I remember getting game guides back in the day. Half of the reason was to be able to get 100% on the games (and figure out what the darn password is to the Sunken Ship in SMRPG - I actually had to call the Nintendo Power Hotline for that one, and they just gave it out as if "stop asking us about it, here's your answer, now move on to some other part of the game please". The guide is similarly straightforward so you don't go through the drama of the clues). The other half was to marvel at the artwork and whatever extras were available. Oh yeah, and finding out what the heck that Mystery Egg and B'Tub Ring are for like Weegee said.
In retrospect, it was more fun hearing about these secrets from the neighbor who happened to be playing the same game you are. Then you exclaim "this game gets deeper all the time!"
Regarding the guides I thought were the most useless, Mario Kart 64 and Wave Race: Blue Storm. They're not going to tell you anything you don't know as long as you know all the shortcuts and best line through the track. Yeah, there's also unlockables and "best times to beat" (which amused me to no end when I used MK64's shortcut for Frappe Snowland, easily beating the pro time in the back of the book considering every other track had them using shortcuts - Frappe Snowland had the one shortcut they missed), but again you probably already know about those. I guess the only reason I'd be interesting in them is to see a topdown view of the racetrack. I'd especially like to see that for an Extreme-G game considering how they twist and turn. I also thought the Star Fox 64 guide was useless. Pretty much all it tells you is where to be or what to do to score big, but no, it still relies on fast reflexes. I followed NP's advice and still couldn't get those medals. Then a YouTube video makes it look pathetically easy. The maps they have aren't too helpful either considering how vague they are. I suppose when 3D games came along, map-making became a lot tougher. The old guides for 2D platform or action games like SMB3 and SMW2 were great because they could print the map directly and then just point to spots on it to tell you exactly where each tip applies to. In the guides for 3D games, we might get a number and then a little box two pages away corresponding to it. Or in the case of RPGs, no number and you just have to follow the series of boxes to figure out where in the sequence of events you are.
But the thing that really annoys me about guides is when it's for a game that has you collect stuff and they have a checklist in the guide (or a checklist of event points to hit). Let alone the likelyhood that I'll forget what I have and haven't collected, trying to re-collect old stuff because I forgot which one thing out of 20 is missing, I'm not going to write in my guide. Who knows, I might play the game again in the future. Last thing I want is to open the guide and see a series of checkmarks on each page. They would just taunt me, and it probably ruins the value of selling it off to someone else.
By the way, Super Mario All-Stars guide looks like the best guide ever if it's what I think it is. I glanced at the Mario Mania guide and was disappointed that it's basically a Super Mario World guide, SMB1-3 instruction manual, and a few misc pages (granted, interesting stuff like a comparison of Mario's jumping and running in the different games, but there's not a lot of it). I was thinking it'd be a full guide of all four of those games. So this is probably what I was thinking of. I remember back in the day of renting NES games from Half-Price Books at the mall, there were two player's guides for SMB2, one for each half of the game.
Edit: If anyone remembers getting SimCity 3000 Unlimited and seeing the 226-page manual that came with it... that's not a manual, that's a frickin' novel serving as a strategy guide. I think the manuals for flight simulator games are even longer. Wonder if anyone who played those games thought they might as well be doing the real thing, since I'd consider it work to get through a manual of that size.
