Post #59463
2025-12-13 12:23 UTC
Oh yeah.
Back in the (dial up) day, amongst the neighborhood kids?
If you looked up a GameFAQs guide to a game, if you had to do that, to beat it?
You were cheating.
Only possibly acceptable if it was a game with an onbnoxious amount of hidden collectable type items, and you were just now doing a full completionist run.
Nowadays, you’d have to basically make a whole lot of your game procedurally generated, to get back to that kind of a paradigm, (hence the existence of roguelites, i suppose) but yeah its absolutely totally normalized now that just looking up a guide or a playthrough is totally acceptable, whereas pre-mass-internet-adoption, doing that was largely seen as cheating.
Replies (1)
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@rumschlumpel@feddit.org 2025-12-13 12:35
Personally, I never cared about the cheating aspect, I was never particularly good at gaming and I’d definitely prefer cheating over not finishing a game or trying to bruteforce whatever I’m stuck on for 10 hours. The issue is that looking up stuff casually like many people (including me) do today has a high risk of reducing the fun for no real reason. And I feel like games today tend to be easier and less grindy than they used to be in the dial-up days, too, so there’s also less reason to look anything up in the first place.