Do You Cheat?

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JimmyB27

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As long as there have been games, there have been cheats. Who can forget Sonic's Up, down, left, right A+Start?
Actually, bad example because what I was about to say is, I've never understood the point of cheats. But in the days before save games, being able to jump to any level was a definite boon.
But infinite lives, infinite ammo, invincibility and so on....what's the point? The developers take a lot of time creating the game so that it's balanced and challenging. And people find it more enjoyable to just type 'GODMODE' and wander through without any chance of dying?
Why? For the love of god, why?
 

BigWords

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There are times I turn to the cheats so that I can do specific things within a game, but I never use cheats to advance the gameplay. Sometimes it is so I can set up a stupid event that will be Frapped, sometimes it's so I can get to an otherwise inaccessible location to see if the designers have bothered to include an easter egg.

Once I have spent 40+ hours with a game I get curious about the things which I haven't yet seen, so I tend to try and find everything that the designers have put in the game.
 

Kievah

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I rarely use cheats. Reserve them for games I don't want to spend the time and effort on, but seeing the ending still has me curious.

Mostly, I play RPGs. And I don't use walkthroughs until the second or third playthrough.
 

Lhun

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But infinite lives, infinite ammo, invincibility and so on....what's the point? The developers take a lot of time creating the game so that it's balanced and challenging.
Except that sometimes, they don't. On of the examples i can remember of the top of my head, is Empire Earth. That game almost forces you to cheat (at least in free mode) because for some reason the AIs only fake fighting each other even when you explicitly assign them different teams. A 4 nations free-for-all is only possible if you use the cheat to remove the fog of war, because the AI unit only fight each other when you can see them. Of course, it is pretty hilarious if you know about that and set up some scouts in the right place so you can watch all the AIs send units in your direction so they can kill each other in front of your gates.
And people find it more enjoyable to just type 'GODMODE' and wander through without any chance of dying?
Why? For the love of god, why?
It depends on what you want to get out of a game. If you just want to reread the story cheating makes sense i suppose. Or if you're bored with the tenth repetitive mission and just want to know how it all ends.
I mean, i enjoy playing FF8 again and again, and i always do the no-leveling thing because i think that's fun. It's pretty much anti-cheating, and i've had people ask "For the love of god, why?" about that too.
Other people like finding ways to finish Morrowind or Half-Life in under thirty minutes. It all depends on what you think is fun about a game.
Though take it on good authority (i started playing on a C64 ;)) that what the game designers thought would be fun about a game is pretty often not actually fun for most, if not all players. Hell, i still play Diablo 2 and the devs have somehow managed to avoid, despite constant demand over the course of at least a dozen patches, putting in any way to transfer items between your characters.
 
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cethklein

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Yes, in action games anyway. This is mainly due to me being absolutely terrible at them. My brother was always good at them and so I'd use codes to do as well as he did.

I don't like cheating at adventure games though. I'm playing through the remake of Monkey Island on Xbox (FANTASTIC game by the way,, everyone needs to try it.) I'm stuck as it's been years since I played it. I'm trying hard not to look for the solution online and it's tough.
 

icerose

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I never ever cheat in multi-player games. That's like the ultimate pathetic.

On games that they've made so difficult you have to play it perfectly to get anywhere and it's so frustrating you've just spent fifty freakin' bucks on a game you can't even get off level two! Yeah, I throw in the cheat codes. I keep them light and only the necessities to get by, I despise god mode it takes all the fun out of it.

On RPG's I'll use cheats the second time through because I'm playing just for fun and to see the story again and I really don't want to spend the next three days grinding up my character level by killing beasts in the evil forest...

And really that's about it. Games that are far too difficult that only a handful of humans could actually beat them and only after I've given them more than my fair shot, and games I've already beaten.
 

GeorgeK

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The developers take a lot of time creating the game so that it's balanced and challenging.

I don't completely buy that. Maybe it's a case of you can't please everyone. Maybe a puzzle is fun for me, but not for the next guy. As long as you are not playing against another person, it's all just a high tech game of solitaire. Today I can put a red five on a black seven...so what? I don't use cheat codes but some of my kids do. Some games I simply can't play due to nerve damage, like non keyboard games. It's painful and clumsy for me to hold a controller or use a mouse quickly. My answer is normally to not buy the game at all. I've played a game of Pirates with my sons where I did the ship combat and navigation. One son did the dancing. My other son did the dueling. Is that really different than a cheat code? Is having "easy", "medium", and "hard" a cheat? Some of my kids buy games where they have to (or maybe just want to) use a cheat code to get past a certain obstacle. Were it not for the cheat codes, they'd buy fewer games. Which solution will the developer prefer? Artists have long had to deal with the fact that not everyone will enjoy every aspect of their work. Will the chef refuse your money if you put ketchup on a filet mignon?
 
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Cranky

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I've used cheats on occasion, but mostly, they take all the fun out for me, so I try not to do them. I *never* cheat with online multiplayer games, and I don't screw around, either. I've seen this happen a fair few times playing Resistance II online and it pisses me right off when people sabotage missions to for laughs.

But most of the time (with rare exception) I don't see the point of cheats, at least on a game you haven't beaten at least once or tried your very best to beat.
 

Zoombie

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The only cheats I ever use are the ones in Call of Duty 4. And...thats just cause the cheats are things like "Ragtime warfare" that speeds everything up, puts it into a sepia tone, and plays cheesy ragtime music.

The only thing that Ragtime Warfare needed was cards to appear whenever a character speaks.

Cause that'd be *hillarious*.
 

JimmyB27

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The only cheats I ever use are the ones in Call of Duty 4. And...thats just cause the cheats are things like "Ragtime warfare" that speeds everything up, puts it into a sepia tone, and plays cheesy ragtime music.

The only thing that Ragtime Warfare needed was cards to appear whenever a character speaks.

Cause that'd be *hillarious*.
Sounds like the 'cheats' you could unlock on Aliens vs Predator. Remember the sniper head munch? Superb.
 

Zoombie

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Actually, it reminds me EVEN MORE of the cheats from the original Turok game on the N64, back when it was about a time traveling Native American. Anywho, one of the cheats was disco mode, wherein all the enemies would dance disco rather than fight you.

Combine that "big head mode" and it gets just plain...weird.
 

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The only cheats I ever use are the ones in Call of Duty 4. And...thats just cause the cheats are things like "Ragtime warfare" that speeds everything up, puts it into a sepia tone, and plays cheesy ragtime music.

The only thing that Ragtime Warfare needed was cards to appear whenever a character speaks.

Cause that'd be *hillarious*.
I do use those sort of cheats on Vice City & San Andreas (but only off-mission) just for the fun of flying cars and making the character smoke.
 

Adam

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I cheat in some and not in others. It depends on the game. As a rule I don't cheat in adventure or RPG games, but I do in FPSs and other action games.

If it's in any way multiplayer (whether it be 2 player or MMO), I don't, as it's not fair on the other players.
 

Shadow_Ferret

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I awful at games, especially RPG's if there's some sort of puzzle or riddle that needs to be solved. I guess my mind isn't set up that way. So yeah, I cheat to figure out what the solution is so I can get to the next level, otherwise I'd be stuck there 4-evah.
 

Clair Dickson

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I do sometimes. I also skip to the end of the book and read the end sometimes, too.

Usually I cheat only when I've played the game awhile and want to mess around. Like with the Sims, (orig. version, cause I cheap) where you can cheat yourself a whole bunch of money and buy a super awesome house at the beginning of the game instead of waiting until hours and hours later when your peon person has made enough to afford the cool stuff.

We all get what we want out of a game... some people want fun, some want that fun without as much frustration. If I've paid my money for the game, it's my call what "fun" is.

Some people even eat coconut... even though it's in a big shell to discourage such foolishness. =)
 

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I've never been into cheats

UNLESS it's a multiplayer title, and to unlock more stuff for multiplayer mode would require me to do a lot of boring/insanely difficult stuff. If I bought a game to play with my friends and family, I want to be able to play it with my friends and family. So I've used cheats to get the more difficult cars in racing games, etc, after exhausting the single-player fun.
 

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I don't cheat in games during my first playthrough.

On subsequent playthroughs I'll mess around with cheats just for the fun of it. It's just cathartic to go back with invincibility or unlimited health and ammo and revisit a level that kicked you around like a comatose schoolgirl the first time you played it.
 

BigWords

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I don't cheat in games during my first playthrough.

On subsequent playthroughs I'll mess around with cheats just for the fun of it. It's just cathartic to go back with invincibility or unlimited health and ammo and revisit a level that kicked you around like a comatose schoolgirl the first time you played it.

There was a character in Jedi Knight 2 who you couldn't kill no matter what you did. I discovered the invincibility of the NPC after spending the better part of a day trying to kill him, using every trick I could think of...
 

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I cheat when there is a glitch in the game. Like I remember years back, this King's Quest game, Mask of Eternity. There was this darn feather I could not pick up, no matter how hard I tried. Turned out to be a glitch, needing a patch.
 

Shoeless

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I cheat when there is a glitch in the game. Like I remember years back, this King's Quest game, Mask of Eternity. There was this darn feather I could not pick up, no matter how hard I tried. Turned out to be a glitch, needing a patch.

Reminds me of Troika's attempt at Vampire: The Masquerade. It was a really refreshing game for the time, but there was a bug in it that actually made it impossible to advance beyond a certain point in the game until the patch came through.
 
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