Cheats are a gamer’s guilty pleasure

Ah, the wonderful guilty pleasure of cheats and cheat codes for games. Are you stuck on a level? Use cheats. Do you keep dying in a game? Use cheats. Do you want to instantly unlock everything? Use cheats.

Cheats are a gamer’s guilty pleasure. I would guess that around 99% of people who have played Grand Theft Auto San Andreas have used cheats. Older GTA games were more fun with cheats let’s be honest. No one judged you for using cheats back in the 1990’s and early noughties, in fact when it comes to GTA, people were writing down cheats and sharing them with their friends (I did it).

When I first played Saints Row 1 many, many years ago I used cheats on my first playthrough. Now with Saints Row you couldn’t earn achievements when you used cheats but they were fun to use and obviously you don’t know what they are like unless you try them. To use cheats in Saints Row, you had to input a series of numbers into the game’s phone.

Do you remember cheat codes? There was the big Xploder block thing (there was also Xplorer) for PlayStation 1 that contained cheat codes for hundreds of PS1 games. When I was a little dude that big block was effectively the Holy Grail. A game that I loved but could never do when I was a kid was 40 Winks. I just couldn’t do it but with the help of cheat codes I could. Cheat codes also came on disc for PS1 as well, which is what I use.

 

I took some photos of my cheat code disc. Do the following images bring back any memories for you?

 

Remember when video game magazines had cheat books? Weren’t they wonderful. Each one had a unique front cover and some looked pretty damn cool. These cheat books could be small thin books or they could be a big bumper books with loads of cheats and tips for games.

 

Cheats and cheat codes are still a thing but they are far more scarce now. I haven’t used them since the PS2 days and they are not the same. The innocence and simplicity have gone. To get cheat codes to work now you have to go use your computer and install some software and there are several other things to do. It never used to be like that. Back in the day you could put the cheat code disc into the console, select the game you want cheats for, press select, take cheat code disc out then put the game disc in and away you go.

If you use cheats now it is pretty much borderline criminal for gamers. I completely agree that cheats shouldn’t be used online as they give an unfair advantage. For a single player experience, where’s the harm? The only person that will know is you but the image now is that if you use cheats, it’s dirty and you are not playing the game properly.

 

↑↑↓↓←→←→BA SELECT START

 

Now back to the question in the title –

Do you miss cheats and cheat codes?

I want to get a discussion going with fellow bloggers and gamers. If you have time, I would like to ask something of you. Give an answer to this question. It can be done anyway you like, a comment below, a blog post in response to this question, a video response, whatever way you feel most comfortable with.

Are cheats something that should comeback or are they best left behind where we can look back at them fondly?

If you want to talk to about video games or want to the carry the discussion on Twitter then my Twitter handle is – @ThatGreenDude95