Topic: Hand-Drawn Game Guides by Phil Summers (NES)

[JonLeung]

Hand-Drawn Game Guides

If you go here and scroll down to "The Original Unofficial Guides, for FREE!", you can download .PDFs of hand-drawn game guides for some NES classics: Contra, The Legend Of Zelda, Metroid, and Ninja Gaiden.  When the art is cool (and cute), just generally well-done, there's definitely visual appeal to these.  I like the comic style and how there's just random drawings everywhere.  The Metroid and Ninja Gaiden ones are especially cute; I think the "seriousness" we associate with Samus and Hayabusa makes for an interesting juxtaposition when they don't look or act like hardened warriors.

I swear we talked about them earlier here in these forums, but I can't find that topic.  I know I'd heard about these before, something about issues with crowdfunding, maybe?  Unless that was something else?  In any case, I'd only just (re?)discovered that these guides are free, and it sounds like Phil Summers is working on another one.

Pretty cool stuff, eh?

[TerraEsperZ]

I too remember that discussion because I was a subscriber to Phil Summers' Patreon for about a year during which he released six issues of his Hand-Drawn Gaming series before closing his page down: Castlevania, Gimmick!, Double Dragon 2, Mega Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bionic Commando.

The artwork was as good as the free guides but they were smaller at eight pages each and usually only featured partial maps or simple tips. I can't complain because the artwork was very good, reminding me a bit of Katsuya Terada's artwork for Nintendo Power's three parts Secret of Mana guide in issues 62, 63 and 64 way back in 1994.

If he's working on an actual book, I'm curious to see what it's going to be about!