Cheating in Video Games: No Shame for the Already Shameful

As a child raised by video games, when you were wandering around in a convenience store, bored at a book store, or abandoned at a newspaper stand in an airport, what were your hyperactive little eyes scanning the most when you passed by the magazine section? Mad Magazine? Nope. Sports Illustrated? Yeah right, nerd. Cat Fancy? I hope not. Marie Claire? Maybe.

Don't lie to yourself. We know the truth.

No, you were definitely scoping out the latest video game magazines. As you leafed through publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) or GamePro, you probably came across stuff like Tips and Tricks, Expert Gamer, and of course the coveted individual strategy guides for video games. As kids, we obsessed over gameplay strategies, codes, and secrets to get by particular sections we were stuck on. Or we used codes as a means to do funny sh*t (Goldeneye comes to mind, with its graphics-altering funny tweaks). But were they enhancements in gameplay, or were they crutches that made you a bad gamer as you grew up?

Walkthroughs are undeniably helpful, and the best reason, of course, is for when you're stuck in one area in a game and you need to find your way past it. Websites like GameFAQs provide almost instant solutions to your problems (thanks, internet); clicking an FAQ for Diddy Kong Racing, pressing Ctrl+F on your keyboard, and typing “WIZPIG” will take you to a section which will either vaguely draw out a strategy to beat him, tell you to exploit a weakness in the game's programming, tell you to “keep trying, it takes practice,” or begin speaking about the etymology of Wizpig and why it's such a “rad name.”

This is an excerpt (click for sharper text) from a submitted Game FAQ explaining the unintelligible plaques (seen above) in Super Mario 64. For some reason, they rejected the FAQ. What nerve!

But a lot of people actually rely on strategy guides and walkthroughs to finish the entire game. They'll spend $40 dollars on a collectors edition strategy guide, and pivot their heads back and forth between their television/PC monitor and this huge, dense monstrosity on their lap (the guidebook, you sicko). Or they'll print out XxSquallLeonheart69xX's 95-page walkthrough from GameFAQs and read it like a screenplay. If your gameplay style is like that, then power to you: I'm sure you have a whole row of blue and black colored works on your bookshelf from your favorite author, Sparknotes.

Game-breaking glitches and codes have their variations of dopeness (like the beloved Konami Code in multiple Konami titles, glitches in Marvel vs Capcom 2 which cause a game freeze and a pissed off opponent, and of course Minus World in the original Super Mario Bros). It's fairly funny how games in the Grand Theft Auto series are only enjoyable via inputting codes to unlock every item, car, and basically make you an indestructible demon-god, hell bent on running people over with tanks so they turn into little green wads of cash.

Cool glitch.

But sometimes they work against the game – especially in multiplayer. The game Phantasy Star Online had a great rare-item system with loads of unique weapons and armor that had people play the game for countless hours to search (and trade) for. Of course, Gameshark and Codebreaker (two devices that let you enable “duping,” or duplicating items) had to be dicks and totally take a crap on the “rarity” of these items. See kids, sometimes cheating is bad, especially when I find a cool rare item and everyone in my party already has one. You dropped the ball on making me a unique snowflake, there, Sega.

But of course, there are the noble gamers. The ones who are purists that never use a guide, or never break their games, because their constructs of entertainment software shouldn't be seen like that. Hats off to you, man of great video game respect. One day you'll put on your gamer resume that you spent 5 hours in the water temple in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess without once looking up a guide or solution. You probably obeyed all traffic rules in Grand Theft Auto IV. You even died a total of 70 times in each Mega Man game in order to figure out the 8 bosses' weakness and order on all on your own.

Fortunately for the rest of us with no integrity (and lets face it, if you play video games, you have none), impatience leads to cheating in video games, and good ol' XxSquallLeonheart69xX will always be there to tell us what to do.