Category Archives: Books

Official Guide To Privateer 2

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This was published by Prima in 1996. It starts off with a tour to the system with the backgrounds of all the various clans, planets, stations and the like. I’m assuming the text is taken straight from the game. Next it’s the more technical information such as how the random encounters work, gun and ship specs, etc.. This is all useful enough if you want to know how to spend your cash in the game.
There are sections dealing with trading and then combat tips. These have lots of tables of data but also some general advice including a return of the playtesters tip’s that were in some of the older books.
As usual, the largest section deals with the missions. The main plot is actually quite brief and a lot of it just involved flying to various places. This lets you know how it works but a lengthy guide isn’t really needed. There is also the same treatment given to all the other missions with cinematics in the game for anyone who wants to track them all down and beat them, although these other missions are basically just offered randomly. One thing I noticed here was that the missions only occur if you have the right CD in the drive. So you could finish the game and keep playing forever with CD 3 in the drive and never be offered anything on CD 2.
The bulletin board missions are also covered. Every single one of them, and this takes up around 100 pages. These missions are all fairly straightforward and this doesn’t seem like anything I could see most people making use of. There are no tips to completing them. It is just describing what you are up against which you will find out as soon as you fly the mission anyway. This looks to me like filling pages for the sake of it.
There is a short interview section at the end, which isn’t especially illuminating although it’s interesting to note that the casting for the game was an attempt to appeal to the various markets around Europe and also the USA by picking actors famous in each country.
The guide came with Prima’s customary pullout. This one had all the ships on one side and a map of the system on the other. As ever, this is all scanned in and available as a pdf in the downloads. The poster is a particularly bad effort on my part to join all the images together. A map of the system sounds like it could be the sort of thing I might have stuck on my wall as a young teen but it’s extremely dull unfortunately and the sort of thing I could knock together myself.
This guide covered the basics but most of it was tables of information I didn’t need to know or text taken straight from the game. It could have been done in far fewer pages, yet skimped on the interviews at the end. I thought we might get to hear from some of the cast at least. For a game that had such a strong visual style the book is surprisingly bland as well with most pages being straight text. There must have been a wealth of artwork that could have been drawn upon but not much of is in evidence here. This guide was adequate but by Origin’s standards I thought this it was fairly poor. I wouldn’t have been happy paying £16 for it back in 1996.

Origin Product Catalogs

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I expect these may already be available somewhere but I’ve just added pdf’s of every Origin catalog I own to the downloads. The earliest of these isn’t dated but will be from around 1987 and the latest is from 1994.
There are a few interesting bits and pieces in these. For instance, the 87 catalog mentions an upcoming basketball game called Homecourt which never got released thanks to Origin moving to Texas in 89. There is a post about this by John Romero on his site at http://planetromero.com/2010/08/gametales-homecourt.
A few alternate covers caught my eye also such as the horrific Ultima Underworld cover in the 91/92 catalog. I’m assuming none of these ever made it onto the shelves.
The full catalogs gave way to small pamphlets of new releases in the early-mid 90’s and after 1994 the only catalogs I have with any of the games cover all of EA’s products.

Official Guide To Longbow 2

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This was published in 1997 by Prima. Anyone who has read much of this blog will know my feelings on flight sims but it’s still scanned in for anyone who wants it with all the other downloads.
The Jane’s games don’t hold much interest for me so I’ve briefly skimmed through this one. A lot of the early content with short tips on the game is straight out of the Longbow 1 guide. As you would expect the same advice applies in both games. There are some new sections to cover the extra helicopters that were added to the sequel and also the multiplayer elements of the game.
There is a long “Attack Helicopter Operations” section which is an abbreviated version of a US army field manual. Some of this is relevant to playing the game, other aspects are just background detail. Reading army field manuals isn’t my idea of fun so I skipped most of this.
The campaign walkthroughs are replaced by some general tips since there is no static campaign in Longbow 2 thanks to the dynamic battlefield system it adopted. There were a set of one off missions though which I never actually looked at myself when I was playing the game. These do get the full walkthrough treatment with tips on how to play each and every one of them.
The last section of the guide is filled with Jane’s Sentinel biographies on the political and military histories of the countries in the game for anyone who wants to know who they are blowing up.
The manual also comes with a pull-out map of Azerbaijan, which doesn’t strike me as especially useful but I suppose could be used for planning routes if you want to fly down valleys all the way. I do get the impression that all these Prima guides had to come with some sort of pull-out as a sales gimmick of sorts.
Without the campaign walkthrough, this book appears to me to be less useful than it’s equivalent from Longbow 1. It can offer plenty of good advice but ultimately you have to figure things out for yourself. It fills an awful lot of its pages with background details from Jane’s and the field manual instead. These didn’t interest me especially but will probably hold more appeal to Longbow 1/2 fans.

Ultima 9 – Prima's Official Strategy Guide

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This is the last of the Ultima game guides that I’ve still to look at and was published in 1999 by Prima. It’s the largest by some margin spanning over 300 pages making it around the same size as the Ultima Collection guide which covered the rest of series in a single book.
Nearly half of these pages are taken up with a full walkthrough in both bullet-point and more expanded form. The lengthier version doesn’t take the form of a true narrative so it isn’t anything you would want to read if you weren’t looking for help.
The early pages start out in a more old-school style and are written as a guide to the land by a sailor from Buccaneer’s Den. This gives a quick tour of all the towns with the maps that you find in game before the pretense is dropped and the rest of the book just gives you information about the game.
This information is much more detailed than the earlier official guides giving tables of merchant prices, details about character creation (including all the gypsy’s questions), equipment lists, a transcript of the Avatar’s journey, bestiary, spells and more. All this information was probably needed less in Ultima 9 than the rest of the series but it’s still good to see it here.
The most interesting sections for myself were the Tales Of Virtue, and the interview at the end of the book. The Tales Of Virtue were originally released one at a time on the Ultima 9 website while the hype was being ramped up before the game’s release. They take the form of a fable about each virtue, each involving one of the eight companions from Ultima 4. They aren’t relevant to the game directly but are a great piece of Ultima folk lore in their own right.
The interview with Richard Garriott is massive and takes up about a fifth of the whole book. It’s a reproduction of the same interview that was in Avatar Adventures with some new sections added. These new parts are not added in a lump but are edited into the original interview meaning that you have to sift through it if you are looking for the new stuff. The interview does skip backwards and forwards thanks to this and is a little disjointed. I’d rather have seen the two kept separate but it might not be an issue if I hadn’t read Avatar Adventures in the last couple of weeks.
A lot of the talk on Ultima 9 is about leaving the land in a state where the people can look after themselves which was one of the main premises for the game. I can’t say I found it especially evident when playing the game although I do remember Lord British getting out and about a couple of times. Something else that caught my eye was that Mondains Gem was involved in creating the Guardian and it is mentioned that the Shadowlords themselves were formed from the Avatar’s evil half before coalescing into him. I don’t remember this being in the game but it has been a few years since I played it. Not all of the new stuff in the interview is about Ultima 9 and if you ever wanted to know why Dupre asked if you wanted to buy a duck in Ultima 2, you can find out here.
The book is interspersed with some superb concept art for the game, and there is also a tapestry of the ages poster in the middle of the book. I’ve done my usual patchwork job of scanning this in.
I prefer the old style of Ultima cluebook but for what this lacks in atmosphere, it makes up with in size and it’s especially nice to see that the Tales of Virtue got preserved somewhere a little more permanent now that the website is long gone.

Official Guide to Jane's AH-64D Longbow

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This was published by Origin in 1996 and is now scanned in and on the list. It has to be said that the Longbow series and F-15 were not my type of game, which doesn’t make me especially interested in reading their respective guides. I’ll still have a quick look at them for the sake of completeness and I’m not going to make the mistake of leaving them all until the end this time.

The manual for Longbow was sizeable in its own right and not really much smaller than this guide. The guide is a lot more specific to what is needed in the game and lighter on the technical details though. It starts with a lengthy series of tips about every aspect of flying the Longbow and planning your missions. There is a lot to remember here but it’s all briefly presented and pertinent.

When it gets to the campaign guides, it actually starts off as something of a tutorial and uses the early missions to introduce the skills you will need to play the game. This is a great idea for less skilled pilots like myself and the sort of thing I could have done with at the time. I’d probably have got a lot more out of the game with this to teach me the basics. The in-game tutorials weren’t bad but I was still left not knowing what I was doing when I started the game itself.

After the early missions, it settles down into a more standard mission guide. The advice given is still very specific and just what you would need to get through the game. I’ve always been a little skeptical about how needed the mission guides were in some of the other games but there is enough going on in Longbow to justify them. There is full detail about altering your waypoints to avoid heavy resistance which would have been particularly useful. This was not a game where you could blindly follow the preset route all the time.

There are a few interviews to end the book. The first is with an actual Longbow pilot who gives some flying tips which mirror a lot of the tips given earlier in the book. I’d have been curious to know what he thought of the game but they never asked the question (or didn’t like the answer and didn’t publish it). There is then another talk with Andy Hollis who describes the creation of the game and how he ended up at Origin and created the team to work on it. Longbow apparently started out as a far more arcade oriented game called Chopper Attack which would have been released simultaneously on 3DO. The collapse of the 3DO resulted in a more detailed PC only game which led into the full-on simulation we ended up with. There are some superfluous Jane’s articles on the Longbow to finish the guide which would probably appeal to anyone who is more into flying helicopters than myself.

This is a well put together book and I expect I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I’d bought this a few months earlier. It almost makes me want to go and have a go at playing the game again but I think I’d soon change my mind if I actually fired it up again.