I’ll cheat if I feel the game design is bad and/or if I won’t continue any further in the game without cheating.
Hmm, that reminds me of the one time I will almost always use a guide: in Metroid and Zelda games with a collection-type thing, so I A) know if there’s a point beyond which I’ll be unable to collect more things (see Metroid Fusion) and B) can get 100% if doing so proves to be something I can’t do on my own.
Never in multiplayer.
For single player, if a challenge defeats/kills me so often that it gets boring I’ll use a cheat code if available. I play games for fun, not masochism.
I also always liked using the “get all weapons”, “get tank”, “populace is armed” and 'populace riots" cheats in GTA games. Then go on a rampage as the city burns. I never actually saved those, though.
I start hacking after I have exhausted all the fun out of the original game. This usually gives me an additional 20-30% more play time on it, but once I start hacking, the game is essentially over and I’ll probably never play it again. One game, Mechcommander, I haven’t hacked yet. I still enjoy playing it too much.
Yes - Other. I don’t cheat often, but I have at times. Sometimes I’ll cheat when the alternative it giving up on the game entirely: I suck bad enough at some games that I have to do that to get my money’s worth.
And sometimes I just cheated because the cheat itself was awesome. Who doesn’t love using the Death Star or Simon the Killer Ewok? And in Duke Nukem I cheated so that I could fully explore and admire the environments without having to worry about the pigs shooting me up. (Though similarly to my first comment, I would not have seen the later levels at all without cheating. What can I say, I suck.)
Also, I gotta ask: assuming anybody else here will admit to playing the franchise-themed lego games (star wars, batman, indiana jones, harry potter) - do you consider using the “cheats” that are openly built into those and other games to be cheating? Not looking them up and punching them in, but actually buying them using fairly earned* in-game money and then using them thereafter. I think it’s not cheating, since they’re obviously built in as part of the game and expected to be used, but I wonder if anyone else holds the contrary opinion.
- okay, I dunno if you can call it ‘fairly earned’ when you’ve multiplied your earning power up by 5000x using other “cheats”…
I chose ‘yes - other’, since I’ll do so to mess around with the game in ways that the developers probably didn’t intend. Like seeing what I can make the physics engine do, or setting up a situation.
For example - Star Wars: Dark Forces (? think it was that one). I’d shut off the AI, then walk up to the Stormtroopers with the shock weapon/cattle prod, and poke them in various places to watch the fun. Or, turn the AI back on, and God mode, then get a bunch of Storm Troopers to follow me into the hangar bay. Then, turn AI off again, go into control room, and open the hangar bay to space.
I won’t cheat in multiplayer though, unless all involved have agreed to. Sometimes, you just want to have fun jumping around like lunatics on speed shooting rockets everywhere.
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I’ll cheat when I’ve beat a game, or to pull me out of a hard spot caused by lazy or incompetent game design. For instance, I beta-tested Mount & Blade. (Great game.) A lot of fun and “buying” a beta key meant you got the full game thrown in when it was released, for a major discount. (I think I paid $12 back in v0.7) However, savegames were incompatible between major patches. That meant you had to grind your way back up to the levels where the game was fun to play at. And with the slow movement speed, harsh fog of war restrictions and endless journeying, leveling a lvl 30 character could easily take 20+ hours of game time. So I cheated for experience, gold and no fog of war. Essentially taking the RPG elements out of it, but preserving the fun.
Ach, I’ve made myself nostalgic now.
Goes off to play Mount & Blade: Warband
I tried a GTA game, whichever one required the player to kill some Chinese dude in a kiosk. The only way I could complete that mission was to get the tank and boom!
I don’t know if it is technically a cheat, but if I get so stuck that I cannot get past a certain point after a (seems like) a thousand tries, i will use the hint section in the handbook. But very rarely.
Hell, I never knew there even WAS a plot to the GTA games until I had already put about 10 hours of massacre and mayhem into the game.
“Yes, but only at times like when a game bores me.”
What I mean by this is that in single-player games I’ll occasionally use a cheat or exploit to get past some tediously grindy part of the game, usually involving income. For example, in Dragon Age: Origins, I did the trick where you get the scale which gives you the quest to get the armor made, sell the scale, get the armor, then buy the scale back, which again triggers the quest to get the armor made. You can create infinite sets of armor this way, which can then be sold for nice chunks of gold. Or in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, I would sometimes save my game before starting a card game, so that I could restore to the save point if I lost.
Dear Squaresoft: There was a reason the Draw system only lasted one game. Painful.
Also, you don’t realize how far you can get in FFX without running into a random battle until you go back and play VI. Yeah, sorry, I like to make it more than 3 footsteps before the next random battle.
Anything that requires excessively boring grinding gets the cheat treatment from me. You never realize how short RPGs actually are until you take away the level grinding. And as impressive it is to defeat FFXII’s Yiazmat in under 5 hours, that ain’t my thing.
I should have read the thread first; I chose Yes-Other because I absolutely love the cheatcodes for Age of Empires and will whip those cars out anytime!!
But I can’t cheat in anything multiplayer, even if I suck and get pwned otherwise. Which is most of the time. >.<
Why is that relevant? This thread is about cheating in solo games. A few people have chosen to specify that they never cheat in multiplayer games, but multiplayer game activity is, for the purposes of the OP, irrelevant.
Because I would have chosen one of the other Yes’s if I’d known multiplayer was out of the picture. I chose ‘other’ to explain the solo part.
Ahhhhhh, that makes sense.
Not cheating in multiplayer is pretty widely understood. Those that would are too scummy even for this board.