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Look at this lazy bullshit (Castlevania SoTN-related)!

Chiggs

Chiggs

Member
I was digging through a hard drive, sorting and sifting through tons of porn files, when I stumbled upon a Castlevania Symphony of the Night strategy guide written by Bart Farkas of Prima Games back in 1997.

The laziness on display is off the charts. How they even charged money for this is quite an achievement.

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Example 1: The rationalization for laziness begins!
OPgMkzj.png


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Example 2: The rationalization and justification continues.


ByNkLwX.png


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Example 3: "Gosh, you don't want me to spoon-feed you details, right? That would be totally lame!"

gksGxbf.png



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Example 4: "Having problems with bosses? Well, you'll need to figure that out; there are too many variables."

g4wzEjB.png



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RokkanStoned

RokkanStoned

Member
What was written on the back or the front of the cover? If it says it's not a comprehensive guide, but merely an overall guide to keep you on track, then I don't see the issue. If it's not clear, then I feel it's somewhat misleading. Then again, strategy guides vary a lot in how in-depth they can be.
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
stranno said:
Visit PlayOnline for more Symphony of the PlayOnline.
Click to expand...
Was about to say, I feel like the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide (which came out a few years after this one) was much worse in terms of not providing any actual content.
 
#Phonepunk#

#Phonepunk#

Banned
it looks to me like he is working very hard. if you have the screenshots and map, you more or less have the entire guide for the game. but he was hired to write a strategy guide. so he did what he had to do and made up a bunch of stuff to pad it out. hey, he got paid.

the lazy thing to me is looking at something someone else made decades ago and drawing a line around it and writing the word "lazy" several times. like lol that must have taken you all of 10 minutes.
 
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NeoIkaruGAF

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
stranno said:
Visit PlayOnline for more Symphony of the PlayOnline.
Click to expand...
Complete versions of the FFIX guide existed though, at least in Europe. I found one in France back then, and I seem to remember it existed in other languages too.

This shit here though, it's inexcusable. There's been ridiculously thorough guides to SOTN on GameFAQs for ages. This guy got payed for making a guide, I could excuse this only if he was allowed very (very) little time to put up a summary guide. Like, a month at best.
 
Northeastmonk

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
I betcha it was because it was an Unofficial Strategy guide. Final Fantasy VIII’s Unofficial guide was all text based. Maybe they got lazy because they weren’t able to make the official guide? From what I remember Unofficial guides weren’t as polished as the Official guides were.

2-C99-C448-8971-4-AC9-8-DC7-156-E82-AB2-C6-C.jpg
 
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StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
SantaC2 said:
SotN is not a hard game, who needs a guide? The bosses go down in seconds.

That said, the dude writing that guide seems very amateurish.
Click to expand...
Yup.

Easy as shit. Only boss I had trouble with is that huge two screen boss (I think that goat boss with the electricity staff). I didn't realize how easy it was to kill him until I watched YT vids as I killed him slogging through normal attacks.

Other than that boss, easy game. Even the final boss wasn't hard.
 
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DGrayson

DGrayson

Mod Team and Bat Team
Staff Member
I used to love official strategy guides. I vividly remember the last guide I bought was the Brady official FFIX guide.

Half the guide was like - "just go online to get the strategy for this part!". I was so pissed I never bought another guide. I was like "ya, Ill go online ... to gamefaqs"
 
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GV82

GV82

Member
You have been spoilt by the future, back in the 90’s people could get away with half assed things such as this as there was not social media to make a complaint so that everyone else could avoid it, sure people complained on forums back then but not not all companies took threats of boycotts serious back then.

I mean the Mortal Kombat 2 guide had fake photoshopped secrets on it for crying out loud back in the day 🤣 on the Official guide, no less.
Why would you do that?
 
Darkmakaimura

Darkmakaimura

Can You Imagine What SureAI Is Going To Do With Garfield?
Chiggs said:
I was digging through a hard drive, sorting and sifting through tons of porn files, when I stumbled upon a Castlevania Symphony of the Night strategy guide written by Bart Farkas of Prima Games back in 1997.

The laziness on display is off the charts. How they even charged money for this is quite an achievement.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example 1: The rationalization for laziness begins!
OPgMkzj.png


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example 2: The rationalization and justification continues.


ByNkLwX.png


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example 3: "Gosh, you don't want me to spoon-feed you details, right? That would be totally lame!"

gksGxbf.png



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example 4: "Having problems with bosses? Well, you'll need to figure that out; there are too many variables."

g4wzEjB.png



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click to expand...
I used to own this guide I think. Unless there were other physical book versions.
 
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alabtrosMyster

alabtrosMyster

Banned
DGrayson said:
I used to love official strategy guides. I vividly remember the last guide I bought was the Brady official FFIX guide.

Half the guide was like - "just go online to get the strategy for this part!". I was so pissed I never bought another guide. I was like "ya, Ill go online ... to gamefaqs"
Click to expand...
I think I had this one, the guide was OK, but for some reason they put some parts online only as if that was a feature.... it got me furious and I never checked whatever that was, you don't put links in printed material -- people can't click them.
 
G

Gargus

Banned
You must have the most perfect and awesome life ever if is what concerns you as a problem worth spending your time on.
 
S

SLoWMoTIoN

Unconfirmed Member
As somebody who has never used a guide this gets a giant shrug from me.
 
ethomaz

ethomaz

Banned
You have no ideia how FF guides where I. The past... you have to decrypt each new step because the guide didn’t give any ideia of where you need to go or do.
 
Alexios

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Was it that hard to write "look at this lazy bullshit SOTN guide" or something?
 
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