You can even download them! Looks like there's everything from the Base Game to Bon Voyage. You can download them in a variety of formats - like for your kindle or epub reader, as well as PDF.

Enjoy!

https://archive.org/details/The_Sim...uide_PrimaGames

Edit: Looks like this was posted in The "Look at This Awesome Thing I Found!" thread. Whoops. (In my defense, I *did* search for "Prima Guide Archive" first.)

Thanks Jessa. That's okay.

That was still something awesome you found after all.

Is readin the guides actually useful? (askin seriously not flippantly)

I had always thought that the guides wouldn't be of much actual usage. Then after I opened this post a thought occurred to me that maybe if I read them I might find out some stuff that I could do that I'd never of thought of and am missin out on doin.

Thank you Jessa for this find it's good to know, I always made it a habit that when I first started playing the Sims 2 game, I would always buy the Prima Guide with each EPs, so I have all up to Freetime.

There was a Prima Guide (or an extract from one) about Body Shop on the official site. I got very little chance to use the official site, because I bought my game in November 2012, and the site closed on 14th January 2013, but in the few weeks between buying the game and actually starting it up (on 30th November), I read that Guide, and it taught me how to do simple recolours and alpha edits to clothing. The result was that by the time that my first Sim (Andrew Jones of course) came into the world on 30th November 2012, he was already wearing a pair of underpants I'd made for him. I've been using that basic knowledge of Body Shop ever since. So, yes, I reckon that reading the Prima Guides can be useful.

Thanks Jessa! I'll have a look at them.

Reading the official prima guides is really interesting, but do keep in mind some of the info in the guides is incorrect! Strange, since they're supposed to be "official" but maybe they were written before the games were finalized. Who knows. It's a good idea to check the sims wikia for more accurate info.

There is some useful information in them, but inbetween some inaccurate information (to get them released at the same time as the game, Prima Guides are written based on an earlier build of the game -- and some developers do a lot of last-minute tweaks) and modding, not all of it might apply to your game.

If I remember correctly, they were published at about the same time each EP was released, so the information there was obviously based on the pre-final version of the game.

I do dip into them occasionally, as sometimes they remind me of aspects of the game that I haven't played for a while and prompt me to go off and explore those scenarios. Plus they're also helpful as a reminder of which objects/outfits/hairs got introduced when. (Between a 2560x1440 screen and lousy eyesight I really can't tell the EP icons in the catalog apart nowadays.)

At the time, we were told the Prima Guides were written about 6 months or more before the release of the relevant EP - hence stuff got changed and they are inaccurate for some things.