1 comments about James Bond 007: From Russia With Love (Prima Official Game Guide).

1. This guide helped me a lot on stuff like bond moments the objectives were straightforward so I didn't really need it there. But the bond moments were hard to identify! I also used the maps a lot to see places that items to pick up resided. overal, a simple but good guide.

2 comments about Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 (Prima's Official Strategy Guide).

1. this is a really great guide! it gives you charecter bios, how to unlock them and what capsules you should use on them! Also a complete walkthrough of dragon world, a list of all the capsules and game secrets. and very easy to understand!



2. Not only do you get a very complete guide that shows you everything from codes to unlock everything and cheats to make some tough game play easier but it comes with a free DVD with a few episodes of GT. It's very much worth getting.

No comments about Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Prima Official Game Guide).

3 comments about Madden NFL 2004 (Prima's Official Strategy Guide).

1. i perused this for a few hours at a local bookstore. it's very thin. most of the guide consists of two pages per each nfl team and tells you like 2 good offensive plays you can run and what general defense the real team plays. i didn't find any helpful hints really. i did find a ton of errors though. i'm an eagles fan... i was more than surprised to see that this guide claims that orlando pace plays for the birds now. wow, that would be so excellent if it were even remotely true. how can can an error like that get through? that wasn't the only one either... very shoddy. between the delivered EA book and the prima guide, madden players are still completely shut out in terms of half way decent documentation. very very lame.



2. This is a great book that gives you tips to win Championships. It also give you tips for owner mode.



3. Very helpful in trying to learn the aspects of the game, makes for an excellent reference book, very good illustrations but at times seems to get a little too technical.

5 comments about Civilization IV Official Strategy Guide (Official Strategy Guides (Bradygames)).

1. If you have ever played a civ game before, this guide is basic. It does lay out the tech's though and puts you on the fast track. It is a real quick read, with half of the book dedicated to the civilopedia.



2. After reading all the pans of this book, I thought I would put in a dissenting point of view. I am completely new to the Civilization series and need all the help I can get. I think generally the book is doing a good job getting me up to speed. I do agree, though, that the drawbacks of the book are significant and make the book frustrating to use.
   
   First, what works about the book:
   * covers basic strategies
   * reproduces tech tree and unit descriptions
   * gives strategy and tactical advice for each unit and resource
   * includes tips from the game testers
   * doesn't assume reader is familiar with previous games in the series
   * is good for people (like me) who don't want to read the Civilopedia online any more than they have to
   
   What doesn't work about the book:
   * text is too small! Much of the joy of reading the book is squandered by having to squint -- and I don't wear glasses.
   * no index. Publishers that release books with no indexes might be trying to save money, but they really reduce the book's usability
   * screenshots are so small (some are 1.5" x 1.25" -- what were they thinking?) and are in black and white, so they are mostly too frustrating to bother trying to understand. Whoever tried to save money by printing in 9 point text made the same decision with the screenshots.
   * screenshots have no caption beneath them. What is the screenshot attempting to demonstrate? Text only sometimes can be counted on to refer to the screenshot. The combination of smallness, lack of color and no captions makes the screenshots mostly useless to this reader. Pretty quickly I learned that they add no value to the book.
   
   Final assessment: I paid a grand total of $13 for the book and definitely am getting my money's worth. The thing is that, given the option, I would have gladly paid $20 for the above drawbacks to be rectified.



3. I expect a guide like this to pick up where the instruction manual leaves off. But this book spends 3/4 of its pages just reproducing what is already included with the book's online and printed help. The rest provides some very abstract ideas on strategy. It does not tell you what units or buildings to build or when to build them. Civ 4 is a great game, but you won't get much here. Stick to the game's manual and visit some of the fan sites for helpful hints.



4. The first part being Age of Empires III in my opinion which has done for the real-time-strategy (RTS) what Civilization 4 has now done to turn-based-strategy (TBS).
   What the developers have done is the most sensible thing - they were not afraid to innovate and they were not afraid to throw out the stuff that was rubbish. Essentially this is not a direct but a innovative advance of the series. I feel sorry for those people who think that the newer games in a series should keep the sacred ideas and just keep making them bigger and bigger, because that way the game does not improve, it merely grows (and you get Civ3). Instead good ideas are put in and bad ones taken out and the game works and is a joy to play. At the end of the day the game AS IT IS, should be good, whether it panders to imaginations of die-hards of what it should be like... well that's them not the developers.
   
   Basically, if you like anything vaguely related to strategy Civilization will fail to disappoint. Enjoy.



5. to sum up other reviews....
   * Full of strategic hints that I've found very helpful to game play. It's well written, and has information that I believe should have been included in the game manual.
   * Lists units, cultures, improvements, etc.
   * covers basic strategies
   * reproduces tech tree and unit descriptions
   * gives strategy and tactical advice for each unit and resource
   * includes tips from the game testers
   * doesn't assume reader is familiar with previous games in the series
   * is good for people who don't want to read the Civilopedia online any more than they have to

4 comments about Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel: Sybex Official Strategies & Secrets.

1. This book has many tables and lists of all the statistics in the Fallout Tactics universe. It also gives information on comabat, charactors (and charactor building), missions, enemies, perks, skills, MULTIPLAYER, and tips on how to win your way to victory. It was easy to understand, the good thing was that it didn't tell exactly what to do. This left the game open, not a complete walkthrough (you know, do this, do that... no fun!). The book really helps make the Fallout expirience ten times better. Buy this book and make the most out of your game.



2. I really was put down when I realized how different tactics would be compared to the origional Fallout 1 and 2; it had excellent graphics and a good storyline, and the new and improved items were great. I can't forget the multiplayer and map creators that are readily available, but if you are interested in buying tactics for the sheer RPG value of it,then don't even bother. Go for Deus Ex or Baldurs Gate.

   In terms of a standalone game, without comparing it to the others, Fallout Tactics is still an amazing game, and certainly worth getting.




3. I sincerely hope no one would be crazy enough to buy the strategy guide at four times the price of the game. It is a good game, but you can figure out most of the stuff that is in the guide for yourself.



4. As a kid I always enjoyed reading the strategy guides to my favorite console games, like the Final Fantasy series. Usually these strategy guides had all the information on the actual gameplay/items/locations, plus added touches like 'bonus features' or 'secrets' and even tidbits of information about the game that owners might find interesting. The pages were in color and you could almost read the guides like a good magazine or even a book.
   
   Not so with this guide. As soon as I got this guide in the mail, I realized I would be disappointed. The quality of the printing is low; small pages, black & white print on normal computer printer paper. There are no pictures of items & the descriptions of them are extremely brief and not really useful. The book covers the missions themselves in a brief fashion (a couple pages per mission) with a general outline of the objectives & strategies, with a couple fuzzy screenshots mixed in.
   
   Nowhere is there specific vendor information, ANY information on random encounters or special encounters (which the book bluntly lies about on the back cover by claiming it does have this information), or a tips/tricks section -- of which there are plenty to discover in Fallout Tactics.
   
   All in all this is a mediocre book and you really shouldn't buy this unless you are some kind of avid 'Fallout' merchandise collector. You are better off going online to look at a F.A.Q. or Walkthrough on the game; this book is cheaply made and only covers the most basic essentials of playing through the game.

5 comments about Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified.

1. I was hoping that this book would shed some light on how to apply practical mathematics to AS2.0 in order to produce some realistic effects. It provides a good start and even gives good descriptions about the inner workings of some of the concepts.
   
   I took two years of H.S. physics, trig, and calc and I still find the explanations lacking for those of us that require the "why's" to all our questions.
   
   The examples on the CD are extremely helpful IF you understand the code. Sorting through the files to find the code is hard and some of the files seem unfinished.
   
   I would get this used if given the chance to do it all over again.



2. I would suggest any books by Colin Moock or the Robert Penner book "Programming Macromedia Flash MX" over this book. I bought this book because I hoped it would explain some physics applications that I was having trouble with and because it dives into topics like multiplayer games. To be fair, I haven't gotten to the multiplayer games section yet, so it's possible that that part is clear and useful. The physics part is only helpful if you are content to simply copy and paste code into your flash apps. I'd like to really understand the topic at hand and for me this book failed miserably.
   
   1. This book is poorly edited. I know it is difficult to make sure there are no typos when you're reading through code examples, but somehow O'Reilly press gets it done very well. I found several examples in the first few chapters, some of them actually interfering with my comprehension of the text.
   
   2. This book does a very poor job of explaining complicated topics. In some places, the authors suggest readers turn to pdf files on the included cd for further explication. The pdf files I looked at, however, were simply scans of handwritten notes. This would have been acceptable to me, but the notes really didn't explain anything any more than the book or code examples did.
   
   When explaining how to test for collisions between graphic objects, the book attempts to describe a quadratic equation. This appears to be a difficult thing to describe; however, this does not excuse shortcuts such as simply not explaining how/why the authors solve the problem the way that they do. I am particularly frustrated by an example of code in which the variables are named a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j... Yes, the authors need to create a number of temporary variables and perhaps this method was optimized. But for a didactic text? Use variable names that actually mean something, that actually convey what is being done.
   
   Look elsewhere for your flash informationl.



3. This book does not use the typical approach where various games of increasing complexity and size are used to explain concepts throughout the chapters. Instead, part of the book is dedicated to small games pieces or recipes and another to full games. In any case, there are many areas of Flash game programming that are covered. Some of the topics include game math, level editors, artificial intelligence (AI) and even multiplayer games. Of course not ever topic is covered with as much detail as others. But, plenty of references to both web links and books are provided throughout the chapters and in the appendix for more information on certain topics. The book includes a CD with demo software, game files, PDFs and other various files.
   
   The first chapters (Part I) start with an introduction to gaming, including terminology and genres. Then is a description of Flash's capabilities and limitations. Surprisingly, there is no basic introduction to Flash or ActionScript that is frequently seen in other books. The rest of this section is dedicated to general development issues including game design and planning.
   
   The core material of this book was cover in Part II (Chapter 3-14). Here many of the fundamentals of game programming were explained through small example scripts and incomplete games. Game math is one of the first topics introduced, followed by physics and then collisions (detections and reactions). Following the math and physics related scripts did get a bit difficult at times. However, full understanding is not necessarily required since the many scripts provided can be easily implemented into other games. Also, the PDF files on the CD consisted of some of the equations used in the scripts with the math worked out in pencil. Aside from the math intensive chapters, there was still a lot of useful material in the remaining chapters. The chapters on tile and isometric based games provided good information on how to handle them more easily and efficiently. In addition, the chapter on AI was original, since it covered maze creation and path finding as well as the usual enemy attack/pursuit scripts that many books focus on. There was even a decent, although single and short, chapter on sound, including using it in Flash and creating your own. All the material in these chapters were explained in detail and included numerous images.
   
   The final part of the book concludes with discussion on several full functioning games. There is one game for each of the remaining chapters (15-18). Not all of the code from each game could be discussed, as the chapters from Part II took up the bulk of the book. Nonetheless, the key areas of each game were described in detail and the .fla source files on the CD did include comments. The CD also provided additional source files for a handful of full and incomplete games. Still, the games in these chapters were each complex and large enough to have warranted more coverage. The multiplayer chess game, which used a socket server (Chapter 16), could have definitely benefited from more content. Ultimately there were probably too few pages to fairly discuss the games in the final chapters.
   
   This book is certainly not for a beginner, since it does not have a Flash or ActionScript primer that most of these books would include. On the back cover it is categorized as intermediate to advance and I agree for the most part. It was at least a notch above in difficulty from beginner level books I have read so far. However, with little coverage on object oriented programming (OOP), it probably can not be considered a true advanced book. Some of the examples did use exported class files, but actual discussion on them was limited. In the end, I found the middle part on game pieces to be more helpful. Nevertheless, "Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified" is still a good book and will work as both a reference and a standard guide.
   
   Rating: 4/5



4. Very informative as far as what it teaches, but I noticed it's written for the experienced user...so why does it come with a demo of the software you're being taught? If you're experienced, you already own it, I think.



5. This book is worth reading if you are trying to develop flash games but don't read it as your first book on the topic ;) It gets into pretty advanced stuff that if you no nothing about Flash or ActionScript you will get a headache. I bought 6 Flash game dev. books and I think I tried to read this one second or something....I quit it and had to read the other books and then I read this last instead :D
   
   Still, I'd recommend it if you are trying to make a flash game beyond 'click the monkey'... ^_^'

5 comments about Building Extreme PCs: The Complete Guide to Modding and Custom PCs.

1. The book I ordered was in better than advertised condition. Shipment was very fast. Would order from again.



2. This is a very professionally done book on how to build your own computer. The pictures alone make it one of my favorite books. The detail is just right for anyone with some computer knowledge. The only knock is the fine print on the glossy photo pages can be a bit hard to read with tired eyes.



3. This book has some great pictures of some really amazing cases and mods, but not much in the way if information on how to actually do the modding.



4. Hello,
   
   In a nutshell: I was looking for a book to help build a high-end PC from the ground up. I ordered this book used. As others indicate above, if you like pretty pictures of exotic PCs, this book is for you. If you want specific pictures for how to build such a PC, avoid this book. There are no step by step photos that show how to assemble the Motherboard with components...where to put the chip (processor); how to hold the chip (and how not to hold the chip) as you place it on the Motherboard; how to apply thermal paste (Arctic); how to place a Zalman fan over the chip....Anyway, these are the important things one needs to know (+see) in order to assemble one of these high end computers.
   
   My advice: look elsewhere for a how to build book. However, if you want pretty pictures of what a fancy computer looks like, or flashy color photos of a nice motherboard, or a nice power supply...then this book is for the dreamer in you. Trust me though: look elsewhere for a book that will walk you through step by step - how to build a PC adding one part at a time.



5. Not much more than a lot of nice pictures of what other people have done. This book is not for learning how to build a computer, so if your thinking about getting it for that reason look elsewhere.

2 comments about The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Prima's Official Strategy Guide).

1. If you think that you would not need a strategy guide to get through the Two Towers, which is basically a hack and slash game, you would be very wrong...dead wrong in fact.

   Although at first look, the game looks like just a lot of button mashing and waving your sword around, there is a fair amount of strategy to make it through. For example, in the 3rd level (The gates of Moria) you have to fight the watcher in the water to finish the level. When I first fought, I assumed that I could just hold down the "Block" button, and block the tentales. 3 tries later, my frustration point was at a boil. Then I looked at the book, and discovered that I had to tap the button rapidly to block the tentacles. On my next try, I killed the beast with ease.

   In Balins tomb, I had a lot of trouble defeating the cave troll and finishing the level. Then I learned after reading the book that I had to do a double hack, then hop back with the L2 button. These types of examples are found all throughout the book, where it reveals all the nessisary tips that you would need to make it through the game.

   Other then these life saving stratigies, the guide has maps to guide you through (altough they are kind of vauge in detail). They also reveal all the cheat codes, and how to get the secret unlockable charachter.

   All in all, a worthy guide.

   The good:
   Reveals life saving tactics
   has all the cheat codes
   overall, a good buy

   The not so good:
   maps are vauge




2. I heard that the game is so fascinating but have observed that is much appealing to serve mostly adolescent boys (13-16 years of age). For those who are adult men but still enjoy owning/playing this adventuresome game must be catious to not offer this entertainment at all to children and women.

   In your own behalf, please safely enjoy your use of this spectacular game.

2 comments about Lostech: The Mechwarrior Equipment Guide (Mech Warrior 1722).

1. A good adition to any serious Gamers reference library. A must for game organizers.



2. Goes into great detail about guns and equipment but doesn't give any history or real story behind these things like 3025 did or most of the other equpment books do. Reads more like a D&D weapon book than a good and informitive Battletech source. This is another example of late era FASA junk. It would have been great if they had written it in the mid '80s.