I much prefer the free guides on gamefaqs.

With those I can just save the text file to my computer and delete parts of the guide as I go through the game, it makes it easier to search the guide for stuff as I progress, helps me keep track of what i have and havent done yet and also gives me an indicator of how far through the game I am. Even then I'll usually only read any guides for the bigger open world RPG's that have tonnes of sidequests.

boy i miss the days of the big thick manuals filled with wonderful story's and background info! i bought this rpg archives thing back in the day(it came with stonekeep and wizardry, the two best of the set) and anyways, the manual to that thing was like a bazillion pages long, it was like getting a book with your games. awsome stuff.

I bought the official guide books to Soul Calibur II and Tekken 3.
I find them graphically superior to the guides on the internet and I also prefer to have a guide book by my side when training my moves than to look them up on my laptop or desktop PC. It's more comfortable with a real guide book.

Definitely, I love that crap. I remember how the manual to Ultima VII read like a tourist guide and it made me want to play so bad (which was kinda unfortunate, since it took me a year to get the game working). Forget the cloth maps and plastic statues, I'll pay for the overpriced collector's editions if they had decent manuals like back in the day!

I don't really understand why there are hardly any game lore books. There's one for the Ashan setting from the newer Heroes games, and the book about the history of Zelda just came out, but that's about it. I know some settings have all this really interesting lore but I can never be bothered to read it in-game.

Indeed, that was good toilet reading back then.

:)

I own one guide, and that's for Hidden & Dangerous (I didn't buy it, though; my dad did). It's actually pretty useful. I probably wouldn't have finished the game without it (this was when I was much younger, mind you).