I never would’ve seen the ending of that game if I didn’t have a Game Genie to grant me near-invulnerability and extra weapons.īut that never satisfies anyone, and truth be told, I’ve cheated on well-designed games before, and I guess I’m supposed to feel guilty for having cheated. Yes, I suppose games are meant to be beaten on their own, but you cannot tell me there haven’t been games where the cause of the difficulty is bad design, rather than intent, see above re: TMNT. Related: Back to Ninjago: Possibilities for Season 6Īnd yet, I cannot mention that I cheat without somebody chiding me for it, like I’m committing a crime. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes to mind, even though I wish it wouldn’t. The phrase “Nintendo hard” was coined for a reason, some of those games were SPECTACULAR exercises in frustration. I used to cheat at a LOT of single-player games, because I get easily frustrated, and nothing’s likely to frustrate me as much as overly repeated video game death, especially during the NES era. And cheating in a game among friends who know where you live is a pretty good way to get your welcome mat drenched in urine. But if you’re cheating in single-player, I hardly expect all the ones and zeroes running through the CPU will complain, unless your cheat literally crashes the game, of course. In anonymous online games, when you cheat, it has a tendency to ruin the experience for everybody else playing that game with you.

I’m not saying that cheating isn’t wrong, it’s just that it doesn’t bother me, because I don’t play games with people I don’t already know in real life. Of course, I might not understand correctly, hacker-speak being about as easy for me to decipher as Mandarin Chinese is for a 10-year-old American who’s blind and deaf. If I understand correctly, hackers have even figured out how to make Game-Genie-esque codes work on games for the PS3. Really, I don’t know why anyone’s surprised, or even why this qualifies as news, players have been cheating at games since the NES. So, a little birdie at told me that an exploit had been found in Borderlands 2 that could allow players to have 999 Golden Keys, and I instantly thought, “Players cheating in a video game? Why, that’s unheard of! Harumph! It’s like they expect to have a magical genie granting their game wishes! Preposterous!” I then cleaned my monocle, stroked my handlebar moustache and harumphed a few more times for emphasis. (Warning: Minor Borderlands 2 spoilers ahead!)

Cheat happens trainers worth it