Surprisingly, I used to use and create cheats a lot when younger but, the older I get, the more I try to "respect" the designers decisions with game mechanics and/or limitations. Nowadays I don't use cheats at all anymore.

Like others have said, some situations just feel as artificial limitations 'for game time go bigger' and sure, plus some cheats also are just fun to use and make a great game greater. Normally I don't see people using cheats to make games harder, but I also used to do that a lot..

That's what I always understood it to mean.

For me, when I’m actually playing to progress through games, I never use actual cheats as I want to play, learn, and adapt to overcome any challenges. I have save-scummed on different games, but personally don’t consider that to be cheating as I am still progressing on my own, learning and adapting to new strategies until I find one that works best.

That being said, when playing just for fun, I do use cheats to try out different and crazy things for added fun and replayability.

The one example I always use is the classic GTA trilogy: when playing to progress the story and whatnot, I never cheat. But sometimes it’s fun just to spawn a tank and throw on moon gravity and pedestrians have guns and whatever else and watch the chaos unfold. Then load up the non-cheat save and continue the story afterward.

Like some I will partake if a game section is too hard or I get stuck in the level geometry. Noclipping to find hidden things that can only be reached via such a method is also fun.

People saving multiple times didn't cause so many changes to game save systems. It was cheap lazy devs being cheap and lazy. Also it's saving, the term 'save scumming' is elitist nonsense made up by some to make themselves feel better than others.

Absolutely yep, cheats (and trainers by extension) mix it up for me nicely.

I'll play the games how I want to ^_^

I will say it's an annoyance when some devs make it so mashing in cheats disables achievements if there are any and alike but eh, happens.

I will rarely 'cheat' in a game. But generally only when there is some aspect of a game that I find more tiresome than the grind to get there normally. Case in point Fallout 4. I will usually set the carry-weight to like 2000 pounds. Because I want to build settlements with lot of facilities, and wasting time fast traveling only for a hundred founds of scrap gets old.

I did cheat in Skyrim to teleport a certain blacksmith to near where she should be (she had fallen through the level geometry and was out-of-bounds); thankfully, the game's AI routines are resilient enough that she was able to go right back on her schedule.

Cheats can also be helpful while *developing* games. Sometimes, you may need to test if something works properly, and the fastest way to do that is sometimes to cheat. A level select cheat, for example, can be useful for testing out a late-game level or a level that hasn't yet been placed into the world (and would otherwise be inaccessible at this point).

Oh yeah, sometimes, just to mess around and experiment, you know? Like a few months back when I was playing through the Enigmatis series. I actually cheated on the third game, The Shadow of Karkhala, to snag that "Eagle Eyed" achievement — finish any Hidden Object Puzzle in less than 1 minute. I never managed that in the first two games, so I figured, why not? Here's what I did: before a hidden object scene, I backed up my save files, started the mini-game just to snap a quick screenshot, then closed the game and did the puzzle offline. After that, I restored my original save and played the mini-game again, already knowing where everything was. Yes, I got the achievement and confirmed what I suspected — screw you, Artifex Mundi! Sixty seconds is barely enough time even for a perfect click frenzy

Reminds me of something I did once in Cookie Clicker. In that game, there's one achievement that requires that you click a large number of times in a short amount of time. So, to do that achievement, I remapped the controls in the OS (actually the X server) so that the scroll wheel was mapped to left click, and it's a lot easier to move the scroll rapidly than to click rapidly.

Note that Cookie Clicker is one of those games where you actually get an in-game benefit for having achievements.

(Of course, I'm pretty sure there's a command you could use in the JavaScript console to unlock this achievement.)

Some games just straight-up beg you to cheat. Like, they throw crazy hard challenges at you, endless grinding that feels like a total time suck, or they just need some serious finger skills you don't got. Whatever it is, it's rough. The cool thing about playing on PC? The freedom to get around that stuff — whether it's using guides, save files, cheat codes, mods. It's all there to help us out.

Library closes soon, no time to read the whole thread today, so for now I'll just answer the original question.

In general, I don't cheat in most games, but there are certain ones I cheat the crap out of, for specific reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is SimCity 4. I long ago mastered the art of making my cities profitable enough to build whatever I wanted, but that's not usually a fast process. Nowadays, when I'm expanding an existing city into a new city tile in a large region, I use a City Ordinance specifically designed as a cheat to give you huge amounts of money very quickly, so I don't have to repeatedly slog through the early days of getting each city tile profitable enough to build as I want.

Not for decades.
Seriously.
The last time I used cheats was on the C64 - when the C64 was in its heydays.

Wow, didn't expect this thread to die off so much before I was able to come back and read it more thoroughly...

To expand on what I was saying before, since I didn't have time that day... There are some games like I described previously with SimCity 4 where I'll use various cheats to skip what could be considered early-game grinds. Then there are others which, as some people have commented one, let you skip challenges that are beyond your skills.

For example, I am mostly a strategy/simulation gamer. I have never been as good at shooters. But often, in shooter/adventure games, the developers will lock certain rewards behind what I call "skillwalls" (my own term inspired by "paywalls.") These mostly impact me on console games, and older ones at that since I don't have any recent systems.

One example is Resident Evil 4, which I own on GameCube. Now, I've played through the entire game on both Normal and Professional difficulty, but there are certain rewards that require a level of skill that I will simply never have. One of them is an unlimited ammo Handcannon weapon. You have to be able to complete certain challenges to unlock it, and as such, I will NEVER be able to access that weapon to play with. I have tried so many times to beat the requisite challenges, and I simply do not have enough skill at this type of game to do so. I have tried to the point where I've quit the game in frustration, because it just doesn't seem possible even though I know there are many players out there with more skill than me who probably don't even think it's that hard. If there were a cheat to unlock the Handcannon, I would use it in a heartbeat just so I could experiment with it in the game. But last time I checked, the only way to unlock it on GameCube was to accomplish the challenges required.

Contrast that with a much older game, GoldenEye on N64. On that one, you unlocked various gameplay cheats by beating each level on multiple difficulties, usually within a certain timeframe. Each difficulty had different associated cheats, and while I was able to unlock all of the Easy ones and most of the Medium ones, I only ever got a few of the Hard ones because, again, I've never been as good at that kind of game. But in that case, there was a cheat discovered later that unlocked ALL of the cheats that were previously only accessible to the best players.

Some people will make the argument that these types of challenges are there to make the game more fun. Well, I call bullshit on that, because not everyone has the skill needed to complete these challenges, and making something impossible to obtain for some players just makes us angry that we're not able to do it. That's not fun.

By all means, keep making the challenges for the purists out there, but for those of us who can't devote ten hours a day every day of our lives to becoming experts at every possible game in order to unlock every possible secret/reward, always include a cheat so we can try those features too. Otherwise, we tend to feel a little ripped off. No matter how fun a game is otherwise, knowing there's a feature or item, no matter how small, that we'll never be able to access is just aggravating and infuriating.

EDIT - I should note here just for clarity's sake that I am not advocating cheating in multiplayer games. That's a completely separate issue and should only be allowed if all parties agree to it. I am speaking here purely of single-player games where whether I choose to cheat or not doesn't affect anyone else's experience.

I think the thread is very interesting and fun to read. Thanks for participating in it all. Gave a + to almost everyone. I don't cheat in multiplayer games and i usually only played single player games. That is where i used cheats sometimes.

I would love to play Demon Soul's with some nice cheats. Also, does anyone know if the Resi 1,2, and 3 from GOG have any cheats to them? Been playing the games normally for years but i'd love a leasurly stroll through those games with a nice big gun.