Blaugust Promptapalooza 2020 is this crazy year’s crazy twist on the August blogging challenge cooked up by Belghast over on Tales of the Aggronaut. Instead of writing every day, a whole bunch of us have committed to being “prompt-bearers”. Today’s prompt comes from Roger over at Contains Moderate Peril:
“What type of content do you feel is severely underrated?”
Promptapalooza (August 3, 2020)
My answer is simple: written game guides / walkthroughs.
Video is great for a lot of things, but I absolutely despise the video format for game guides. There are a lot of reasons, but primary among them is the fact that metrics of video content creation demand that the creators not respect the watcher’s time.
If I’m playing a puzzle or adventure game, I want to be able to jump straight to the place where I am stuck, so I can get over the hump and get on with my gaming. Guide videos tend to be long, to the point where watching one could eat up the majority of the time I have to game, and there’s doesn’t seem to be any simple way to skip to the portion you need other than randomly fast forwarding and hoping you don’t go too far and spoil yourself.
I mean, I get it, it’s a digital world now. The days of buying chunky Prima Game Guide books is over, although I will miss those books dearly if The Elder Scrolls 6 ever makes an appearance. There were never going to be bound books for anything that wasn’t AAA anyway.
But I honestly believe that the written word never goes out of style, and I am grateful every time I can find a text (or text and screenshot) game guide in between the plethora of videos.
Nerd Girl Thoughts 
Amen!
I always preferred the written word for everything. It is not different when I need help or information for a game. There are very, very few situations where a video would give a better idea on how to solve something in a game for me and it usually is some tricky, action thingy that you have to watch to get an idea how they solved it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hate, hate, hate having to use a video guide for games. I miss the days you could mosey on over to GameFAQs and get an exhaustive 100,000 word guide on the most niche game you can find. No it’s no longer a guarantee you can find a text based guide for even the most popular games.
I buy printed strategy guides often. At least when I can find them cheap. But I’ve rarely found them useful as guides, they were always inaccurate and filled with … well “filler”. After spending my allowance money on the infamous Final Fantasy 9 guide I stopped buying for their walkthroughs. Now I use them as coffee tables books to relive a game without having to play through a whole 80 hour game again.
LikeLike