A Time to Cheat

The other night I reached a point in Dark Souls where it is starting to cost a lot to upgrade my weapons and buy the items I needed. It came to a point where I was just grinding and it was starting to become tiresome. Then by accident I discovered a secret. There is a ledge in a certain spot that if you get a bunch of guys to chase you, then drop down onto it they'll go flying right over the ledge, just like in that game about the lemmings. I think it might have been called, The Lost Vikings.

Anyway I found that doing this earns you a lot of souls very quickly. So I was able to finally upgrade my stuff and life was good. Then I kept doing it and felt like less of a man, because it's so easy that it's pretty much cheating. But the alternative is just grinding the same spots over and over for hours. It's not a challenge, it's just tedium. So I guess my question to you guys is: When do you think it's ok to cheat at a game?

In my opinion, as long as it's a singleplayer game and you're making the game more fun for yourself, then anything goes. If you're doing it online to gain an unfair advantage, then fuck your couch. When a lot of us were younger, the only way to beat some games was with the help of a Game Genie. Not because we sucked or were lazy, but because a lot of game developers genuinely seemed to hate children and wanted them to suffer.

Actually it was mainly because they didn't want people to just rent games; they wanted them to buy them so instead of making games longer, they just made them really fucking hard so you couldn't beat it in a weekend. Maybe part of the reason many games are so piss-easy today is that for most consoles, cheats and cheat devices no longer exist. You're pretty much forced to play the game the way the developer intended, for better or worse.

So instead of making games too easy, so people beat it in a weekend and trade it in, now developers are afraid of making games too hard, that people get frustrated and trade them in. Amazing how we've come full circle.