When you think of strategy guides, chances are your mind heads in one of two places: either to Prima Games, or to Brady Games. Both have, for many years now, been the go-to-guys when it comes to strategy guides for the latest games. But there’s a new face on the street now, a small but dedicated team working their nuts off to bring high quality guides in an easy to read and easy to access format. The name? GamerGuides.
Found over at GamerGuides.com the company – running since early last year – consists of five highly determined gamers made up in part by Seb (who used to own PSU.com and PlayFire) and Andrew (guide writer in the past for the likes of Gamesmaster and XBox World 360); certainly guys who know their stuff and saw a sizeable gap in the market. At one end you have the free info found online which, befitting the price, is often difficult to find, tough to follow and doesn’t always carry the reliability you’d want in a full guide. Take a step up from there and you reach the printed guides mentioned earlier, more professionally created than the wikis online and often beautifully put together but with a premium price to back it up. GamerGuides have aimed their guides squarely in between these two areas, and with 47 professionally written guides already on offer at a very affordable $4.99 each, the tent is clearly pitched in the right spot of the strategy guide campsite.
How did I get onto camping?
The guides mix text explanations with HD screens and videos, often with audio commentaries with them to backup and enhance what’s written on the screen. There are some sizeable games here too – alongside the official guides for titles such as Stealth Inc, Reus and Fieldrunners 2 are guides for some of the biggest games to hit the current generation’s consoles. Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto 5, Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored are all present and correct. There’s The Last of Us and Assassin’s Creed 4 guides in the mix too, and although the latter of those is still getting its finishing touches it shows the scale of what they’re willing to do and how up to date they’re keeping things.
The bonus to all this though is the iPad app, which lets you sync all of your purchased guides and access them on your iPad (provided it’s running iOS7) which is, as you’d imagine, pretty handy to sit next to you when you’re trying to get that last gold medal on GTA or struggling to figure out how to sneak around a mansion in Dishonored. There’s even a trailer for it, which we’ve dropped below for you to take a look at. The guides come to life on the app, and while the site itself is easy enough to use, the ability to scroll through pages so quickly and naturally benefits the guides themselves immensely.
We’ve been having a good read through some of the guides offered by GamerGuides, and they’re very impressive – we’ll have more on individual guides for you in the next day or two including their hugely detailed Pokemon X&Y guide which includes imagery captured directly from the console, something that’s deceptively tricky to do with Nintendo’s handhelds. Each guide has a small preview so you can check out the kind of thing you can expect to find if you were to buy them, and if you’re the kind of player who likes to have everything totally sorted but finds it tough to get the small details spot on then this might be the perfect place to look.
It’s a little early to know if GamerGuides can be the next big thing in strategy guides, but they’re certainly doing all the right things to make it happen. My advice? Take a look at the site and see what you think. What’s the worst that can happen?
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