About [Books] Fallout 3 Game of the Year Collector's Edition: Prima Official Game Guide by TonyWihlen's review
Comprehensive and hard to navigate.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most comprehensive guides I have seen to date. It ranks up there with DoubleJump's Disgaea guides and Piggyback's Final Fantasy 12 guide. It has every concievable piece of info you could ever need and this Game of The Year version also (thankfully) has an index in the back to find stuff easier.
Indexed or not, though, the guide suffers a bit from the way it's laid out. It takes a while to figure out how it works and you'll find yourself flipping back and forth a LOT during playing. This is because whatever maps that pertains to a quest is not shown within the chapter on that quest but rather in a separate section further back in the book. This will have you flip back and forth quite a bit, putting extra wear and tear on the book in addition to being just a little bit annoying.
Other than that there's really not much to whine about. It is an *excellent* guide and well worth the price tag.
About [Books] Fallout 3 Game of the Year Collector's Edition: Prima Official Game Guide by B_McLain's review
It was hard to rate this guide so low...
Especially since the technical information contained in it is massive in depth and in scope. Even though I'm only 40 hours into the game (I bought Fallout 3 GOTY and this guide together). This guide has yet to lead me wrong. So you may be wondering why I rated this guide so low (and it hurt me to do it) so let's start with the really good things about this guide first. (As I can tell you now that I HIGHLY recommend this purchase if you own the game.)
PROS
- Excellent maps, not only is there a massive movie poster sized map covering all of DC, but there are wonderfully detailed location maps. Plus lots of verbal directions for those of us who are directionally challenged!
- Collectible item locations are all laid out, clear and concise.
- Plenty of spoiler warnings.
- Quest options and the various paths that you can take are laid out in a very intuitive manner. (Something hard to do with a game as free-roaming as this.)
- Hard Cover! Omg, this is such a cool thing. I'm actually proud to show this guide off. Not to mention the binding actually seems really sturdy. (If you happen to be one of the lucky people who own PRIMAs old Breath of Fire III Guide then you more than likely know what I'm talking about.) This guide feels like it could really stand the abuse.
- Excellent presentation of the information.
- I really wouldn't want to trek through D.C. without this guide.
Note that even though I really like this I hope I can explain why I gave it a low rating.
CONS
- LOTS (and I mean LOTS) of spelling mistakes. I know what you're thinking, "This guy isn't doing any better!" But I paid a considerable sum for this guide, and there were so many spelling mistakes that it made it feel cheap and incredibly rushed. (Did anyone even bother to proof read this thing?)
A few quick examples for anyone who owns the guide.
-- Page 148 the last sentence on the page IS NEVER FINISHED.
-- Page 122 (In the Weapons: 'Small Guns' section) Under 'Combat Shotgun' and 'Combat Shotgun: The Terrible Shotgun' the ammo type is listed as 'Shotgun Cell'[sic] instead of Shotgun Shell.
-- Page 123 (Right next to the previous one...) Under 'Double-Barrel Shotgun' in the ammo section it reads 'Shoitgun Shell' [sic]
I'm sure there are more (as I haven't read the whole thing, and I won't get into the lack of proper punctuation) but this gives you an idea of what I mean. Either the people at PRIMA thought that their primary customers were illiterate teenagers who speak LOLCat as a first language or someone may be using software devoid of some semblance of a spell check feature... But most likely it was just laziness. I would like to take time to point that I'm not an English professor by any stretch of the imagination (which I'm sure you can tell). But I did work in publishing for several years and I honestly can't imagine ANY kind of good scenario that would allow this to walk out the door. I have never noticed a problem like this before in a PRIMA guide, which is why I rated it so low. Factually this guide seems to be spot on. I just think it was released way too soon.
Oh, and I think that more map references would have been nice, especially if it used the guides own Zone.Section decimal system, as this would have saved a lot of map hunting. In conclusion Great Guide as far as scope, information, and presentation. BAD guide for execution. That's it :D
