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.
Cheating destroys the joy I get from games. I used to run cheatengine, but noticed I got bored of the game the instant I ran a cheat. So I stopped. Only time I will create a cheat now is if I get stuck in something time consuming and I don’t really enjoy the game but want to see what’s next.
Never cheated in multiplayer, people who do that should be put to death, fucking assholes.
I don’t see the harm of cheating in single player games but I don’t personally like to do it. I like to play the game in the way the Dev intended.
I have a few exceptions. I replay Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 10 regularly and I do abuse the built-in cheats. Speeding up is a must have now, can’t live without it. I also use the Get all items cheat to complete the sphere grid before doing dark aeons. I establish that I can kill the monsters that drop the items and then just use the cheat. It saves like 10 hours of repetitive non stop grinding.
I like to cheat sometimes on singleplayer shooter games, give me all weapons and unlimited health so I can just kill monsters in a wild rampage to relax and release stress. This is especially fun in Serious Sam style games.
The other thing that I do in singleplayer games is to use mods, that could be seen as cheating too, which I personally don’t.
The point of games is to have fun, so you should play the game in the way that is most fun for you. Whether that involves cheating or modding the game is up to your own preferences.
Cheating only becomes a problem in competitive contexts because at that point you are being dishonest and ruining the fun for others.
There are some cases where cheating is not okay in singleplayer games and some cases where it is okay in multiplayer games. It all circles back to whether everyone is having a good time.
Its always okay to cheat in single player games
It doesn’t matter if its single player or multiplayer, if you are competing against other people, cheating is not okay.
If you cheat to get a highscore on a leaderboard in a single player game, thats not cool. If you cheat a speedrun in a single player game, you lose all my respect. If you use cheats to beat near impossible challenges in single player games to get clout on social media, that’s despicable.
It’s not always ok to cheat in single player games.
I would say that a game stops being singleplayer as soon as a any form of competition with other players is involved, this would make it asynchronous multiplayer in my eyes.
single player, absolutely. half the fun in the 90s was typing in a code from a magazine just to see what broke
If the devs can’t make a fun game I sure as hell won’t make it fun by cheating, I don’t know anything about game design or how things fit into a meta narratives. Sometimes, you have to have some trust in the devs (otherwise, why did I give them my money?). A quick look at how other people tackle a problem is also often more helpful, since there is a good chance I’m stubbornly not using some tool in my arsenal.
I use cheats to quickly test things in games lacking an editor, otherwise… the games I play don’t lend themselves to cheating, anyway. Cheat codes really don’t make much sense when lowering a difficulty somewhere is an option.
I can’t recall the last time I used a cheat. I so wanted a game shark growing up. Some games I will exploit systems if I get a chance. That said there is fun to putting on ‘god mode’ for a game like gta and going to town to just blow crap up, sometimes you just want to fool around.
I wouldn’t say I ever beat a game while cheating though, hell the list of games I’ve beaten is shorter than women I’ve dated (or at least close I don’t keep track anymore). Really though growing up with undiagnosed ADD and only being allowed to rent games, possibly for the best, I finished reactively few. Oh shit the Sierra adventure games I never count those ones for some reason, they were great for learning typing.
In the end just play how you want single player and don’t cheat multiplayer is what I think works. Though I wouldn’t call it beating a game if you used cheats, maybe saw ending or finished but not beaten. Though all semantics is all.
I never knew of that stigma. I grew up in the 90s too and as far as I can remember cheat codes were myths, legends… you’d obtain some level-skip codes in magazines, others through word of mouth… and some were completely made up, such as the one where you could allegedly get Lara Croft naked by making 200 full turns in the bathtub
I used to when I was younger, but I don’t any longer because overcoming the challenge became a big part of the fun for me.
Absolutely.
I like a challenge. It’s not fun if there’s no risk. But the bottom line is a lot of devs appear to not have a great grip on gameplay. These days if I come across a mechanic that is just bad, I cheat or go to Nexus Mods and find a mod to just strip the mechanic out of the game or alter it to make it more reasonable. Just got done playing a game I Nexus Modded the shit out of to get it to play the way I wanted.
Or maybe you just select a difficulty you think you can handle but you get halfway through the game and you realize you can’t and you aren’t going to start over cuz you have a life.
Cheating is totally fine to get the experience you want unless you’re doing it in an online game, then you can die a slow death.
I cheat on a lot of single player games and I’m happy to tell anyone. It makes gaming sooo much better. It’s one of the main reasons I favor pc gaming and have moved away from console. Cheating in competitive multi is nasty and I would never do that but for single-player it helps me reclaim time and avoid frustration. Grinding is a thing of the past - good riddance. I used to love it as a kid and I cannot stomach it now. Heavy punishments for failure is some sort of trend now and I don’t understand it and don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to replay 10 minutes to get back to where I was because it decided to send me back to the beginning of a level or a boss has 4 phases and I’m just stuck on the last one. I skip a lot of platforming in my action / adventure games - jumping around to climb a building is not why I’m playing. Rng for rewards - skip that too. Grinding and save scumming and guides were all strategies to work around annoyances but cheating is much faster and easier. I don’t make the game trivial I just make it so that I’m enjoying the fun parts and avoiding the tedious parts that I no longer have the time and patience for.
The only games I ever used cheats on were games where I wanted to experience the story of the game but found it to be prohibitively difficult to get through (Silver Surfer for NES and Einhänder for PlayStation are two that come to mind—I used a Game Genie and Game Shark respectively). One game where it was the opposite was Grand Theft Auto 3 (and Vice City). I have never actually played the storylines of those games. I just really enjoyed pulling rampages and wandering around. So I’d employ cheats to do that.
Most games are too easy. The moment you figure out how AI is playing it becomes too predictable and boring.
So, i do changes to make the game more difficult, more challenging, more memorable moments.
Mods aren’t considered cheating even if they make things easier, but then that is cheating, unless is makes other things harder to balance.
Sometimes, situationally, usually if I have already done something I need to do again. I just beat Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse tonight and intentionally got the good ending first. Then I had to redo the final boss fight the get the best ending, so I cheated so I could beat him within a couple of minutes that time.
Depends on the challenge. If you can figure out how it all works, you can usually overcome it yourself and that’s the best feeling, one of the best things about gaming. Don’t deny yourself this out of laziness.
But if the challenge is a timewaster, a grind, bugged, or just makes no sense, absolutely use cheats.
