Do you use cheats, walkthroughs etc?

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Helmsly]

tl,dr: I use whatever I need to make the game as enjoyable as possible.

 

right, this is exactly what I do once I've beaten a game. Sadly hardly any games these days even have fun cheats or cheats at all.

[Blade]

Yes to walkthroughs/video guides. I only use them though if I do get truly stuck and have spent a few hours trying to figure what to do/ where to go next etc. I used to be totally against guides and just refused to use them eventually resulting in not playing te particular game that I was stuck on.

 

I buy games to have fun, chill out and not to get stressed over therefore I will use a guide as a last resort to ensure that I continue to enjoy thr game.

 

Ive not used cheats since Sonic 1 on the Mega Drive. Actually thats a lie I used an action replay to get all the new starters and Mew on Pokemon Blue

[Jonnas]

Guides: Only if the problem/obstacle I'm presented with feels like it has an obtuse solution. If I see a puzzle that I can't solve easily, or a boss that I can't beat right away, I'd rather find a solution on my own. Otherwise, the experience feels cheap and incomplete, like reading the abridged version of a book.

 

(Fun fact: Back in Ocarina of Time, I only used the FAQ in 4 separate occasions. One of them was playing the Ocarina to Darunia, because whenever I tried, the game wouldn't register because I was always a couple of steps from him :P)

 

I should also add that, in Hitman (which I've been playing recently), I also checked videos to see how other players choose to complete their missions. Most of the times by curiosity, and only after I completed the mission (or at least after I tried multiple, multiple times, until the problem became obtuse).

 

 

Cheats: For silly fun, they're great. But never as a means to help beat a game. The shortcut principle is the same.

 

Funny that Ville should mention Age of Empires II, because one of the mongol missions was the only mission in the game where I seriously used cheats (a.k.a., I used the "Win instantly" cheat), because I wanted to see how the other missions were. To this day, the only instance I recall of ever using a cheat to progress.

[Cube]

For guides, it depends on the game. I wasn't fond of the gameplay in Catherine so I watched a video as I played. Most of the time I avoid walkthrough unless I'm stuck on a part for ages (and then it usually tuns out that I missed an item in an obscure location, or something extremely simple).

 

Cheats I used after a game is finished. Sadly, these are in decline.

[Agent Gibbs]

Guides generally i will only use if i have to, or if there are missable items/scenes that i'd rather not miss, for example i usually print off a list of skits for tales games and tick them off as i get them, and occasionally i print maps of, like i did for Dragon Quest (forgotten which) on the DS for the map items

The rest of the time its if i've gotten stuck and its making the game unenjoyable, then i'll look what i'm missing and continue

 

As for cheats.....mainly on second or third play through to allow me to experience the story etc with ease or just to muck around (ala gta games)

 

 

should we include Mods in this? as technically they could be seen as cheats....

Mainly Fallout/TES series games i will add some items/skins etc, nothing that is game destroying or stupid but technically its an item not normally obtained so its sort of a cheat. for example with New Vegas i added a Tommy Gun and a mod that improved the weapon customisation to make it more uniform and realistic, it made the initial bit of the game easier, but the rest of the game was standard really

[Jimbob]

I only ever use walkthroughs/guides if i am well and truely stuck. I like to just explore areas and find secrets/areas out for myself. When i was younger, i did use game guides often but i havn't used one in ages. Games like Zelda, Mario Sunshine, Fable, Gears, Assassins Creed etc i do use guides. But that is only for finding locations for items i may have missed in my initial playthrough e.g. heart pieces, blue coins, cog tags, gnomes/gargoyles/keys, feathers/pages etc. I do hunt around for these, but i do end up using a guide at times.

 

Cheats however are a no no, unless it's GTA and i've completed the game and just fancy a muck around. Then it's perfectly fine. Spawning a helecopter randomly or a tank and going on a rampage is usually fun.

[are1981]

If I have been stuck for a long time, around an hour or more, I might do a www-search; but I usually just stop playing, resume hours or days later, only to find the solution pretty quickly.

 

I feel good having completed ♥Toki☆Tori☆2♥ without any outside help. (I miss just a few 'items', maybe five.)

[Rummy]

Top topic, @Ville! Something that's always been very close to my heart tbh. There's a big generational/technological aspect to consider as well. There's also cheating(tips), cheating(walkthroughts), and cheating(hacking/glitching/cheating). Gonna make a proper tl;dr here. I'm all Nintendo throughout this btw.

 

As a kid, cheating wasn't easy. You didn't know how if you didn't find it(or if you didn't have other means, which I'll come to soon). I know magazines and media at the time might print stuff, but I didn't get those and it would have been minimal. I recall the button codes in goldeneye staying secret for a long time - either hacked out or leaked.

 

Now...hacking out. I, as a child, happened to end up getting a Game Genie. From there my love of cheating began. You could cheat just for cheating's sake(and I did, all through mario world) - and you could also cheat just to do things and play the game how you aren't supposed to; finding strange things along the way. You've here got both cheat device cheating, and the no accessories needed glitching - less common but sometimes a big glitch opens up whole new worlds(such as the select/map warp glitch in Link's Awakeneing).

 

I recall with the Game Genie you could 'change' codes by altering the first two digits, it was a weird and arbitrary system that made no sense to me as a kid because it was encrypted - but I did it none the less. The other sad thing was when newer games came out, you had no codes(you only had the book it came with when you got it). My hack-cheating days were behind me. At least until later, anyway.

 

 

Then came the internet, and with it, a flood of tips, 'cheats'(often tips), and walkthroughs. You found out stuff about your game that you never knew(unless you'd use the earlier 90s resource in the back of every good instruction book...The Nintendo Hotline! Told us where to get the whistles for SMB3, think it told us how to complete the impossible castle in Lost Levels, and even told us how to get somewhere in Yoshi's Island(we got stuck very basicly)). That was it though - sometimes you just got stuck, and with places like the internet - CheatPlanet, CheatCC(frowned upon by many), GameFAQs later down the line etc. Man! You could know all sorts! Of course, there were still trolls back then too, even if they didn't have a name - making up many a fake cheat amongst the real ones. One favourite of mine was GameWinners, who had a wealth of user submitted content - and the first major forums I joined back in November 2000 for help with finding Don Geros frogs in MM. Those forums were a very big part of me then, and I only rocked out on the Zelda ones mainly!

 

My hacking days weren't over; of course. With the advent of the internet, and gaming magazines and their adverts - I picked up both an Action Replay Pro for my N64(along with a 4MB expansion which allowed me to actually use the logic search engine to hack out my own codes as well as view the memory values to change them at my whim) AND I had a Pro Action Replay for my GBC...man. If I could tell you the things I learnt. Finding UK codes for the games on the internet was hard(being PAL the american ones didn't work), also the PAR and ARP were not encoded like the game genie(additionally I could now find new codes for these!) - they were raw hex values and stuff. Fortunately, whilst the codes themselves didn't exist; I eventually found many guides on how to successfully find them etc. From those I self taught myself hexadecimal. I also learnt about trying to port American codes by hacking out your own equivalent for your game, subtracting the address values and using the offset on all other codes(mixed success) - I learnt about button activators too. I remember also; finding codes for stuff like Dragon Warrior Monsters - and running them with all 255 different values - writing down the effects of every single one(done on a few games, until I realised mostly you get shit). It killed me to the day I realised that 255 didn't cover all the possibilities, and if it was a 2 address code you'd have 65535 potential values, or even more with a 3 address code! I gave up and didn't run through all of those, sadly(or not so rather!). I dabbled somewhere in the middle with emulation, roms, and hex editors there too.

 

 

Cheats really gave me the sense of doing what you aren't supposed to. Breaking the boundaries and doing it how you want. Cheats were like little secrets no one else was in on, and they were awesome. It's why I want less linear gameplay and more secrets in games(Super Mario World is still less linear than Mario Galaxy is, if you ask me). So yeah, I loved cheating - not just to 'win' the game, but to appreciate it in a different light. I'll admit when I've played some games and had the means, I'll have used cheats just to breeze through it and see it all; I might not have time or commitment to stick to just the gameplay alone.

 

 

Anyhoo, I've digressed. For me, walkthroughs and tips are 'help' but they aren't real cheating. I have no qualms on using them these days though I try and avoid it where I can. I'm lazier/less patient these days too though and turn to them easier because I can(no fighting for the computer, the phone, waiting for dial up, waiting for load, waiting to find the right site with the right information...). Cheats are a questionable sort, but as Cube mentioned they also seem to be dying out a lot - maybe they're no longer neccessary with the advent of walkthroughs and guides? Maybe people don't care for them anymore? I think often they were probably also just debug options left in the game, maybe these days that's just not needed. However, for me, cheating blew my world of gaming wide open and gave me both a lot of fun and good times. It also educated me quite a lot when I was playing with hex stuff and cheat devices, I can't begrudge that all. It did more for me than gaming alone ever would have.

Edited June 5, 2013 by Rummy

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Rummy]

I actually remember that Link to the Past came with a little hint booklet included, but it was sealed with a Triforce sticker and said something like "do not open unless seriously stuck". I thought that was a nice touch back then (and yes, I ended up opening it at one of the dark world temples).

 

Haha yeah I remember that. I think I opened it and read it quite early on because I couldn't play the game right away(so I was reading everything else instead lol). Very nice touch though, I think I still remember the bits it mentioned too. Man, what a game that was!

[Grazza]

Cheats - no. To me, they're just something I used to do when I was a youngster. When you had a £45 Mega Drive game, there was no shame in putting in a level select or something like that. With Revenge of Shinobi, I used to use the "infinite shuriken" code, and it never occurred to me that I hadn't completed the game properly.

 

Actually, in recent years I have started to cheat using Restore Points, which are an excellent way to take the stress out of certain sections. I wouldn't have been able to complete Zelda II without them. You still have to do everything yourself, you just have a safety net.

 

Guides - yes. I remember when Twilight Princess was released, I was determined to complete it without any help. Whilst I achieved this, it made the game seem far longer than it really is, and sort of ruined it for me. Nowadays I will simply have a game session and, if I couldn't work out what to do in that session, will look at a walkthrough the next day.

 

This may be controversial, but I don't think games should need guides or walkthroughs. If you need a guide, it means the game didn't give you enough information. Especially when it's an RPG, for instance, and there are permanent changes and missables. In these situations, the game should explain the consequences properly.

 

As for the more traditional type of walkthrough (ie. "what to do next"), I really think this is a huge area where games need to evolve. Things like Super Guide are a brilliant innovation, in my opinion, and need to develop further. It just seems so old-fashioned that when you get stuck you either a) give up or b) look on the internet. The next level of sophistication should be that you have all the data you need - how high you set your challenge is up to you.