6.
You Dirty Rat
“Hello, my name is Chris and I am a compulsive
cheater.”
It started, as so many things did, with the
Sinclair Spectrum. The gaming mags then much as now ran regular
tips and tricks sections; little hints to make playing the games
easier. This was vital with some releases, which more often than
not came with no-more clues on how to play the game than a small
poem and a list of keyboard commands. Thanks a bunch Ultimate.
Even the best instructions contained reams of text describing
the plot of the game in preference to any description of the gameplay.
Like I care what my characters motivation is when all I want to
do is shoot shit until it blows up. Hmmm. Plus ça même
chose…
French Fancies, oil on board, Catherine
Kurtz 1999 - easy joke and I took it
I’d try and deduce what I could from the
cryptic instruction sheet on the bus on the way home and then,
after reading the instructions again while loading from tape,
I’d play it for five minutes before I got confused and then
would turn to the back pages of Crash to figure out what to do
next. (There’s another thing, Tips pages are always at the
back – it’s like an implicit declaration that using
them is wrong.)
But it wasn’t long before tips pages mutated
from the merely helpful (“Frankenstein can be defeated by
the spanner – for the bolts on his neck. Geddit!”)
to full walkthroughs, detailed maps and then, eventually, the
mighty POKE.
Arcade poking!
The problem is this: once I know a piece of
information I find it almost impossible to forget it. I’ve
tried, but my brain just refuses to let go of stuff. It means
that I’m a demon in pub quizzes as I can effortlessly recall
half-heard facts from long dead television shows, or books that
I skimmed while killing time at lunch 20 years ago but it also
means once I’ve read ‘you can get infinite lives by
typing IAMTHEBEST in pause mode’ I would automatically recall
that when I loaded the game from tape. And, all too often, I found
it impossible to resist, especially when I’d died twenty
times in the first wave and just wanted to see the next screen.
It’s still the case.
So, gradually, I became a cheat.
It became a matter of course to automatically
POKE in an infinite lives cheat (never in Jet Set Willy though)
when I loaded a game. Why bother taking the time to get good at
something when you can let the HEX take the strain. What I didn’t
understand then is that this is a two-edged sword.
Sure, there are a load of games that I would
never have finished, or even grown bored of, without cheat modes;
games that I would not have taken the time to learn to play well,
games that would have been labelled ‘too hard’. On
the other hand there are all the games that I never explored properly
because of cheat modes. After all, where is the incentive to load
a game when you know that if you hold down the fire button you’ll
complete it in twenty minutes?
It took me a long time to realise that the journey
is sometimes as important as the destination. That, without meaning
to sound like everyone’s mother, the only person I was cheating
was me.
But still, when I get stuck in Zelda, I get
itchy fingers. I know that there are places out there that will
tell me which island I need sail too, which monster to defeat
and which weapon to use. I automatically reach for the back pages
or, nowadays, for gamefaqs.com. But I’m older now, and possibly
wiser and I do stop myself before the damage is done. The temptation
is still there, and it is strong but, in true twelve-stepper style,
I have not cheated today…
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