I’m talking about games that you play solo rather in a multiplayer environment.
I don’t play games often, but when I do, I always research them and get all of the cheat codes and walk throughs so I don’t get frustrated with the game and can enjoy it from a more aesthetic point of view - for lack of a better way to describe what I mean.
For example, with Portal, I loaded up every cheat code I could find so I didn’t have to play the same parts over and over again just because I suck so bad at game mechanics. Had I not done that and knew the proper approach to the problems, it would not have been a pleasant experience.
I get the impression that many people view video games as a challenge to be overcome, but I view them simply as toys to be played with. Cheat codes often add a new dimension to a game that extends my play time with it.
In Civ IV, for instance, I detest how mountains and most desert tiles are useless, so at the start of a campaign I’ll crack open the map editor to change them all to hills and plains (and remove flood plains). Or I might change the whole continent to all grassland or all plains and see how that plays out. If I’m fed up with the restrictions on missionaries I might periodically use the city editor to add existing religions to all cities; or I might found and un-found all seven religions in 4000 BC to have a religion-free campaign. I might add corporations to my cities in the ancient era to see how much that affects my early expansion (answer: a lot). I might cover the whole continent with railroads at the start of the campaign and see how plays out. Back in Civ II my brother played a game where he gave himself a single stealth bomber at the start just to see how much it changes early gameplay (answer: entirely). Adding a silly parameter like this to a campaign is fun for me, and it almost certainly would have been less fun to play the game cheat-free over and over for the same amount of time.
I will almost always play a game through once without cheats first, and then use cheats to circumvent annoying aspects of the game. There is, however, the occasional game where I don’t even bother with one cheat-free playthrough. Tropico 3 is much more fun with the instant-build cheat; I don’t have to spend half my time staring at unattended scaffolds and yelling at my construction workers for dicking around on the other side of the island. I happily cheated my way through much of Warcraft III because I was much more interested in the story than the gameplay (I’m not really into RTS games).
If a game throws up some quick-time-events or random mini-game that blocks progress then I might look for a cheat. Other than that I prefer playing games on hard modes without cheats.
Same. If I feel the challenge is legitimate and interesting, I’ll go along with it, but the entertainment I get out of games isn’t necessarily directly related to the challenge they offer. I don’t really have a problem consulting guides or using codes to tweak the game to my liking.
I’ll always try to solve puzzles first, but if it gets frustrating, I’ll seek a walkthru - and a lot of the time find out I was right in the theory to use to beat it, I just either wasn’t persistent enough, or had made a minor mistake. (One good example of this is the Cloudless Skye quest in Dragon Quest IX…you have to kill a particular monster with a particular weapon. I had figured it out, but nothing was happening…eventually I looked it up…I’d MISREAD the name of the monster (going after Cumulus Vex instead of Cumulus Rex).)
If there’s an excessive amount of grinding involved in levelling up, I’ll use a cheat code to double experience gained if I can.
If there’s balance issues, I’ll use cheat codes to mitigate them, too - see food supply in the Warcraft RTSes (and gold and wood on certain maps).
If I’m finding a battle particularly frustrating, I’ll look it up…first checking if it’s intended for my level, not significantly higher, then, if so, I’ll glance over the strategy for general hints…then if I still can’t work it, read thoroughly for specifics.
Not usually, no. It kind of defeats the point, doesn’t it ? When there’s no challenge, there’s little pleasure in beating the game. The only times I cheat are when :
the game itself is rubbish, bugged and unfun from a gameplay point of view, but I still want to see the cutscenes/story
I already know the game inside and out and want to try whacky stuff out for shits and giggles.
I also confess that, after replaying the games a zillion times, these days when playing Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale I’ll just edit my starting stats to whatever I want instead of clicking the “Re roll” button for 20 minutes… But’s that not *really *cheating, is it ?
However, I certainly go to gameFAQs religiously to find out about hidden items, lost forevers, tactics I hadn’t thought about, best ways of getting gold/XP legitimately, number crunching I can’t be arsed to do for myself or solutions to inane dream-logic & badly translated puzzles.
I chose Yes - other. I only cheat after I finished a game. I just played through Mass Effect 2 for the nth time and didn’t feel like playing the stupid mining minigame. It takes about two hours to mine enough resources to get all the tech, so I just tweaked my save to get enough minerals.
Almost always for it’s to just go out and have fun blasting things. Give myself a full-auto machine gun (or Redeemer) with unlimited ammo in God mode in Unreal Tournament, and kill everything I see? But not if “victory” is in the offing, or it’s a plot based game (which I usually avoid anyway).
I like having the full arsenal early and usually limit myself to the guns the game has actually given me, but sometimes I like to use a bigger gun and so forth.
I’ll sometimes make myself invincible as well if I’m having a hard time.
Yes, when necessary. For instance, in Doom 3 (‘Never has black been rendered so well’) I shamelessly used the Flashlight cheat. And playing the original Doom, I use the light cheat, because otherwise I simply can’t see things; Doom was designed for CRTs and the game doesn’t display the same on LCDs.
I don’t really consider a walkthrough “cheating,” unless the game is something like the Professor Layton series. If I’m only planning to play a game once, I’ll probably use a walkthrough to some extent to make sure I get the most out of my single playthrough. If it’s something like a CRPG which I’m going to play multiple times, I won’t.
I also don’t really think cheat codes or mods which save the player time but don’t actually affect the difficulty of the game are “cheating” (though this depends on the specific change.) These I’ll use less often.
I never use unlimited ammo, god mode, etc. cheats.
The only way I cheat is skimming a walkthrough to find permanently missable content.
For example, I absolutely love Cave Story, but I think it was bad design to make a substantial part of the game (and most of my favorite parts) easy to miss without a walkthrough.
I picked “other” because, frankly, I don’t believe it’s possible to “cheat” in a single-player game. Cheating is something you do to someone else. When I play a game by myself, I’ll play it in whatever way is the most fun for ME. Sometimes that means playing the game in ways the designer didn’t intend, either making it easier or harder as necessary. But that’s not cheating.
I picked “Only when a game bores me” But it’s more “Only when it seems appropriate” if that makes any sense.
For example in Neverwinter Nights 2 I kept finding myself playing through the first 5 or so hours with different characters because I just couldn’t settle on one build. So finally after around the fourth or fifth try and when I was starting to get tempted to try a new build rather than restarting yet again I just found a character editor and replaced the main character with a new one. I went to painstaking ends to ensure the new character was perfectly valid so it’s not much of cheating from my perspective.
I did something similar recently when playing Baldur’s Gate for the first time.
And I used to love getting hex/memory editors and just putzing with values to see how the game reacts. It can be very interesting to see how a game responds to values outside of what it was programmed for. I don’t do this much any more though as most modern games either don’t react interestingly at all or just plain crash.
Yes. I’m a blatant cheater. Usually not cheat codes as much as I apologetically adjust game play sliders so games are moderately-difficult yet regularly beatable for me. I play very casually and if not, I’d likely only experience half the game. For example, I tried to beat GTA:IV without cheats and still haven’t seen the second half of the game since I’m STILL stuck on Snow Storm.
With a little help, my Madden drafts have been down right prophetic.
Yeah, I noticed that the drafts are the same few classes recycled over again, which is kinda weird. I started a couple of franchises, noticed it, traded for the first 8 picks in the draft and crushed the draft. Of course, I didn’t have the foresight to stagger the contracts and when they all came due, I was 35 million dollars over the salary cap without resigning any of my free agents.
