Playing video games is often perceived to be a leisurely pastime, so leisurely that confessing it's a hobby is like admitting you only watch seven hours of TV a day. Easy on the limbs it might well be but, as any experienced game-player will tell you, it can be infuriating, challenging, thankless, rewarding and silly all at once. In fact if you take away infuriating, challenging and rewarding it's not too dissimilar to playing golf.
(Of course, if you really want to play Golf as it should be played, you can always load up one of the finer golf games such as Links LS on your PC or Every- body's Golf on your Playstation and off you go. You don't have to trudge around in the wet, you have your own caddy, you can choose a playing partner who is never going to beat you and who never speaks out of turn.) The really good thing about video games though, unlike golf, is the ability to cheat without feeling even remotely guilty. Most good games come with pre-set cheats for you to find and, if they don't, you just have to learn how to play dirty. This might involve shunting another car into a wall or cutting corners by driving over the grass in a motor racing simulation. In an older version of PGA Tour Golf you could force your computerised opponent to take a chip shot from the tee by hitting the F8 key. Very nice.
Some game developers however are trying to stamp out this black art by making their games more realistic. For instance, more recent driving simulations make it almost impossible to drive your performance car over the grass or you might get black-flagged for dangerous driving.
This traditional cheating may be in decline but there is another form that is positively flourishing. Its goal is usually the same.....how do you beat the game without having to actually beat it? Depending on the game, you will want full ammo, invulnerability, every weapon available or perhaps loads of money, how to skip levels, all the power and, for the cheat, none of the glory.
To allow cheating, the game must have hidden codes of course. But, to a good cheater, "hidden" doesn't mean much these days. With the advent of the Web, a game has no sooner hit the streets than some bright spark has found the cheating codes and uploaded them for everybody to see.
Not so long ago if you were stuck in a game you just had to keep on trying until you succeeded. With access to the Internet it has become far too easy to go online and see how to solve your particular problem. It's akin to turning the paper upside down to see the crossword solution. So, although you might not be really in trouble, if the answer is only a few clicks away, it's far too easy to give in to temptation.
Some cheats aren't real cheats at all and are there for cosmetic reasons: to add invisible walls to a soccer pitch or change the colour of a character's hair. These are often referred to as "Easter eggs" and are not much use to a hard-core cheater.
If you're not one for trawling through Web searches, some good sites to start with are www.gamesdomain.com, www.psmonline.com or, for Nintendo fans, www.ign64.com. These sites have a plethora of cheats waiting for you. They are all indexed nicely so you shouldn't have to waste too much time tracking down the cheat of your choice. You will find however that, in some cases, cheating can be difficult. For instance, in Tomb Raider to get all the weapons means you have to move Lara in a different direction five times before making her rotate 180 degrees and then get her to jump back and do a flip in the air. It would be easier just to play the game through as normal. But, to the dedicated cheater, it doesn't matter how difficult the cheat is. When you find it, flaunt it.
Garrett Rowe is at growe@irish-times.ie