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Well, the modern version of this is very granular difficulty sliders.

In the name of accessibility, a lot of recent games allow you to customize the hell out of your gameplay experience — things like “how hard do enemies hit?”, “how easily can I find ammo?”, even “how hard is it to make jumps?”, and so on.

Hades has a setting called God Mode, where every time you die, you just get straight up 1% stronger, stacking infinitely.

Cheats in single player games aren’t dead - they’ve evolved!

Anyone remember the infinite masterball cheat (red and blue) that required surfing up and down the eastern side of Cinnabar Island and fighting the MissingNo. pokemon? Good times. Also, I would 100% buy a Nintendo Switch if they released a remastered version of red/blue/yellow (no additional pokemon ffs) especially with online multiplayer.

Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu is a remake of red/blue

Oh really? Is there a catch?

You have to use the joycons. Multiplayer battles don't really work because all pokemon in Pikachu/Eevee have weirdly inflated stats due to the candy system imported from Pokemon Go. You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them.

This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.

(Also, Pikachu/Eevee are not remakes of Red/Blue - they're remakes of Yellow. But that's a small difference.)

If what you want is online multiplayer pokemon battles with just the first 151 pokemon eligible, I'd probably go for Sword/Shield and try to round up support on Smogon for your "only gen I pokemon" format. If you want to replay Yellow, then Let's Go is what you want.

> Multiplayer battles don't really work because all pokemon in Pikachu/Eevee have weirdly inflated stats due to the candy system imported from Pokemon Go. You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them. This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.

Oh man, that’s tragic :’( I knew there had to be a catch. I genuinely don’t understand why they wouldn’t just remake the originals! Surely I’m not the only one in my generation with nostalgia and a professional salary to spend on video games.

I mean ... other than some of the multiplayer stuff mentioned, Eevee/Pikachu are tile-for-tile remakes of the old games, so if you're after a nostalgia kick I'd say they are definitely worth it.

> You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them. This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.

That all sounds like singleplayer stuff.

If you're looking for my opinions, the restriction to catching wild pokemon doesn't really hurt the game. (It's also true that the classic "random battle" mechanic is mostly gone - instead, tall grass and cave tiles that could previously generate random battles now generate pokemon that are visible from the overworld, and you can run into them or avoid them at your own discretion. I happen to like that change, and I believe it's popular generally.)

The change in difficulty level is, in my opinion, bad. What happened is that pokemon now earn half of an opponent's experience value just by being on your team during the battle, and full value if they participate. (Catching a pokemon counts as defeating them.) The older system was that the opponent's experience value was divided evenly among participants while spectators got nothing. So for a battle in which two of your pokemon participate in defeating an enemy pokemon worth 400 experience:

- In generations I through V, your two participating pokemon would earn 200 experience each, for a total of 400 experience.

- In generations VI forward, your two participating pokemon would earn 400 experience each, and your other four pokemon would earn 200 experience each, for a total of 1600 experience.

But this 300% increase in experience earned by your team (250% in the likely case where you only have one participant per enemy) was not accompanied by any increase in enemy levels or in experience required for you to level up, or by a decrease in enemy experience values. You just earn ludicrous amounts of experience and dramatically overlevel everything prior to the elite four, and there's nothing you can do about it. It is not possible for a pokemon on your team to fall behind in levels even if you never use it at all.

As a separate concern, specific battles that were viewed as challenging in the original games tend to be nerfed in the remakes; the notable ones are Whitney in Gold/Silver and Cynthia in Diamond/Pearl.

It does, I guess I glossed over it!

My point still stands about the tile-for-tile remake though. I thoroughly enjoyed them. But then I wasn't at all bothered about fighting wild pokemon, and honestly the original games had virtually zero difficulty for me anyway. Just waste a bunch of time fighting wild pokemon to boost your stats every so often, then carry on winning at everything. There are reasons to try things like that in the new game - catching the same pokemon multiple times increases the chances of shinies appearing, and pokemon with better stats.

Each to their own, but for me it was a good nostalgia kick, and I'm not going to get upset if some of the mechanics have changed a bit.

Fire Red/Leaf Green using RetroArch + NetPlay?

Alternatively, check out PokeMMO. It's basically a multiplayer Pokemon game built on the roms of the original games (supports gen 1, and 3-5). There isn't a native Switch build though so you'd need to dualboot Android or Linux if you wanted to make that happen.

I had foolishly used every rare candy I'd found before I learned about the item dupe glitch. I then proceeded to run around the entire world searching for hidden items hoping I'd missed one. By the 3rd or 4th city I painstakingly searched tile by tile, I found one!

Adult me wishes I still had that determination and persistence, fuck.

Reminds me of when I was playing Morrowind on the Xbox at fifteen years old and, after many months of playing, I finally embarked on the main quest. At which point I realized I had looted a main quest item from some fortress during early exploration and misplaced it. I needed it to finish the game.

I must have spent months here and there looking for that item in the world. I checked every shopkeeper in case I sold it. Then I searched every container I might have stashed it in.

Never found it. Never beat the game... (Until last year, 15+ years later, thanks to OpenMW).

Always wanted to rip the save file from the Xbox in my parents' attic and search for where I put that damn item just out of curiosity.

But your determination and persistence reminded me of mine.

I also occasionally enjoy cheating in video games, but it's rarely about the game itself at that point anymore. I've noticed it's not really about avoiding tedious or unpleasant parts of the game for me. I just think it's funny to have tutorial enemies yielding astronomical amounts of XP and gold or to have random Great People born in my cities every single turn. No kill like overkill.

It's also educational. Creating overpowered joke Civ4 mods and reading disassemblies of NES games to adjust numbers in an emulator's debugger make for fun semi-practical programming puzzles. Honestly, I think I enjoy the process of cheating more than the result.

Try it out sometime! Load up some old game in gdb and start messing with the numbers. It can be fun.

I like WeMod[0], which is a unified GUI for trainers. It supports a lot of games, handles a lot of the heavy lifting (e.g. starting the game in offline-only mode for multiplayer games), shows any extra steps that you might have to take for a specific game, and the developers are very quick at putting out trainers for new games and updating trainers for older games when needed. You can even see the queue of the games that they're working on supporting/updating.

I also like the Xbox Gamebar widget for those games that are hard to alt-tab out of.

0: https://www.wemod.com/

Not open source though

Neither are most games. If you are opposed to non-free software on moral grounds, then the utility of a tool like this is pretty limited for you.

you can also use a memory editor

Cheats graduated into "assist features" (invincibility, reduced damage, etc.), which you can toggle in game options. Some recent games, like Psychonauts 2 and Control have them and does not penalize players for using them.

Play on PC! Plenty of excellent modding communities, or just the ability to drop into a dev console for a bit on most games there. My partner often does this to reduce parts of games she does not find enjoyable.

What really disappoints me is I'm seeing a lot of YouTubers and streamers advertise really hard challenge they do in games , and even often sometimes advertise them as 100% legit.

Those interest, as some of these challenges are extremely difficult, and I'm curious to learn what stragties they used. Then usually I get mid way through the, the explains the issues that make the challenge hard, before immediately dumping a console command to instantly bypass them.

I disagree with pretty much everything here. Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse.

I would also argue most games are not really that grindy. It’s actually… rare to see in any single player game. If anything most games put you at risk of becoming too powerful too fast. If there’s a grind it is usually for the last 1% of content. And very few games actually try to sell you power ups for single player content. That’s really not a common thing as some people claim.

Multiplayer games are a different beast, but you definitely don’t want cheaters there either. Not wanting long progression curves for multiplayer games is a reasonable ask. Allowing cheaters is not.

> it just makes the game really boring.

Oh boy no. Maybe for you. Maybe for some. With a bit of empathy should be able to imagine that not everyone think like you do. What if someone wants to play pokemon for the exploration, lore and care taking of pokemon. For that person, fighting and leveling is a chore. Maybe someone does not have the actual time for the grind before each arena.

> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless

What if the grind was not a goal or what if we actually doesnt want to fight at all. Pacific run exists. Let's me skip dat boss if I want to.

Agreed. I spent dozens of hours playing GTA5 and literally never made any progress in the story. I had too much fun driving around like a crazy person, constantly using the cheat code to avoid dying.

If you want to play Pokémon and not do the Pokémon battles then you’re on a weird edge case where it’s debatable whether you’re actually playing the game at all. If that’s what you want, sure, go ahead.

That’s actually still very different. Removing fighting from the game vs doing it but with infinite health. The former is at least self consistent I guess.

They enjoy or get satisfaction from one part of the game without enjoying or getting satisfaction from another part. Being happy there are methods to skip or minimize the part they don't like is pretty reasonable. There's no reason in a recreational hobby to struggle through something you don't enjoy in order to do something you do.

Personally I think the battles are the best part of Pokemon but if folks like the story, the exploration/discovery/search, or the collecting parts of Pokemon but don't like the battles it doesn't hurt me if they do something to minimize them and they aren't lesser for doing so.

Doesn’t hurt me if someone decides to shoot themself in the knee but I still have pretty strong opinions against it.

Judging people by their choices is pretty much instinctual human behavior.

> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring.

Probably depends on the person and the game. If they're enjoying the game as an interactive storytelling medium, playing through it on god-mode is probably not significantly worse than struggling to win; it's no worse than a movie.

I prefer a little challenge, but it's clear there's a demographic for this with the 'journalist mode' in many new games.

I doubt it. There’s still a big difference between very low difficulties and god mode. God mode in the typical sense exposes the cracks in the game and breaks the immersion.

And if you enjoy dicking around and abusing cheats that’s fine but it’s about on par with smothering fine dining with hot sauce. Or reading the summary of a novel rather than the book.

Or I played this game already 3 times and I don't care about the lockpicking mini-game since I already done it 100 times, or I already crawled on some stupid long cave levels where the developers just spammed spiders, I want to enjoy certain parts and not waste my limited time on the stuff I don't enjoy.

Unfortunately few games have good modding tools, but the few games that have you will notice players using mods to "cheat" away parts that they no longer enjoy , like skipping some terrible level in Dragon Age Origins on repeat play-troughs. Other time saving mods are things like increase inventory capacity (it is not immersive anyway you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant).

> you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant

Wasn't there a game where you could turn over your inventory to your dog, who would run back to a merchant, sell it, and return with the proceeds?

Torchlight did this.

City builders like city skylines or sim city are much more fun with infinite money, at least for me. I could care less about the financial part, I just like building!

Especially since the "money" side of those games is always so very weak, you just need to learn a few steps and you'll effectively have infinite money anyway.

Yeah. Either I cheat myself infinite money or I set up a basic, in the black city, turn the speed as high as it'll go and go eat dinner. Functionally the same result, so why waste the time?

Sometimes I kind of wish the city simulator games had buildings and roads be free - the only money issue you had to worry about was balancing monthly maintenance expenses with taxes, as the cost to "build" isn't really a problem at all.

Sure, I buy that. But presumably you’re just interested in building cities, not completing challenges or a story mode or whatever. I’ve never played that specific title.

> Cheating in single player games is super lame

Who cares? It's a single player game and doesn't affect other players whatsoever. People can enjoy it how they want.

Sure. People can also just waste their lives away on shitty drugs. It’s their lives and aside from some edge cases I’m willing to ignore it doesn’t affect other people.

But maybe it’s not unreasonable to have an opinion that it’s a super lame choice. Maybe seems foolish. Or likely to lead to lesser appreciation of the art/life.

> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse.

Yeah, cheating in Pokemon is what finally killed my love for the games as a kid. A friend wanted to show me his cool Action Replay, turned on every cheat and left my game saved in a state where it would be a lot of work to get back to "normal". Somehow it revealed all the grindy bits that I had been okay with up until that point.

But it definitely does depend on the person. My friend was still having fun with his Pokemon games after. Another friend in high school seemed to get more fun out of typing the level skip code on Starcraft than beating the levels the intended way.

Weird. I'm disillusioned with games that have grind as a major pillar. So my most memorable games have been games like Soma or Outer Wilds. Can't say I like games as a whole any less, I just avoid a number of genres.

Like what games? Outside of mobile games I find this pretty rare.

> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring.

In many single player games, cheats are isomorphic to configurable difficulty options and allow you to tune the game to the challenges of interest.

Sort of. The lowest difficulty may be stupidly easy, not even requiring comprehension of the game mechanics. But it’s rarely so blatant that it would be described as a god mode.

Not all cheats are “god mode” and there are games that use various cheats the same way other games use multidimensional difficulty settings, as the means to disable or enable particular subsystems or dimensions of challenge (or bypass them, e.g., by providing infinite resources of one kind so that the system addressing that resource can be ignored.)

It's a good thing its a signle player game and someone cheating in their playthrough has absolutely no impact on your own enjoyment of the same game!

I agree re: cheaters in multiplayer games, though. Except for the rare cases of "everyone gets to!" ala CoD:MW2 lobbies where the cheater/host set the game to where everyone could fly and shoot massively explosive rounds. That's good fun, for a few rounds.

As I've gotten older and busier I've started using cheats and walkthroughs and methods to skip parts of games I don't enjoy much more often. I'm an adult with real difficulties and responsibilities and stressors. I spend 60+ hours a week running a startup. I have other hobbies like rock climbing and Magic to struggle against and push myself to get better at.

I understand that the challenge can be a lot of fun, I finished both Hades and Doom Eternal on their hardest difficulty and really loved my time with both but sometimes a challenge isn't what I want out of a game and I just want to enjoy the story or explore the world or blow off steam.

Video games for me are usually a relaxing past-time I enjoy in the small amount of free-time I have available and I'm often not willing to get frustrated slogging through slow sections or trying to overcome difficult ones. So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3.

If you prefer playing games differently from me and want a challenge when I don't that's totally fine, I hope you're having a great time cause the way each of us play doesn't affect or take away from the other person experience or goal in any way.

People are allowed to enjoy different things or even the same things in different ways and its super lame to call them super lame for something so inconsequential as how they play video games.

> So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3.

These all seem pretty reasonable to me. The first one is a desired difficulty level. The second one… well that one’s kind of on you depending on how granular it was. The third one is a desired game mode. The fourth one is just quality of life.

Elden ring was poorly balanced imo. I would imagine if you’re less skilled an easy mode would still give you the full game. But I stand pretty firm that an infinite health mode would utterly ruin it.

Save scumming because something went poorly vs repeatedly save scumming a high risk move until the dice fall favorably seems a little lame to me.

I rarely have time for video games now (work full-time while also trying to optimize for rock climbing). But I really enjoy "Let's Play"s of cinematic story-driven games (especially games which are fairly linear)

I can watch on up to 2X speed, skip through sections where the player is grinding/leveling, managing inventory, toolbuilding, traveling long distances, or engaging in repetitive combat. I just finished Last of Us games 1 and 2 in ~12 hours total (playing would have taken closer to 50)