Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Curse You, Stupid-Cheap-Hard Game!
I was cheating at video games since I can remember. Hell, I was the first kid in my county to get a Game Genie for the NES. Just about everyone has pointed out that games have gotten easier, arguably to make them more accessible to people who aren't going to devote 5 hours, 2 liters of Mountain Dew, and a pound of marijuana to beating them. But no one has pointed out that cheat codes are dying out. The few games that have cheats don't even have the invincibility thing going anymore. Modern Warfare had infinite ammo, and Red Faction: Guerrilla just gave you increased damage resistance rather than total immunity. And all of these cheats had to be earned. I think that is the measure of difficulty in gaming, we don't get cheats anymore. The games are easy enough that we don't need them. How many of you, back in the old days, used to beat a game out of spite? The game wasn't good and you stopped having fun days ago, but turning off the console and walking away somehow meant that the game had "won", and by God you weren't going to give that smug little bastard the satisfaction. On a vaguely related note, Battletoads was a hard enough game that I can honestly brag that I beat it, even with a Game Genie. Yeah, the game was so hard that beating it WITH cheats was considered an accomplishment. Beating it without cheats was just a legend. I've seen it done, though. And I still can't beat Ninja Gaiden. Any of them.
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I noticed this when one of my roommates totally destroyed my Time Splitters 2 save file by turning off the console while it was saving. I discovered, to my dismay, that there was no "unlock everything" cheat. Faced with the prospect of logging another 40 hours into the game, or playing something else, I never played the game again.
I'd previously noted the demise of Game Genie when I found the Playstation 2 version was severely ill-equipped compared to the Playstation version. I had all sorts of fun making impossible class/ability combinations in Final Fantasy Tactics using the Game Genie. You can thank the DMCA for killing it.
But yes, I find I haven't encountered many "cheap" games these days. Unless you want to play Ninja Gaiden Black on hard, Ikaruga or Trauma Center, there aren't many games out there that actively spite the player. They generally leave that to the multiplayer.
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