Game Cheats

What's a video game cheat? And what's the fun in using one? Let's take a look.

There are scads of video game cheats, some much more legitimate than others.

There are cheats for all kinds of things - skipping levels, giving you skills and possessions you never earned, making you invulnerable or terribly weak, and making in-game characters look distorted or menacing, to name but a few. Some are superficial; others can make a game unchallenging and uninteresting.

It's important to know what kind of cheats are out there. Sometimes they can be a useful tool. For example, if a game has a critical flaw that makes a certain stage unplayable or horrendously difficult, it's only logical to look for a way to skip you past that stage so you can continue playing and enjoying the experience.

Other times, it can distort your perception of a game, or permanently alter it, forcing you to reinstall it to get it back to normal.

By far the most damaging and infuriating are online game cheats. When you're playing against others who are invulnerable and can kill you with one shot, pass through walls, or can see you through obstacles, it saps all the fun out of the game. Legitimate gamers have trouble understanding how this can be entertaining for the cheater, too. What's the point in playing when the odds are so dramatically and unfairly biased? There's no challenge and there's no triumph.

Single-player cheats are generally much more innocuous. These cheats only affect your gaming experience, and they're fairly common. Gaming magazines have recurring cheat sections that publish cheats for popular games. If you're a busy professional, cheats can make the difference between finishing a game and walking away from it forever.

Walkthroughs are simply documents that describe how to finish a game efficiently. They're like a friend who gives away the end to a movie - except with a game, you still can experience and enjoy the process of completion, even if you're not the one solving all the puzzles.

Some products are built entirely to assist cheating. There are joysticks that will autofire as rapidly as electronically possible, making some games ridiculously easy. The GameShark products for the PlayStation 1 were the best-known of an entire class of devices that would make life easier for cheaters. Instead of entering in a laborious sequence of button-presses, the GameShark had libraries of codes for your favorite PS1 games in memory, ready to go at a press of a button.

Not all cheating devices have to be sophisticated. Based on tips I read online, I once upped my swimming skill in a game (single-player, mind you) by aiming my undrownable character at a mid-river piling and rubber-banding the controller joystick into a "swim forward" position. A few hours later, after some relaxing reading, my character was a swimming hellion.

As you can tell, cheats come from all kinds of sources.

The multiplayer cheats, especially, tend to be built by bored hackers who have nothing better to do with their lives than annoy other gamers. And there are a fair number that were caused by errors in the development process. Games are complicated pieces of software, and a dedicated player can often find strange loopholes in a game world. Often these loopholes cause crashes or undesirable situations, but sometimes there will be a hole in a wall where there shouldn't be, or some secret testing area that never got properly sealed off.

However, the majority of game cheats are actually intentional. Game companies want players to spend a lot of time on their products, discovering new things and seeing the game world in fresh ways. A cheat often can help this process.

In addition, game companies often use cheats to help stimulate waning interest in their products. A few months after release, they often "leak" or outright publicize cheats for their game that offer incentives bored gamers to return to the game for things they'd missed on the first playthrough.

Cheat carefully, and cheats will enhance your gaming fun.

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