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Where Did All the Cheats Go?

Where Did All the Cheats Go?

Goldeneye was a huge hit for the N64 for several reasons. It was the first first-person shooter that really worked on the N64, and for most of us it was the first time we ever played a shooting game using a joystick. Graphically it blew us away at the time – I still can’t get over how good the explosions and weapons look. Multiplayer? Forget about it; countless hours were spent running around Facility and chucking remote mines at our friends and collapsing in fits of laughter (or rage, because that one friend would always pick Odd-Job and run around crouched).

The single-player campaign was a blast, and it promised seemingly infinite replay value. That replay value was derived mainly from one thing: unlockable cheats. There was a huge list of cheats built into the game that you could unlock for completing various stages under certain conditions. The Infinite Ammo cheat, for example, was unlocked by beating “Control” on Secret Agent difficulty in under 10 minutes. Paintball Mode, one of the easier unlocks, was won by beating “Dam” on Secret Agent in 2:40 minutes or less.

There were 23 unlockable cheats in all, and each one made you want to load up your favorite stages from the campaign to play around. More developers should take note of this and start incorporating baked-in cheats into our games. It’s a brilliant way to increase replay value and keep fans engaged in single-player content for longer. It’s also much more economically feasible than developing DLC packs, alternate endings, or storylines with arbitrary player choices. I’m not saying we should do away with all of those things, but they’re not as fun as cheats can be.

Most recently I’ve had the joy of going back through Infinity Ward’s flagship campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered . Not only did Raven do a bang-up job of updating this timeless thriller for current-gen consoles, they went above and beyond to bring us a bunch of new cheats to use after beating the campaign for the first time.

Cheats are unlocked by finding enemy intel, something that seemed useless and boring when the game first came out (unless you were in it for the achievements). For playing the game well you’re rewarded with hilarious and game-breaking cheats. Want to replace every enemy’s head with a huge, exploding watermelon? You can do that. Want infinite ammo? It’s yours. Want to transform your grenades into lemons that explode into torrents of lemonade? You got it.

Where Did All the Cheats Go?

I noticed baked-in cheats made their way into games like Uncharted 4 and the remake of Ratchet & Clank as well. Sometimes even simple “cheats” that are no more than visual overlays can make a campaign you’ve beaten several times feel fresh again. This is a trend we need to encourage; I’d love to see more cheats worked into single-player modes as rewards. No one knows how to break or exploit a game better than its own devs do.

PC players are probably reading this with smirks on their faces. Hacks and modding communities are very commonplace on PC, and popular games always have a modding community to make things more interesting. On consoles, though, our options are limited. We don’t have Game Sharks or Game Genies any more, so we’re pretty much reliant on the devs to give us some cheats or enable mods like Bethesda has done. We need to make sure that they know that this is important to us, as it’s far and away the best way to jack up a game’s replay value.

What other modern games feature baked-in cheats that you found funny or fun? Is there any campaign or story mode that you went back to and played for a second or third time so you could use in-game cheats? Let us know in the comments!

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