Strategy Guide - Source Mistakes

Source Mistakes

Some companies will, at times, make mistakes in the book about the game itself, such as stating that "Character A" has a relationship with "Character B", despite there being no relationship. In a strategy guide for Diddy Kong Racing they referred to characters with terms such as "The Dinosaur" and "The Octopus" instead of their names.

Games journalist and guide writer Alan Emrich has severely criticized recent strategy guides for:

• Containing only facts which should have been in the game manual, e.g. about the user interface.
• Failing to teach users how to improve their play.
• Failing to provide information which helps them to make decisions, e.g. about the capabilities and costs of units and buildings.
• Being inaccurate, often because the developers have tweaked the game during the publication lead time.

The faults, he says, are mainly caused by the game publishers' and guide publishers' haste to get their products on to the market.