Games That Cheat

Don’t you just hate it when you disover that you are stuck and unable to progress in a game because it is actually cheating on you?

During six years of careful video game studies I have had the opportunity to witness the demeanor of many games which kept on cheating the player and preventing, a way or another, of achieving any progress at all.

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.”,

Alvin Toffler said. Pertaining the virtual reality of videogames not one but many definitions were the kind of reflections which enabled me to cope with this frustrating issue of games cheating the player.

Rule of thumb number one: any CTD (Crash To Desktop) is unreal pertaining the reality of the game’s world. One example of a game which almost drove me crazy with CTDs was a particular level of Blood II: The Chosen. The episode in question was “Cabalco Meat Packing Plant” somewhere in chapter two. The design of the level and how the mobs were disposed encouraged and/or required the use of the sniper rifle. But among the bloody places of this level there was one special zealot which, if shot with the sniper rifle, will everytime crash the game to the desktop.

When one is having difficulty with a game and has already ruled out every misconfiguration or issues related to the game’s software itself one should be easy to realize that it is the game’s fault and not one’s.

In the two-thousands I’ve been studying the DOS era of PC video games; sometimes. I had vague recollections of my gaming seasons in adolescence. I must admit that I haven’t had much luck nor scads of fun with videogames back then. But sometimes memory gets deformed and ten or fifteen years later I remembered the DOS era with a vague self-satisfied nostalgy; thinking that I did have fun!
But now I must confess that it wasn’t so. I had only the essential fun with videogames from ’91 to ’99 (except in ’93 when I didn’t play), meaning that the only games that I played and finished were only the staples which “everyone else was playing”, something along the lines of Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, DN3D and the compulsory graphic adventures (Lucasarts et al)…

Building a database of DOS games and starting to fire them up in DOSBox I have had many delusions about what that era was (really) about. It wasn’t about assimilating the whole commercial PC video game scene, playing to it, finishing it and then feeling glorious. It was more about choosing what really would be fun and discarding all the trash with potentiality to scar one mentally with contionuos deep frustrations. I am speaking of corporate trash, not even touching the topic of shovelware games.

In those years, many of them pre-Internet, it was difficult to find the information needed to fix an offending game. I am not talking from the resentment of picking an obsolete object of study for being out of touch with reality. Sadly the most painful memories are unforgetable, along with the erroneous ones (the ones of having deep fun with DOS games).

I remember very well that, for a myriad of factors, games back then did ”cheat” a lot more than the ones of present day. Not only strange acts on the meat of the game itself, but also OS-wide horrors like:

Heap overflow, (the gist), data error, fail on INT 24H, access denied, sector not found, sharing violation (BBS games), CRC error, invalid memory block address, file not found and the dreaded insufficient memory.

These traumas aren’t easy to forget. Now, to fire a high-end DOSBox emulating all the hardware that I lacked when things went wrong, and to start seeing the same acts, by actually the same perpetrators, is a
dumbfounding occurrence.

In 20 years of PC gaming some of the games that “cheated” me were:

The Dark Half: Once you reach game over the game quits to DOS.

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen: played in a retrograming rig, yet something happened.

Shadow Warrior: The OpenGl, fanmodded version which is playable in modern OSes, very annoying and often occurring CTDs, but I remember it acting up, specially when using the missile launcher, in the late 90ies too.

Terminal Velocity: The Build3D games were all more or less buggy, except maybe for Blood, so to speak.

Redneck Rampage: Cheated me when I played it in the dedicated retrogaming rig which was high-end compared to the computer I had when I played it for the first time in 1996.  I think it cheated a lot less back then.

Doom II: Played with Risen-3D on XP. I can’t remember what it was, but it did.

Starcraft (on XP): Would appear to work okay since fired up until quitting it. Then when returning and going to open a saved game it just hadn’t any saved games.

Age of Mythology: I wonder what was it, can’t remember.

Unreal Tournament: can’t remember exactly, but surely bug-related crashes.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Can’t remember… CTD?

GTA: San Andreas: I can’t remember how did it cheat me, but it did it five times.

Far Cry: Woot, CIA cheats!

Painkiller: Another cheater…

Tony Hawk Pro-Skater: In PS, suddenly the menu stopped to work as it had to, this was weird….

I documented some of the games above when they were cheating me, other are mental recollections.

Now, the game wich I specifically researched how it cheated me, because I thougth was the one most offensive in this regard, was The Terminator: Future Shock.

The game crashed constantly, when playing, when loading up, even in the transition from a level to the next. The crashes were protected mode errors that crash to DOS with a lot of binary data garbage in the screen.

I was one hour walking in the sandbox-like scenario of level two without finding anything out of one of the sides of the death camp. Supposedly here I had to drop an explosive satchel, yet there wasn’t any really indicators of the spot being the access point to the death camp. This was more of a design flaw, subject for other set of articles.

The game freezes in the “LOADING…” (long) intervals…

The machine gun firing muzzle’s animation looks like two ansis, I know this game’s very dated, but even in its heyday, that was just cheating the buyer for the sake of code reusability. The pipe bombs explosion animation is the most grainy graphic I’ve seen in a game considered classic and a muster… The humming of the soundratrck in the transition from level two to level three, its bass, is really annoying!

The old-fashioned cutscenes are quite revealing but not 100% satisfactory. I lost more than one hour in level three simply because the cutscene didn’t explain how to select the satchel charge.

Around forty meters away explosions aren’t heard… why?

Enemies so easy as those wafting mines are not killed with half a dozen rounds of the shotgun? WTF?

Inside of death camp trying to hit a switch thingy from the exit to the sewers, the primitive of wall where the switch is just dissapears (when looking down), in the sewers the playing character just won’t transfer from a pipe to the preceding one if jumping backwards when trying to avoid a surprising mob and if falling from a ridiculously low height the playing character will lose a nonrealistic quantity of health points.

I concluded thinking that many times the cheatings are produced by buggy software, but there are times when the causes appear to be totally software unrelated. In this way they start needing to be judged from a techno-pagan point of view beyond the technical one.

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