Not really. Taking away the challenge ruins the fun.

But I liked activating cheat codes in GTA: San Andreas. Spent many hours traveling around the map in a flying tank and causing random mayhem.

Back in the day my friend couldn't get through the MOH level with snow. It would just freeze and crash. So I showed him how to cheat and bypass the level.

If it's single player then do whatever you want. It only affects you.

Depends on the definition of cheating. Here are a couple of ways in which I "cheat":

I didn't have the skill to progress beyond 4BC in Dead Cells, so I downloaded someone else's save file with all items unlocked.

If I hit a wall in Silksong to the point that it starts to put me off the game, then I look up a walkthrough to see where the nearest undiscovered bench is or where to fine the thing I'm looking for.

For any game if I end too frustrated by a boss, I'll watch a YouTube video to learn the attack patterns and avoid repeatedly dying to learn them. This is especially true for roguelites where I may have to cross 3 levels to get to a possible chance at a boss, and then get killed.

In FTL I used to copy out the save files to allow me to save scum if I died. The game is a roguelite and doesn't allow loading saves in case of mistakes of death....so this is a workaround to save scum.

In survival crafting games I'll almost always make it easier on myself through the world settings or something. Getting rid of item and food decay, boosting XP gain, making sure I get 100+ of each resource anytime I go mining or whatever.

Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass on normal settings, so I make it easier to explore, gather, and fight enemies. Otherwise it'd take me at least twice as long to get to where I'm at in the game, and that already took me over 100 hours.

Palworld I do all those things and increase pal spawn rate so there's always at least 5 pals in a group at any given time. It makes capturing them so much easier.

Idk the last time I actually "cheated" in a video game though. Maybe one of the Lego games?

First: who cares what people say?

Second: depends. If a game is too hard for my old ass, I cheat it easier. Like, a headstart with money or more life in an fps or whatever. It is MY play through, I have to enjoy it. And I'm gaming since the first ever pacman, I got spoiled. Just because a Dev thinks this is great, doesn't mean I have to. So, if I can change that to MY preferences, yeah sure.

If it's a second run of a game I might go nuts and testing everything 😏

PS: goes without saying, but only single player. Never ever cheated in multiplayer. Being called a cheater was the greatest honor though 😁

When an aspect of a game is ass (usually grinding, and I tend to be tolerant), even if I try to engage with it. Or if I'm about to drop the game anyway and cheats means seeing an ending. Last time I did was Megaman ZX, the game was already tedious and expects you to then also do a boss rush with limited ways to recover between fights, so I cheated infinite lives to get it over with.

I remember trying a Game Shark on a few games back in high school, and what I found is that it made the games boring really fast.

More recently I tried applying cheats in Super Ghouls and Ghosts. I still didn't make it past the first level. 😭

I was getting ready to rant until you mentioned Terraria. Then I read the last line of your post.

Shoot, if I'm playing against the computer I use the game the way I want. It's not cheating if your opponent is non-sentient.

I especially feel that way in games where ridiculous stuff happens at random (e.g. Rimworld). If I'm 2h into building a new colony and somehow get wiped out by 1 rabid squirrel, I curse, laugh my ass off for a minute, then load an autosave.

In single player games? Yeah.

Save editors for Mass Effect to unlock squad mates early for spoken lines that I would have never heard earlier, cheating in rare candies on emulated Pokémon games or making Pokémon shiny too.

I recall using something similar for Borderlands 2 circa 2012/2013 to get certain guns to drop with the right parts as well.

I'm strongly of the mindset that cheating only means taking a dishonest and unfair advantage over another person. Changing the rules of the game is not cheating, it's house ruling - in tabletop discussion, that's part of what we call Rule Zero. If I'm not in competition with another person, it's just playing by my own rules.

I remember one HL1 CS (Specialists Mod) LAN party I was in where we all turned on Matrix Vision and multiplied the slo-mo timer. It was great - utterly chaotic, but everything was equal.

So no, I don't cheat in games. I just play by my own rules as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. And if I do play multiplayer, I try to bring my house rules to them. I've never had any person accuse me of cheating when I ask about various options. TBH, the closest I come to cheating is turning on all of the assistive features - colorblind mode, target highlighting, auto target, sound notifications in minimaps, custom keybinds, and whatever else is in the menu. Everyone else can also choose to do that, and I'm just as happy if everyone I play with has those same things.

Sometimes. I tend to have quite hard lines about what feels like acceptable levels of cheating though.

To use Terraria as an example, I remember going mad searching for a lava charm, and I ended up using a map viewer to check whether my world actually had one. It didn't so I used a save editor to give me the charm. This part was a mistake, and felt like the kind of cheating that makes the game less fun in a slippery slope kind of way. I regretted what I did.

In future games, I would sometimes check to see if a Lava charm existed on my world if I had spent a while searching for it to no avail, and if there wasn't one, I'd try going to a different world. If there was one in my world, I'd try to not pay attention to where in my world the chest(s) with the lava charm(s) were (and in some cases, I'd get a friend to confirm whether one existed on my world, so I wouldn't even know the rough area where the chest was. Sometimes cheats can make the game more fun and engaging, if used wisely and in moderation.

Last time was in GTA 5 online, when it launched on pc, got some billions, all the things available and then stopped, never got banned, but forgot my password some years later.

The grind was too much, I never tried to instakill anyone, nor getting planes to harass other players, just wanted the grind to go away.

Edit: holy shit that was more than 10 years ago.

no

I consider cheat codes to be an accessibility tool for disabled gamers, and I think it is really sad that they are far less common than they once were, and it's even sadder to see some devs/publishers (Ubisoft comes to mind) try to monetize cheat codes.

I use cheat engine speedhack (with different speed hotkeys) in almost every game. Got that long walk in Witcher/Skyrim ahead of you? 2x game speed. Got some waiting to do while the base builds in Command and Conquer? Speed up. For whatever reason you can't pause SPTarkov? 0x speed. As someone with limited gaming time, Cheat Engine speed function is a blessing

Never in PVP or competitive type games.

I've used 'cheat codes' and mods on single player or teamwork vs environment games for decades after playing a game long enough to want a different experience. Depends on what kind of fun I'm looking for.

As long as no one else is being affected and my experience is being hampered I will

I used to, back in the days of cheat codes, because they were fun.

The only real way to cheat now is to hack the game. This will mean doing shit loads of homework to learn how to do it myself, or pay for some dodgy software that may or may not contain a virus to download all my nudes and blackmail me for bitcoin while my account gets terminated for cheating so I could win a couple games on COD.

I do not any more.

I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don't want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I'll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.

I mean "legitimate" as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I'm not big on mods in general, and I don't usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.

In Satisfactory, there's a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You'll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.

Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I'm pretty sure the developers are aware of this "glitch" because it's never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.

I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this "strategy" to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.

A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it'd save him tons of money buying games to play.

But he's also completed all achievements on almost every game he's played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn't need to redo them on PC.

The thing about Steam Family is... if someone's caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn't even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.

IDKFA

In a world where everything is trying to steal as many minutes of our attention as possible, cheating in single-player games is just a way to experience the content without the grind. I appreciate any SP game that offers "dad-mode" difficulty options, but those are few. My favorite types of games are those that incentivize replay by offering "cheats" within the game. Games such as Dead Space and Silent Hill IV incentivized replay by offering enhanced items or, in the case of SH4, an infinite rocket launcher. Those are still, to this day, games I've played at least 3-4 times from start to end just to find fun ways to play and be a badass while doing it!

As with most things in my life, if it isn't hurting anything/anyone why would/should I or anyone else care? Cheating in MP is akin to drinking water from a public toilet, though. Almost nothing grosser than that action and those people!

All that said, one thing I've learned about myself over the years, especially since my ADHD diagnosis last year (or the year before, time is a blur anymore), is that cheating is nearly always going to kill any interest I have in that game. It's when I know I'm nearing the end of my interest in the game. It extends to hobbies, too, though the "cheating" in that is splurging and finally buying stuff to really get good at the hobby. I did that with woodworking, 3D printing, and ghost hunting. Bought the shit, got excited about using it, and basically didn't touch the hobby afterwards. It kind of sucks and I'm working on that stuff, though!

Not in the typical sense, but I do use mods that may alter the vanilla experience to be less grindy.

For example in Sacred 2 remaster I use mod that doubles the quantity of enemies making it more challenging but also more challenging.

In Incredible adventures of Van Helsing I made set and godlike items drop from special mobs with 1/10th of chance of epic items or something as without mods you'd have to grind for keys to open offline lootboxes.

I do also like exploits that may trivialize the game. Especially in rpgs where they may allow mevto create ridiculously powerful builds.

I never played the Sims or GTA 3 without them.

I do not, as a rule, play games where my enjoyment affects others. When I do, no, I don’t cheat. The rest of the time? I’m not above taking a shortcut if it brings me more enjoyment if the product I paid for. I occasionally cheat at Animal Crossing. Look up treasure islands. I don’t abuse them but I definitely make use of them.

I only use things like console commands in case I get softlocked or similar. When playing Bethesda games, especially modded, this will come up sooner or later. Apart from that, it would ruin the fun, so no point in doing it.

When I'm spinning up the n-hundredth skyrim run I cheat my stats up a bit to skip the early game tedium, but otherwise I tend not to unless I'm getting bored of a game and want to sample endgame content to see if I wanna keep with the grind

I don't get it in multiplayer games. Why ruin it for everyone and why cheat? Your not actually that good. I just don't get it.

And then what is cheering is watching/reading a walk through cheating? Single player so what you want.

I had a game genie for my nes. Highly recommended. But for modern games? Na. I'll look up a boss if I'm having a hard time, but I don't really feel the need to cheat, outside of carry limit on stalker.

No, I tweak the rules to better suit my gameplay preferences.

i cheat by practicing