I Cheat in Games, So What?

Cheat; a collection of instructions or special information that someone can use to help them play a computer game more successfully

Just so we’re all starting from the same point, that’s the Cambridge Dictionary definition we’re working from.

I recently tweeted that I thought The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild “is unnecessarily hard”. Someone who doesn’t follow me stumbled across the tweet and replied to tell me that I was “bad at games”. Not sure what their criteria for being “good at games” is, but I’ve always said that I choose the easiest difficulty option, so I doubt I’d ever meet them.

However, that does bring me onto my main point. I cheat in games. Developers have made this more difficult in recent years by not including cheat codes, but I play enough older games which had them. Cheating is seen as a bad thing these days, but years ago every gaming magazine and Sonic the Comic would have cheats for the latest games. Heck, I still have a book of cheats given away on the front of a magazine in the late-2000s, and a GameCube cheat CD! And a different book from 2009 titled 100 Greatest PC Games of All Time, but that’s beside the point. 1993’s Doom was at number one, in case you wondered.

Great!

But back to cheats. It’s only since developers stopped putting cheats in games that anyone has been against them. The majority of games don’t even have those Big Head Mode types of cheats, though to be fair that would be immersion breaking in Call of Duty.

You’re probably wondering how I cheat if games don’t have them anymore. As I mentioned, I play a lot of older games. For instance, I was having trouble with some of the Rainbow Six games while playing through them and used God Mode. There was an invisibility cheat in one of the Splinter Cells that I used a few times, too. But I have played a couple of more recent games, such as Rainbow Six Vegas 2, that don’t have cheats.

No cheats!

When you want to cheat in a game without cheats, you need what’s called a trainer - which are exclusive to PC games. They usually have multiple options available, and need to be running while the game is. Press a key combination and it enables a cheat such as infinite ammo or infinite money. I recently played through the majority of Superdimension Neptune vs SEGA Hard Girls with “9999 Damage/One-Hit Kill” turned on, because the difficulty spiked hard. And that’s why I cheat. Games get too hard, so if I can’t work out how to beat a section or two, I cheat.

Why shouldn’t I? I don’t play player-vs-player games, so when my options are to stop playing a game or cheat, the only intelligent option is to find a code or download a trainer. I have four kids and a full time job, so my free time is limited and my stress level is high. If some snipers have spent the last 15 minutes spotting me through walls and killing me the moment I peek a corner, I shouldn’t have to uninstall a game. I shouldn’t have to “git good” or “learn strats” to enjoy my short amount of free time with an entertainment product. I bought it, why shouldn’t I play it how I want to?

Screw you, tarantula!

If you’re going to hurry to your keyboard and have a go at me for playing a single-player videogame the way I want to, I hope you have the same reaction to people who use mods. And keyboard macros, third-party tools, shaders, launchers… Not everyone cheats because of how hard a game is, so this isn’t even an argument about difficulty in gaming. There are some fantastic indie titles recently, such as Moving Out, that include modifiers to make games more accessible. Those work the same way as cheats, and make the games easier to enjoy.

Of course, cheating in multiplayer games is a whole different thing. You’re affecting other people’s enjoyment in those, not just your own, which is super selfish. There’s a reason that people get banned for cheating in online games, after all.