StarCraft: Prima's Official Strategy Guide

by Bart G. Farkas

StarCraft: Prima's Official Strategy Guide is an invaluable tool for Blizzard's newest war sim. This guide gives complete statistics for terran, protoss, and zerg species. The book has detailed maps for all 30 single-player missions as well as tips for defeating opponents in multiplayer mode. Each of the units used by the warring races is explained in detail, with advice on how best to use them. Plus the Official Strategy Guide includes advice on using the Campaign Editor to create your own StarCraft battlefields.

Genres: Games, Guides

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Suz · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I swiped Dave's Dungeon Keeper play guide, I also snaked his Starcraft Prima guide. Just as I remember (Prima guides) and I actually played a couple of campaigns using the maps (for funsies).

[Victor Dimitroff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A classic guide for a classic game.

[Zach Askins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Look here, a relic of the past: a video game strategy guide—in print! In the year 2016, these serve as excellent paperweights and drink coasters! But there was a time long ago when these strategy guides had an even nobler use: for guiding strategy, believe or not—for, in the dark days before the Internet, people used to actually buy these, and I at one time dabbled in this activity when I bought an official guide for both StarCraft and its Brood War expansion. Being perhaps about 6 or 7 years old at the time, I pretty much just bought them to look at the pictures. Thumbing through the guide now, I guess I was easily amused back then, as all of the pictures are downright ugly and in black-and-white. Childhood is a strange thing.

Anyway, as for the inner content of the guide: I flipped through it a year or so ago when I was replaying the game's campaign, and it was fairly helpful. The campaign guide gives you some useful pointers, and displays a detailed map of each level, with suggested routes you can take during your playthrough. StarCraft isn't the quite the easiest game out there, so it's helpful to have a battle plan for some of the levels before you start playing through them.

As for some of the additional information contained within the guide, such as stats for all three of the different races' units and buildings: this information would of course would be available inside the game's manual, but regardless it's nice to have this information consolidated alongside the Prima walkthrough. Additionally, the guide also contains all of the game's cheat codes. Oh, how I used plenty of those in my younger years. I've typed "show me the money" more times than I care to count.

This was a decent guide for a great game in its day. Prima's walkthrough I imagine was quite useful to plenty of people back in '98. But as for today? I don't think so. You could find all of the information contained within this book on GameFAQs—and that's a website even older than this book! Yes, when appraising something so thoroughly obsoleted, such as printed strategy guides: decent just isn't good enough.

[Parker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing you can't learn from reading the instruction manual or logging a few hours on your PC, but since it's included with the battlechest you might as well have it handy in case you're an uber noob. Anyone familiar with any blizzard game other than rock and roll racers(which was technically released under their previous moniker of silicon and synapse) will find this to be a waste of time, other than the fact that the pre-map synopses are available in text form, but why would you want that when you can have the cool voice overs the designers intended?

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a strategy guide I could appreciate. The Starcraft campaign is a difficult one, and requires a good amount of guidance. The levels have been deemed painful by some and impossible by others, so the creation of this book is somewhat understandable when compared to the creation of guides unfolding plot driven games. This prima still spoils the ending, and most of the plot thereof.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

oooh nostalgia

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cheater's Guide.