Sorry, mate. However, if you disliked Steam at the beginning, and then purchased a game from them, then honestly…you’re the one who got fucked hard…thrice.
Hopefully, you’ll grow wiser.
Unfortunatelly you cannot ignore steam, a lot of games have to be activated via the platform, so not getting fucked is not really an option.
Except for one alternative I am not willing to invest my time and nerves in however.
BUT BUT BUT BUT STEAM IS THE MOST AWESOMEST THING EVAR!!!
(LOL)
I’m trying to figure this out as well. Guides? errr um, the internet?
Off the top of my head, having the guide in your hand or next to you as you play, accurate and detailed maps, layout that supports the game well (I believe the Assassin’s Creed guides are non-spoiler on the left, spoiler on the right), well-arranged charts of weapon/armor/item data for RPGs, and overall much more visually interesting than staring at 12-point Courier New text in GameFAQs.
I adore strategy guides. I tend to get them all from Half-Price Books for $6.
Hey guys, I have this new insight to post.
Why do you download guides, lol! Use the internet n00b.
I still haven’t gotten around to playing a game of Shogun 2 at Legendary with the Oda, but I will say that so long as you know to cower in fear in your city on the first turn you’ll be absolutely fine.
I mean, they have a bonus to producing the cheapest and most efficient unit in the game, with reduced upkeep on it to boot. So I don’t think they really constitute a hard faction, merely one with an inconvenient gotcha at the very start.
Ugh, advice to use markets. Markets are bad, don’t use them. Rice gives you better empire wide growth potential than what you’ll get out of market spam unless you combine them with a bonused metsuke. So five upgraded markets is pretty much the max cap on how many you need. Definitely not an early game tech focus.
You can download the page, stick it in to GDocs, pretty it up and then view it in an ereader (like Evernotes on the iPhone, which does a great job handling pdfs). I actually did this for some game because I thought it’d be fun.
Are you, uh, middle-aged, Lynch?
This thread was worth it just so I could get Frogbeastegg’s guide. Thanks!
A nicely presented and bound book can go some distance with me. I’m a complete bibliophile. There’s no pleasure quite like browsing through a quality book.
I like to get guides as a companion piece for the sprawling RPGs, provided that a nicely presented guide which also contains a lot of information is available. If the information is incomplete or idiot-level I won’t bother, ditto if the binding is crap. I find that Doublejump and Piggyback are typically good publishers in that they have reliable, comprehensive information and decent binding. Bradygames are hit and often miss, as are Prima. Their premium range guides tend to be better (less awful?) than their run-of-the-mill ones. Future Press did a gorgeous hardback Bayonetta guide, as stylish as the game itself and packed full of good info. Not sure if they have done any others.
I was a bit disappointed with the last Piggyback guide I had, which was for FFXIII. I got the hardback version and found that the binding was so stiff I could barely open the book without risking damage. The front and back cover plates were absurdly thick cardboard, like twice the normal thickness for a hardback. The paper was so heavy-weight that it verged on being stiff card. It was a very difficult book to handle. The inside was disappointing too; I didn’t feel it was as comprehensive as their previous JRPG guides. That might be the game’s fault, after all I did dump it after 15ish hours and never got chance to see whether the skimpy optional content chapter was slight due to the lack of game to cover. I sold it for a profit when I got rid of the game.
Their FFXII collector’s guide was beautiful. Leather embossed cover, heavy yet flexible pages, proper sewn binding, and so much information exploding out of every page … I hoped for something similar from FFXIII.
Level 1 markets are one of the keys to powering up your land-based economy. There’s no rice consumption at level 1 so it’s a pure koku gain. Level 2 and above are useless in all but a few specific circumstances, a waste of research, construction funds, and rice.
Pleased you found it useful.
I don’t know anything about a different guide for Final Fantasy XII. Dammit, I’m going to end up spending more money, aren’t I?
A) No e-reader. I know, I’m so behind the times. I’m actually posting this via telegraph!
B) Downloading the page, putting it in Google Docs, manually editing it to pretty it up, then making it a PDF sounds like a lot more than $6 of work for me. Hence, I buy the guide.
I think that they did two version of the FFXII guide. The one I have is ‘Final Fantasy XII: The complete guide, limited edition’. ISBN is 978-1-903511-49-7. You can’t see the fancy leather cover if you look at it on most websites as it also comes with a paper dust jacket.
Same for me. I use my iPad for just the normal “WTF? How do you get through this?” stuff, but for actual reading enjoyment, nothing beats the hardbound guides.
This x2. Rarely was an official guide good enough to use as a reference during play, however I find them fantastic as a tactile way to be connected to the game while not at my PC. I can read a paper guide in the can, while I’m eating (NOT at the same time!) or just curled up on the couch during commercials. I can’t do that with a wiki or an online guide (unless I go buy an iPad and start taking it to the can with me).
Exactly. And I am the same way, usually buying guides used from Half Price or off Ebay for a fraction of the cost. Bonus, if I go to resell the game later on I can usually toss the guide in as well and make the $5 or so I paid for it right back again.
Absolutely. That guide is fantastic and makes me want to move Shogun 2 to the forefront of my backlog.
Charging paper book money for “Official” guides that are PDF or digital in nature just seems like highway robbery to me. It’s bad enough that the days of the nicely bound, well written and beautifully illustrated game manuals are long gone, but now they are going to take the closest thing we had left, the bound and printed official guide, and make that into a shitty DRM-laden digital copy as well and expect us to thank them for the “convenience” of paying $20 for access to it. No thank you.
Agreed. It’s just a shame we had to wade through Lynch’s vitriol to get it.
I like how we’ve taken this completely negative thread and made it positive.
I own a ton of guides, but my favorites are the Doublejump guides (the guide for Rune Factory Frontier is legitimately funny) and the Fallout 3/Oblivion guides. I’ll just sit and read those for fun some evenings.
I think I enjoyed the Starcraft 2 guide about as much as I did the game itself, too.
Have to be activated does not equate must be purchased through.
I’ve bought Darksiders through Impulse. It required a Steam install of sorts…IDK what it did, but it appears the installation was botched. I can’t run the client or anything, but whatever does run suffice apparently to authorize the legitimacy of my copy and let me play it care free without Steam even running in the background, or so I think.
At any rate, it works and I don’t use Steam.
I have no idea if Valve made Half-Life a steam-only exclusive sale (that’s the game that ‘broke’ you, right?).
However, I’d think that if you could find it on Amazon or elsewhere then you could still play it and give Valve money without actually supporting Steam as a Digital Distribution platform.
Basically, think of it like this: activating through Steam is a DRM issue and that’s something else altogether which we won’t get onto because that’s a long-drawn argument with its own threads already.
Buying through Steam = supporting the platform as viable as seen through Valve’s accounting sheets.
So as long as you just activate games through steam and not buy them through steam then essentially you get to play what you wanted without actually acknowledging Steam as a customer.
The more do it like that, the dimmer Steam becomes. Until eventually it becomes just an authorization gateway/overly-elaborated-IM-or-facebook-esque portal thing.
And…nope. I don’t use Steam.
And…nope. I don’t use Battle.net (no Starcraft II here…not feeling like missing on anything, either).
And…nope. I don’t use EA/Origin (again, no sense of loss).
Maybe you need homefront, battlefront, COD, KOD-KOD, whatever, perhaps you can’t live without the next Halo.
Luckily, my tastes cover many genres and I have multitudes of games, old and new, to keep me busy (as if my job doesn’t do that enough as is) as well as a variety of other entertainment sources.
The power is in your hands, in your friends’ hands and their friends.
The sooner you all get over yourselves (there’s no greater than he who conquers one’s own urges) and become an intelligent consumer the sooner the market start shifting towards catering to YOUR wants and needs and you can release from these shackles all the EAs, MGSes, Sonies, Valves, whoevers trying to throw over you.
Ah ok, level ones are fine. I just saw markets and my eyes went red, then I scrolled down to the econ system and rage reduced. Unfortunately I was too lazy to edit my post.
I did a lot of arguing about markets in the early days.
Also I have some funny pictures: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?p=9358944#post9358944
