Words On Wednesday

I love a strategy guide and the recent release of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen on Nintendo Switch made me break out an old one for maximum nostalgia. When Nintendo released Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen officially on 27 February 2026 for Nintendo Switch, I certainly wasn't going to buy them again, but I didn't want to miss out on the zeitgeist of a new(ish) release. I bought the original cartridges back in the day, and GBA games are extremely easy to emulate, so I had no moral scruples in emulating those titles to play alongside the people who did choose to buy the port. Fortunately, a 2026 re-release of a 2004 remake of a 1996 game means we had two decades of guides, content, and forum posts about the games still relevant for the latest port. It was trivially easy to look up nearly anything about FireRed and LeafGreen and get an immediate and in-depth answer. Although that is beneficial in a sense, it's also fundamentally different from the way those of us old enough t...

You guys remember strategy guides? Man, those were the days weren’t they? Back in the day, strategy guides were the only mechanism available for getting help in video games. That, or asking our friends, and most gamers in the 80s and 90s were super antisocial, so we didn’t have a lot of friends to begin with. We bought the book, or borrowed one from somebody who had it. A History in Reverse Today, there are numerous sources for gaming tips and guides. Youtube and Reddit are peppered with content about every game out there. Many of your larger intellectual properties have a dedicated wiki or fandom, with individual pages about nearly everything. There are platforms geared toward hosting that sort of information, and no shortage of volunteers looking to create the content. In the recent past, maybe a decade ago, GameFAQs was the be-all and end-all of video game information. They had general guides for playing through games, specific guides for particular sections and tasks, and even a fe...