What is this strange flippy thing... with letters?

I forgot to mention this anecdote back when I picked up InFAMOUS (I'm about halfway through, review coming soon people!) for the PS3. So I traded in my unused Xbox Qwerty Keypad (which I bought for TOJam because I thought I was going to need one to have people play the text adventure I created but I didn't need it... yeah, that's a story for another post) and in the return/exchange line at Best Buy something strange happened to me.

I put the unopened mini-keyboard in front of the BB employee, who was already bored on this Tuesday morning, and she went through the usual motions of returning an item. The manager was called to open the cage to get a copy of just released game and I fished through my wallet for my debit card and Best Buy Rewards card.

Alas, my worn down blue swipey rectangle was nowhere to be seen and I remembered taking it out and putting it in the back pocket of something when I had checked my account a few days prior. I looked up at the apathetic twenty-something with the bright yellow tag in front of me and asked if my points could be added on since this was an exchange from a previous order where I had used my card.

Fine, I'd have to do it by internets. No big deal. I swiped my warped debit card and put in my pin (but not backwards). At this point I looked at my shiny new game and noticed something sitting underneath it. Suddenly, I was mesmerized by the items before me.

I walked away from the counter in a trance, forgetting to ask the woman what this extra thing was. Black. Electricity. Bike-courier/biker wannabe. All the elements of the cover of my new PS3 game were on this big, solid rectangle. I wondered if it could be a new type of instruction manual that wastes even more paper. Maybe it was some part of a special edition that I was unaware of. What could it be?

A memory, forged centuries ago in the back of my mind started to reappear like fireflies at the sundown. Words... letters... periods... this was a book! But, no, more than a book. There were pictures inside and maps and enemies and 'tips'. This was a guide for something. It outlined the strategy of the game. Obviously this must be some relic that an action-anthropologist would go after. This was a grail.

As I turned the pages it all came back to me. These things before the era of the interweb. The Strategy book! No, that's not it... the Strategy... Guide. Strategy Guide. This is what I held in my hands and in my heart. I felt the importance in my hands and as I slipped the guide along with the game in my bag, I knew that it would sit somewhere in my apartment probably only to be opened a few times.

The nostalgia of the archaic book device made me smile a smile that I smiled as a kid.