you're only hurting yourself you know: your perspective on guides, glitches, exploits, and other forms of CHEATING

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/86/245896891_cd467170ce.jpg

i don't cheat a lot, but when i do i never regret it or feel bad

I will cheat, but only if I feel that I have given it the ol' college try first.

i don't ever use cheats in the old-skool sense, or even take advantage of acknowledged exploits, but i know when it's time to dial up the ol' walkthru. i have a good sense of when i've tried enough on my own, enough that i never feel cheap about looking online.

If it's a game that's about exploration, or if I just want to see how it ends, unless I'm having stacks of fun I'll do cheats without a second thought. Life's too short.

Re 'you're only cheating yourself': absolutely correct, and if it doesn't benefit me personally to do the hard yards, I don't care.

i got a game shark for my LIFE

Yeah, I'm willing to go to a walkthrough if needed, though I much prefer hints. A lot of what I play is narrative-based, though, and if you get too stuck it completely disrupts the flow of what you're doing.

didn't ledge or lamp make some thread on this that was p good before

some poster whose name was a short word beginning w/ an L

I cheat frequently.

Basically if I need to go to gamefaqs for anything then I see that as a failure on the part of the game, not me. So I don't have any problem doing it, it just makes me like the game a bit less.

glitch gaming is the best gaming! for me it's just another kind of exploration within the game and it's world

I'll cheat at a single player game if I'm absolutely stuck and won't get to see the rest of the game otherwise.

didn't ledge or lamp make some thread on this that was p good before

don't remember this but that don't mean it didn't happen.

count me in on the 'will cheat if stuck and have made had a decent stab at it'.

it's not exactly cheating but reading skyrim wikis has definitely improved my enjoyment of the game. checking walkthroughs *after* i've done a dungeon to see if i missed anything, and - without getting super nerdy about it - finding out the most effective way to do alchemy, smithing, etc.

Dunno about that. All games are basically just systems to be deciphered, letting someone else do the deciphering defeats the object for me, the fun is in figuring out stuff like that for yourself.

I think in the case of something like skyrim there's so much going on anyway only the super lonely would have the time and dedication to figure it all out for themselves. I didn't even figure out I could get Lydia to carry stuff for me before I read it on here!

Tbf I guess that's something I knew from playing fallout but yeah, it's not well signposted in skyrim. Stuff like that, sure, it falls into the "failure of the game" category. But wih alchemy etc the idea is that you just fiddle with it and learn through experimentation, so wikis feel like they're taking away part of the intended experience or something.

Well as far as alchemy knows that's mostly what I've been doing - just in general, y'know, the idea that you can optimise yr gaming experience without it actually being cheating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyQvN8lI2w

i'll look at a walkthrough when i know i'm stuck or if i'm doing some GTA-esque "find 100 objects that could be anywhere" and i'm getting nowhere, but that's it.

If I don't know what I'm trying to do, despite looking for aaaages, then I turn to a walkthough. SOmetimes game designers get it wrong, and I'm not very good at games, so sometimes it's necessary. I['ve had to do that a couple of times playing skyrim - once when I had completed the side mission before playing a main quest mission which would have explained the game principle to me, and one other time when I couldn't find a lever because it was hidden behind a vine. Both times I tried for ages on my own and the walkthrough relieves frustration when the game stops being fun.

On the other hand, I cheat massively at strategy games and the such. For me, those games are about creating a world with me as the all-powerful center, rather than what the game designers set it as, which is presumably a challenge. These kinds of games I prefer being a little more sandboxy, y'know? And the cheat is usually just unlimited cash, so I still have to play the thing. Although I'm essentially removing part of the game design, that's just how I roll. So I'll give myself unlimited cash in FM2010 or Total War - so I can still play and enjoy, but I get to be magical as well as Conqueror of Europe or League 2 champions.

I can't stand grinding in RPGs, since this removes the immersion, and I find a little dull. Skyrim is the first RPG I've really spent any time with because it feels less...idk, real? Like, before you had to choose who you were gonna be before the game starts, which is all kinds of counter-intuitive, and then you have to do something dull for ages just to get your numbers high enough for you to go do something fun. Why not just go do something fun straight away? If I wanted to just do work, I'd go clean the fridge. This is why I refuse to get good at smithing in skyrim, despite being told I can get awesome stuff with it, because I refuse to sit there making iron daggers for hours just so I can get anotehr number up to 100.

tl;dr - I only cheat when it doesn't feel like cheating or when the game isn't doing what I want it to do. Grinding lives next door to cheating, but is waaaaay duller.

thinking back to when i was playing portal 2, i'd be damned if i let that game beat me (probably wasn't stuck on any level for more than about 20 minutes though). one day i will get round to playing braid and then we'll see where that attitude gets me.

Does doing an all weapons cheat to sit on a roof on GTA and wreck shit count as cheating? If so I'm a cheat, but I'm only doing it for entertainment purposes.

I also use unlock codes for Lego game "skills" because wtf is the point of slow building/digging?

I occasionally consult walkthroughs if I convince myself I'm properly stuck, though I often find leaving a game alone for a day then coming back fresh tends to work just as well.

i've only ever really used the 'funny' cheats, like the ones in the original Colin Macrae rally and the silly ones in San andreas. I didn't use them to progress in the actual game, just to have a bit of fun.

Normal cheats I've used on really crap games that I've given up on and had no intention of wanting to play properly, but wanted to see what the next levels would be etc.

i'd never cheat on online, in fact this gets my goat up so much when i see other people doing it. last night on BF3 some guy had a cheat which enabled him to instantly kill everyone as soon as they spawned. What a fucking jerk.

Does doing an all weapons cheat to sit on a roof on GTA and wreck shit count as cheating? If so I'm a cheat, but I'm only doing it for entertainment purposes.

This is definite "only cheating yourself" territory for me. I kind of ruined GTA3 for myself by trying out those cheats, but once you've seen what the city's like with infinite tanks and infinite rocket launchers or whatever, going back to the vanilla version never feels as fun again, so my interest falls off instantly. And I don't want that to happen when I've paid for a game, so yeah, haven't let myself do it since.

I used to call the nintendo tips line.

thinking back to when i was playing portal 2, i'd be damned if i let that game beat me (probably wasn't stuck on any level for more than about 20 minutes though). one day i will get round to playing braid and then we'll see where that attitude gets me.

The same. Refused to do any walkthroughs for Portal 2 also. Although there was one level where I came very close to cracking. (but yeah, it felt relatively easy all things considered). Had to stop playing Braid because all I was doing after a certain point was pausing the game and going to youtube for walkthroughs. Which was both demeaning to my self-respect and also utterly pointless in terms of gameplay.

Actually, I only did it at a friends house. I was never allowed to. Too expensive. xpost

xxxp, yeah those gta cheats should only be used after you've seen all the city and finished the game. imo.

Hah, I've only just finished Portal 2 this week (spoiler: it's awesome), and so that was going to be my example of games that I just wouldn't walkthrough (though I have picked up the guides to find all the easter eggs). Usually my gaming eyes are larger than my gaming stomach available time, so for example I have probably two years worth of unplayed games, many of them from Steam Sales. I'll probably give them all a go and then if I like the story but am not immensely fantastically in love with the mechanics then it's off to a walkthrough. See also: playing through on Easy the first time round on EG Resident Evils.

Also I will cheat the fuck out of any RTS game, because the only reason I am playing an RTS game is because it's by Blizzard and I want to see more of the story.

There is probably another thread about "what do you mean by finished?" - as in, there probably is already another thread for that.

Hah, Playing games after you've 'finished', classic or dud? is Not The Thread You're Looking For!

called the nintendo hotline once when i was ten

lmao xp

I used to call the nintendo tips line.

― Jeff, Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:18 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I was all about these as a kid. It used a red gel to scan over jumbled text to give you the answers without spoiling the whole game.

http://www.magisterrex.com/prodimages/LLL2HintBook-h600.jpg

there was one bit in braid where i looked it up on youtube and did not feel at all bad about it, because it relied on some mechanic that was really non-intuitive and hadn't been introduced before in the least (can't remember exactly what, something about on one of the enemies maybe?). otherwise i had figured out the level, and it felt more like game was cheating.

^yep. I mean I'm not sure it was the same bit, but I didn't really feel that I should have known it or even could have worked the problem out without a certain amount of inspiration better applied in other fields of life.

i think the portal 2/braid dichotomy is an interesting one, part of what made me never even consider doing a walkthrough w/P2 is the fact that the game builds in the discovery aspect - i think early on i said that the game all feels kind of like a really well-written tutorial level, but i dont mean that in a bad way. whereas braid felt like a game that was more interested in being clever than being playable, sort of a throwback to the old memorize the ghost patterns thing but without the reward of crazy speed or the feeling of accomplishment. or fun.

basically i really dislike braid.

"For me, those games are about creating a world with me as the all-powerful center"

It's interesting to read this because I love so much an opposite and yet connected illusion - I try and play basically every game at the maximum difficulty, with self-imposed restrictions, and never cheating, because games to me create a world in which a bright person, armed with persistence and patience, can be a great & conquering hero and prove their possession of these qualities in just a few determined days or weeks. (I loved Braid and didn't like Portal at all, but that's just because I don't like 3d in general)

Braid's puzzles were great I thought. Only one or two broken ones, which still is too many but it's not like you needed them to finish the game.

xpost to gravel - i think this is maybe a difference in game motivation tho (talked about this a little in that punishing difficulty thread i started) where i really dont want to triumph over the game, i want to just enjoy the time i spend there on its own merits. but i get that if you are in the other camp stuff like braid might be more rewarding.

I am not in the punishing difficulty camp at all fwiw, I just found the Braid puzzles intuitive and rewarding.

Me too, except for two of them (and one of those was definitely the same one Jordan's talking about).

spoiler the one where u have to move the puzzle ledge? spoiler

Jim I think we are talking about the same one. I think it involved a dropping ladder?

Puzzle ledge for me.

This is what I said back on the old braid thread:

SPOILERS:

The first was the point where you needed to let a goomba dude fall on your head and kill you, so that the goomba would then bounce into the air and your rewound self could use it as a springboard to the just-out-of-reach platform. I'd managed to avoid having any goombas fall on my head all the way through the game. So there was no way I could've known that doing so would make the goomba bounce up into the air. So yeah, the tools to solve that one just weren't in my possession.

And similarly, the one where I had to use the ring to get three time-ignoring goombas past three dragon-plants...the answer was to start rewinding time then right-bumper forward, which stops time altogether. But again, there hadn't been a point in the game that'd shown me that was possible, and I hadn't noticed it myself. Without experimenting with every potential combination of controls (or else just luckily happening across it), there's no way I'd have realised that was something I could do.

They'd be minor niggles in any other game, but they did feel like unusually big flaws given that the rest of Braid was so carefully and cleverly designed.

I only vaguely remember it but I think I managed the puzzle ledge one.

But yeah, those two were prime examples of me cheating and not feeling bad about it because it was the game's fault and not mine.

the one big example I can think of is on Carnival Zone in Sonic 3. i might not be remembering this correctly but at one point there's some weird barrel elevator that doesn't work like anything else in the game. the way to solve it is totally counter-intuitive and something I would assume most people would bang their heads on the wall over.