Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games

Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games was published in May 1982. The book, published by Signet in New York, was a brief strategy guide for many console games in existence at the time. The book was divided into chapters by console type or manufacturer, and each chapter had an article on each game title available for that console. The book was published in paperback, with 676 pages and illustrated throughout with black and white line drawings.

Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games
AuthorKen Uston
LanguageEnglish
SubjectVideo Games
GenreEntertainment
PublisherSignet
Publication date
May 1982
Pages676

Ken Uston was a blackjack player, and at the time this book was published, had already had six books in print. Two of his previous books included Mastering Pac-Man (1981) and Score! Beating The Top 16 Video Games in 1982, dealing with standalone arcade games, which also had a "short intro to the Atari VCS, Intellivision, Odyssey2 home systems and some Coleco and Entex table-top games."[1]

The book was intended as both a guide to selecting a video game console from a growing market of then-expensive entertainment systems, and as a brief guide to gameplay of each game, however not necessarily for beating them.[2] Some of the systems have enjoyed a resurgence in the 21st century (Intellivision, for example), giving the book a slight degree of longevity in its original purpose, and the book remains a useful capsule history of available games and systems in 1982.

Chapter titles

Each game article (over 200 in number) was divided into sections (some sections were combined or omitted depending on the article):

  • Evaluation
  • Basic Objective
  • Scenario
  • The Board
  • Controls
  • Facts You Should Know
  • Strategies

See also

Jeff Rovin's The Complete Guide to Conquering Video Games and his "How to Win at" video game book series.

References
  1. cyberroach.com review accessed 20 Aug 2006.
  2. Video Games magazine, 1983 January, page 82 Review rating Usefulness 8, "Uston cheats when he uses the word beat. This simply is not a great strategy book."
  3. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4117034W/Ken_Uston's_Guide_to_Buying_and_Beating_the_Home_Video_Games Open Library's "About the Book" and Table of Contents, information.
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