Manuals. Strategy guides. FAQs. Youtube videos. I've been using them pretty much since I started playing video games seventeen years ago. My first manual was Nintendo Power's player's guide for Donkey Kong Country. Ever since then, the softcover guides have been a major part of my video gaming hobby.

First and foremost, I use them to help me through rough or confusing parts of a game. In some cases, I use a guide the entire time I'm playing a particular game because I don't want to miss anything. The Final Fantasy games are a good example of this.

In addition to actually being used as intended, strategy guides - at least for me - can be a sort of collector's item, a form of game memorabilia. I'm not just talking specifically about the Collector's Edition hardcover strategy guides they come out with these days. I'm talking about any physical guide that you could buy at a store. Yes, they can be used to help you play the game, but they can also enhance your experience with the game through their layout, the illustrations or pictures featured throughout, or simply because they can help you remember elements of the game when you haven't played the game for a while and feel like being nostalgic. Just as games have a personality all their own, so too do the accompanying strategy guides. They mesh well on purpose.

So, on to the question at hand. Are walkthroughs, no matter which form they come in, a form of cheating, much like using a Gameshark device? My primary belief on the matter is that no matter how detailed the walkthrough is, it is still the player that is inputting the commands via their controller. The walkthrough might be telling the player exactly where to go, what to do, and how to do it, but it's still the player getting the in-game avatar or whatnot to carry out those actions. In this respect, I find absolutely nothing wrong with using walkthroughs. If anything, they allow the player to gain more pleasure and entertainment from the games that they play.