Growing up when I was gaming in the 90s and on, I knew of the stigma of cheating in video games. You were seen as stupid, someone incapable of completing challenges on your own. You were seen as lowly, someone who can never go through life without cheating. Like, it was a pretty big deal as I grew up, hearing all of this for years on end.
I’ve been able to beat games without cheating, of course. But during my late teens and early adulthood, I just tried going past the stigma. Cheating in video games don’t necessarily reflect how you handle life and don’t translate. I’ve found it quite fun to cheat in video games. Probably not in multiplayer and especially on the receiving end.
I even use cheats just to beat games anymore, who the hell cares. People only care if you want to make a big deal about it, by showing it to everyone and boast how you’ve beaten a game in record times. I’ve tried beating some games head on without cheats but there just comes a point where you ask yourself if it is fun dying a hundred times at some part of a game. I don’t think so, personally.
So yeah, I don’t have the stigma anymore. I kinda like how gamers today only care about cheating if it was done in multiplayer or if you’re trying to beat a speedrunning record or some score record. Fun is meant to be how you find it.
Single player, sure, especially grindy jrpgs just to cut down on time to complete time
Multiplayer. Absolutely not
In single player yes, because I play how I want to play.
In MP with friends, no I don’t.In MP with friends, no I don’t.
Back in my day cheats added so much more variety for local multiplayer games with friends. Some cheats were hilarious, like giving you big head, or add gameplay features. Nowadays off course with strangers on the internet where only one part have them activate is unfair. How times has changed.
That’s wild, definitely did not experience that stigma growing up in the 90s. Cheats were just something fun to play around with, like the skins or big head mode that we used to unlock. Of course cheating in multiplayer, especially PvP has and should be considered taboo unless all parties are in agreement, but cheats in single player like a GTA or the Sims are just for fun.
“big head mode” reminded me of Turok for N64 disco mode( SNFFRR ) that somehow I still have memorized like the contra +30 lives on NES.
Yeah, but not the way you’d think. I’ve used cheats to go back and re-fight bosses and such in silksong or to make the funny hahas in Skyrim (thomas the tank engine dragons are funny).
But not really for anything meaningful that would affect progression of the game.
Sometimes it can be fun to mess around. In Crysis 1 I used cheats to make myself super strong, I would punch people and they would go flying, it was great.
But then I increased the strength higher and when I punched someone I would die for some reason. I realized if I backed away while punching I would survive. Turns out the physics of the game, with the enemy ragdolling, actually calculated that the enemy’s legs would swing up and kick me and that’s what was killing me.
In singleplayer only.
For me, a SP game is a toy to play with as I see fit. If I can’t play with it how I want to or make it so, what’s the point? Games are for fun.
Accessibility options in a lot of newer games have fortunately made cheats largely unnecessary, but it’s helpful to have them anyhow.
player.additem 3377d 25You Psycho.
This one’s gonna
tclit’s way out of this conversations…
Design-wise, I think cheats were basically the original difficulty slider and sandbox mode before studios shipped those as real options. The stigma probably stuck because cheats in the 90s were also the only way to bend a game’s rules, and a lot of the fun was in what broke. Big head mode never made a game harder, it just changed the mood. Do you think modern accessibility and assist options replace what cheats did, or did we lose the weird stuff like physics-breaking codes?
Lol no.
They were almost all just game testing features. Infinite lives, being the ubiquitous one
I’ve been gaming since the early 90s and I’ve used cheats over the years. I don’t take games too seriously (for the most part).
Around the Xbox 360 era I stopped cheating because of the achievement systems reduced built-in cheats for many games. That same time I also played a lot of multiplayer with friends so I didn’t cheat in those types of games (Halo 3 multiplayer was so much fun).
But I also remember grinding COD4 on veteran difficulty or grinding The Last of Us for that max difficulty backpack. Until your post today I forgot I even did all those things and none of it even matters today.
These days I don’t take games too seriously anymore. I only play solo now so I play games on easy mode and I resort to cheats/trainers/mods if I need to. I’ve gotten to that place in my life where gaming is less important than other things and I simply don’t have the time to play a game all day long.
Some memorable ones from back in the day:
- IDDQD
- F2+F3+F6
- NO TALENT
- DIFFICULTY_SCALE = 0.00
Never been very competitive in games, so cheating to win against other people was never something I’ve felt compelled to do.
But in single player games, all the time! XP earning multipliers in Pokémon, house ruling Arkham Horror so Investigators can interleave their Actions in any order, starting Sims with all the money! Editing a save file to resurrect that one NPC I might’ve killed for being too snarky in etc etc.
I wish I could cheat more in computer games, honestly!
I don’t cheat on multiplayer but do modify games however I want if it is single player or in multiplayer games with friends who want the same kind of modifications.
I have a backlog that I refuse to leave untouched. And sometimes the games take too long, not to cheat. So I do like to speed things up so this backlog actually shrinks.
I always felt like cheats were rewards for beating the game. Once I had accomplished a given thing in a game on my own, I never felt bad about giving it to myself again - especially in the days before saving in games was a standard thing. So even when schoolyard chatter taught me where the warp whistles were in Mario 3, I didn’t use them to get to Boswer until I had got that far myself.
100%, but it’s really just to cut down on grinding JRPGs stuff.
Like adding 999 Rare Candies to a Pokemon game.
Or maxing out Materia for FF7 Remake.
I will also occasionally use a save editor, for example. To unlock a late game companion in Mass Effect 2, because they’re one of the most interesting squad mates in the game and you only get them for about 3-5 hours in most playthroughs. Plus they have a bunch of dialogue in the game naturally, and seemingly were meant to be unlocked earlier.
It’s
Tap for spoiler
Legion, my beloved.
Only if I run into a bug or blocker that would basically mean all the time I spent playing was useless.
