Hello everyone, and welcome to Inside the Guide, the article on GameCola that discusses writing guides for videogames. After messing around for a couple months, I’m back to my semi-normal format of writing about three games a month. This month’s theme is “games based on movies.”
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
No, this isn’t the game that Carl reviewed last month; this is the NES version made by Taito. If you haven’t played the game (lucky you!), it’s a series of random, sub-par minigames. Basically, they threw a bunch of crap together and the end result wasn’t very good, so they threw the Indiana Jones label on it in order to make sure it would sell. Sort of like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
This game was on the request list at GameFAQs (back when they had a request list), and it’s no wonder why. The third minigame is in the proud NES tradition of forcing your character to wander around aimlessly through an infinite series of practically identical hallways, in hopes that you can find the ONE SINGLE DOOR that ends the level. Fortunately, I’m a great gamer, so I was able to draw myself a map of the area and find the proper exit in almost no time flat.
Ha! Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! I’m lying, of course. I looked on the Internet and found instructions on how to beat the maze. I slipped the instructions into my guide, and that’s how I managed to write that section of the guide. I used the same process to beat the last section of the game, but that’s just because I was lazy and didn’t feel like solving that section of the game on my own.
So…I threw those instructions together with my own instructions for the other minigames—they were all easy things like “kill twenty bad guys” and “get the puzzle pieces in the proper order”—and that’s how I finished the guide. It took me about an hour overall. See? I make a strong effort. That’s how you can tell I do quality work!
The Jungle Book
This is what happens if you play videogames for fourteen hours straight.
I wrote this guide over six years ago, and honestly, I can’t remember anything about this game. The movie was awesome, though.
And that’s all I have to say about that. See? More strong effort, and thus, more quality work!
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
In case you can’t tell, I was lazy this month and took images from other Web sites, instead of taking my own screenshots of the games.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is a basic platformer that comes with all sorts of cool “Force” stuff, like a lightsaber, levitation, and the ability to talk to girls. My cousin Jimmy couldn’t beat this game as a kid, so I decided to write a guide for it, just so I could be a jerk and brag about how I’m a better gamer than he was. Writing the guide was no challenge, because it’s a pretty basic game, albeit a long one. I submitted the guide, called my cousin to tell him that he just got pwned, and figured that’d be the end of that.
Well, I was certainly wrong about that one. Shortly afterwards, a slew of Star Wars fans e-mailed me to say snotty things like “It’s called a Taun-Taun, not a Kangaroo Thingy,” demanding that I update the guide to accommodate their new information. OK, so technically it was only about ten people, but whatever, it was annoying to have to update the guide every time I opened my e-mail. So I finally got fed up with it and slapped a “FINAL VERSION, WILL NEVER BE UPDATED AGAIN” label onto my last update, which stopped the e-mails. My guide was good enough without help from nerds with good intentions, thank you very much.
So that’s it for this month! I’m sure you learned a lot about the hard work that goes into writing guides—either that, or you learned about how I have a bit of a lazy streak in me when it comes to, you know, actual work. Speaking of which, writing articles every month for GameCola is a lot of work. I should probably save myself some effort and just stop right now instead of writing more.
