Sega Genesis Games Secrets Greatest Tips, 2nd Edition

4 minutes ago, kitsunebi said:

I haven't bought a game in the last 20 years, but do they even have cheat codes anymore?  It seems like they would have lost their mystique now that everything's a google search away.  What made them cool back in the day was that they'd show up once in whatever your favorite mag was as a kid.  If you missed that issue, which was entirely possible because you spent your allowance on comic books that month, you'd never even know the code existed, unless maybe one of your friends got the code from another mag and you could excitedly scribble it down while passing the mag around after school.  It was their relative UNavailability that made them interesting.

Thanks to the largely online and achievement-focused swerve that video games have taken since the 360/PS3 era, cheat codes in games are largely a thing of the past. You'll also notice that you don't see peripherals like the GameShark or Pro Action Replay any longer, for much the same reason. Developers want you to earn those achievements/trophies, not just blast through the game using infinite ammo and health cheats.

I can think of only a handful of games from within the last, oh, fifteen years or so that included cheat codes. The usual trade-off for them today is that they either prevent you from saving your game, or they disable all trophies/achievements on your save file if you activate them. The last game I'm aware of that allowed you to input a cheat code without actively screwing you over in some way was Dead Space, which had some single-use codes that allowed you to refill your stasis meter, gave you some money, or added some power nodes to your inventory. No invincibility cheats or weapon/ammo codes though.

2 hours ago, kitsunebi said:

Like the excitement of catching sight of a boob while watching a late night movie on the free weekend preview of Cinemax back in the day[. . .]

( . Y . )