![]() ![]() I take no joy in killing enemies while I am trying to explore an area, plumbing it for its secrets. To me, this was exactly what I wanted from the game. By the time I reengaged with the unexplored areas of the world, I was wiping the floor with just about anything that wasn’t a boss. A few hours went by and I jumped nearly 100 levels. I stocked up on a few hundred arrows and went to work. ![]() The placement of this cliff crow in Elden Ring is perfect, where you are not in harm’s way and can quickly reset this enemy by the Site of Grace where you heal, thereby respawning enemies in the area. With this item equipped, I searched around until I found what seems to be a universally accepted grinding spot: a giant crow that, once aggravated, runs off a cliff to its death. The first move I made was to seek out an obscure cave in Caelid, one of the game’s notoriously unforgiving areas, where after a few dozen stubborn deaths, I obtained an item that would double the runes I received from defeating enemies. The mod that caught my eye in Elden Ring is billed as an “easy mode.” While I was not unduly struggling in my playthrough of Elden Ring, I had reached a point where I wanted to simply accelerate my experience working through it. So I never dabbled in the modding scene until quite recently, the most obvious example being Elden Ring. Furthermore, I don’t know the first thing about coding. I have always been hesitant to mod my games, fearing that I’d break something fundamental in their code and waste tons of time patching the game back into a playable state. But with some basic computer knowledge and plenty of internet forums, many games have a serviceable modding scene. Most modern games do not have built-in cheat codes. The fact that you can cheat in video games – especially when developers intentionally program their games with these absurd exploits in mind – is one of the things that makes gaming unique from other artistic mediums. Years after that, I would find myself typing “O CANADA” into Age of Mythology, squealing with joy as flying bears sporting the Canada flag as capes zoomed in to laser my enemies. ![]() ![]() I’ll never forget those joyous evenings dropping tanks all over the place, earnestly trying to maximize my “wanted” level as the police aggressively chased me around the city. Soon after, I sneakily obtained a copy of Grand Theft Auto III for the Playstation 2, sending lists of cheat codes to my mother to print out at work. From my earliest days of elementary school, inheriting the Konami code in the lunch line was a rite of passage for some early experiences on the GameBoy. Despite the uncompromising challenge of these three experiences, I inevitably found that it was quite useful to “cheat” to make my journeys more fun.Ĭheating is an intrinsic part of the gaming experience. Over the past few months, however, I have voluntarily saddled three games that provide no such difficulty sliders: Elden Ring, Returnal, and Dark Souls. As long as games don’t artificially lock away story content behind barriers of difficulty, I will simply choose the easiest mode where difficulty sliders exist. Cuphead, for example, locks away its final boss if you choose the “simple” gameplay option if I hadn’t known about this feature of Cuphead, I would have needed to replay the entire game to reach this proper ending. It has never interested me to complete a first playthrough while using a game’s hardest difficulty settings. I have made no secret of my aversion to difficult video games. ![]()
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