Welcome to “Inside the Guide”, the column that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at writing walkthroughs for GameFAQs. I haven’t written any walkthroughs since May, so it’s time for me to get cracking!
I decided to write a guide for Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box. Kind of. In reality, I wanted to see if I could speedrun this game, because it’s well-structured and has a semi-generous skip button feature. When I played through the game as a test speedrun, I took simple notes on what the various puzzles were (i.e. jigsaw puzzle, slider puzzle).
It turns out that speedrunning the game is more trouble than it’s worth, due to some multi-part puzzles. Instead of skipping the whole puzzle, the skip button only skips one part. So if you want to skip the five-part puzzle, you have to stockpile a lot of hints. It’d be faster for me to just memorize the puzzle solution, but since that’s not happening, the speedrun’s not happening.
My notes for the game were still good, so I beefed them up a bit. I explained how to solve the puzzles in more detail, and added solutions where necessary. About half of my notes were one-line sentences like “put all the jigsaw pieces in place” or “find all the hidden objects”, so it’s not the greatest guide ever. But it’s better than nothing, which is what GameFAQs currently has available for the game.
I logged on to GameFAQs to submit my guide, and whoa! They’ve got a fancy new message system! Instead of contacting me through my third-party email that I never check, people can contact me through a GameFAQs email that I never check! The last message I got was in April, telling me that I haven’t touched my message board profile in over ten years.
… I’m not good at keeping up to date with GameFAQs, in case you can’t tell.
Also, you can friend people on GameFAQs. GameFAQs is trying to use snark to get me to add friends.
GameFAQs also has a backloggery system, which can notify you if you’ve beaten games that need FAQs, and—fine! Enough free advertising for GameFAQs! This is GameCOLA, by jingo! I should be advertising here!
Hey, people on GameCola! Do you like GameCola? Then you should visit GameCola! We’ve got podcasts, articles, reviews, and more, and you can sign up to be a writer! We’re always looking for new writers to join our crew of people like me who keep forgetting to write stuff amazing authors! Send an email to Editor-in-Chief Alex Jedraszczak to find out more!
Note to self: Post links to GameCola in my GameFAQs guides from now on.
Okay, so that’s basically it for this month’s guide! All I did was write vague notes, then I prettied it up a bit so it looked more like an on-purpose guide. This is the literary equivalent of putting frosting on your pastries to hide the fact that the “donuts” were originally cupcakes.
