying to harness the popularity of the internet in hopes that online walkthroughs and physical strategy guides
could exist simultaneously and be of benefit to each other. No. If anything, this just made you ask, "Why did I buy the book if it's asking me to go online anyways? Why wouldn't I just go
online for everything?" A lot of physical guides
now give you a free eguide which you can access online. Again, nice sentiment, but the whole charm of seeing
everything the official guide has to offer, honestly, a
lot of it comes from the fact that it's physical. If I need help in a game
and I grab my phone, it's way simpler for me to
quickly Google my problem instead of pulling up the eguide. Now, some walkthroughs are really nice. They give you great and clear screenshots to tell you exactly what to do and then you have the
exact opposite of that. Here I have this Mario
Cart Wii guide by Prima. The layout's okay, but I
feel like they just don't show a lot and end up describing
things with only words. And I don't get why. Before you engage foes in competition, park your car here. Where? But I do like when they
take advantage of the fact this is a physical book on paper, having a little checklist
and just pure visualization of what you're supposed
to do written and edited by professionals with the
game developer's blessing usually means knowledge
is on for dinner tonight. One thing I really love about
traditional strategy guides is the art. Not only the key art from the games but the stuff made
specifically for the guides. The diagrams of the levels. Mario Galaxy's guide has
full 3D renders of the worlds and it's really cool. These were definitely
made by some unpaid intern I'd die to have lunch with, but just getting a full-blown
view of these levels is really nice. So much work gets put into these things. But sadly, I feel like this works seldom gets appreciated or even viewed. Especially in recent years. The primary audience for strategy guides are the fans of these games and thus, they don't actually need
to crack these open. They just want the guides because they love these games so much, they'll buy it out of respect. I didn't need a smash
brothers Wii U and 3DS guide, but I wanted it because
I loved those games. I skimmed it, I enjoy having all this info compiled into one amazing waste of paper, but how many people
actually bought this guide to help them play the game? All the information
relate to how much damage certain attacks do, my god,
this game had numerous updates. Characters and stages were added, the balance of attacks were tweaked, none of this is still true. This book was outdated within
four months of its release. Which is why the internet
is the true best way to get help with games now. It blows, but it has to be this way. I mean, I've stopped playing
my fair share of games for a while and a couple of weeks later, when I come back. What the hell happened when I was gone? I end up going to Google to see exactly what I'm supposed to do. You will find me bored and
directionless if I go to GameStop praying the made a
Kirby Star Ally's guide. I feel as dirty looking at an
official guide for pointers than asking the internet for
help, now that's too easy. See, I could play through
an entire game, no problem, no hope required, but I'm
more of a recreational virgin. I don't want to waste all
this time trying to figure out some things on my own, I just
want to get on with the game. And sometimes the
walkthroughs you have to read aren't descriptive enough. That's when you need
to look up the videos. I love game walkthrough, videos. They know exactly what I want to hear. What's up guys, it's
me, game fan Mike here and today I'm going to show you how to get through the
entirety of the first level in Super Mario Brothers. It's really easy, it's really simple and I'm going to show you real quick. This is a classic game, one
of my all time favorites. And I'm going to show you
how to get from point A to point B. Before we get started,
I'd really appreciate it if you gave me a like, a
thumbs up, a nod really, any form of respect you
can give, I'll take it. You are what's helping me
grow and make helping you all out with games my full-blown career. All right, ran out of time there, we'll start over on the next life. Just a reminder, guys, before
we get to the meat of this, if you haven't yet, please
follow me on Twitter. Each form of video game walkthroughs have some merit to them. It just so happens the internet based ones have that much more merit. They're just so much easier to access. And most of the time, you
would need help with one or two little things with the game. So buying a 400 page
walkthrough for a game doesn't make much sense anymore. You can get all of this
information online. And most of the people
buying these things nowadays are collectors and they're not buying these books because they need the walkthroughs, it's their favorite games,
they know how to play them. They're buying these just
because they're books based on their favorite games. So all the information in this book is pretty much work completely wasted. And with Prima Games
officially putting an end to their physical strategy guide business, I feel like others have
the same sentiment as well. It just makes more sense
to put time and effort into art books or retrospective works instead of physical strategy guides. But when these things finally
bite the dust entirely, I won't ever forget them. I don't think I'll go the rest of my life without remembering. (organ music) Oh (bleep), remember strategy guides? (video game music)
Broke: Scott The Woz
Woke: Game Fan Mike
Somebody else tell me how this one is, I'm still waiting for my The Video Game Walkthrough guide to come in the mail
Why do I feel like the ending is exactly what could happen at a funeral?
Holy shit, how old is this guy??? He’s talking like he grew up in the 80s, but he looks like he’s in his mid 20s at most!
You know most shows go down the shitter after Season 3...
But not Scott
Haven’t watched it but judging on his expression it’s gonna be a good episode...
Good video walkthroughs are short and get to the point.
Great walkthroughs tell you about gaining speed for 12 hours to go into a parallel universe.
Does the framing look off to anyone?