Ever met or known a gamer kid who bragged (and has the save file to prove) that he was able to beat a game within hours of obtaining it? And it's that same game that you've spent several days trying to get through? Way back when you probably considered that kid to have really "mad skillz"... until you snuck a peek into his bedroom to find his dirty little secret... gaming magazines full of cheat codes and strategies no one else would find out without reading them, bookmarks on his computer to computer game cheating sites, etc...

My nephew thinks I'm cheating while playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. One of the things I like to do right after creating a character in the game is to head into the Market District (from the door leading to the bridge to the Prison), turn left and then sneak into the corner of the left wall. I just find something to hold the strafe key down for three hours and I've maxed out my sneak skill.

I guess it could be considered cheating if I run into a town with strangely named people and a building with a lot of doors inside.... and inside those rooms are all the weapons, books, spells, armor, etc... in the entire game, including items from that Crusader quest.

Have you done anything like this? Where you think you're playing by the rules but people watching you promptly tell you that you're a cheat?

I was playing Karko the other day and some kid told me to go to hell. Then, I used a sealing spell on him and accused me of cheating.

When playing fallout 2 I found a simple way to get the Mk II power armor early in the game. When I leave the starting village (which is located in the top left corner), there's another town nearby to the right that I'm supposed to go to. Instead I head straight down to bottom left corner, where I'll discover a military base that I'm not supposed to know off until really late in the game. There are no obstacles between the starting village and this place but there are couple of instances where you run into a patrol that will kill you in a round or two if you don't run away as soon as you're spotted. The base itself is heavily guarded but it has a back door that's locked. The key is in the procession of this old guy that you can easily kill, despite being low level at the time. After sneaking in through the back door, you'll discover an unguarded room with a MK II power armor along with some high tech weaponry. After emptying the place I head back the way I came and start my quest from that point.

Since this power armor increases my strength by four (with max being 10) i normally start with modest 4 in strength so that my other stats can be higher. With the power armor I now have well rounded stats and room to improve. This is the biggest, most blatant exploit cheat that I've ever pulled. I made no effort in claiming that it was not cheating.

I've been known to continuously use one really hard to dodge move in fighting games and been called a cheat for it. I'm not very good at fighting games, though, so if I don't do something like that I'm pretty screwed most of the time.

i've been known to be awesome and people accuse me of cheating because they can't keep up. But only in Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

I'm the kind of player that probably will curbstomp anybody in Street Fighter by throwing Hadoken after Hadoken and keep the other player far from me. If he can get close enough I can pummel him in the old-fashion way, but if he can defend himself I would burn him with Hadokens...

I used the duplicate Rare Candy cheat...

Excuse me while I go confess to my Father.

Splash Damage
i've been known to be awesome and people accuse me of cheating because they can't keep up. But only in Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

How do you cheat in Guitar Hero?

In counter strike, sometimes I'm really lucky, like a long range shotgun kill, or I have a 5-7 and the other dude has an awp and I manage to kill him at sniping range. I get called out on that.

I also I've been accused of cheating for C&C Renegade online. The game had weird physics, where if you shoot the dude anywhere on the body, it would be like playing an rts. different units had different hp, armor, and damage, so you would always deal X amount of damage where ever you shot, BUT if you shot them in the head, it would be an instant kill. Apparently not a lot of people figured this out, so I'll be a grunt unit, while everybody else is like some fancy class soldier, and I'll easily take them out with a head shot.

JoeL_CQB
In counter strike, sometimes I'm really lucky, like a long range shotgun kill, or I have a 5-7 and the other dude has an awp and I manage to kill him at sniping range. I get called out on that.

I also I've been accused of cheating for C&C Renegade online. The game had weird physics, where if you shoot the dude anywhere on the body, it would be like playing an rts. different units had different hp, armor, and damage, so you would always deal X amount of damage where ever you shot, BUT if you shot them in the head, it would be an instant kill. Apparently not a lot of people figured this out, so I'll be a grunt unit, while everybody else is like some fancy class soldier, and I'll easily take them out with a head shot.

I was about to mention CS too; I remember playing on Dust (years and years ago) and I was chasing some guy around a corner. He ran to the right and when I come around the corner there's no one there. Either A. he hacked and ran super fast enough to get all the way down to the terrorist starting area or B. he's hiding behind that box. So I light the box up and kill him, and he starts crying about me hacking. Kill anyone enough times in a PC shooter and you're a hacker, no questions asked, no explanations accepted.

Elder Scrolls IV, I would do the tape down the joystick thing to level my athleticism and sneak abilities and in the sims 2 I motherloaded like crazy. I remember in SWG the AI was kind of stupid in this one area with really tough monsters who couldn't climb stairs, so me and several other people would camp there and just aggro one, climb upstairs to the balcony and just autoshoot and come back later.

Also, PP, there is a way to cheat in GH2 to beat Jordan. Goodness knows I can shred a lot of songs on expert, but not that one.

Eh, the original thrust of this thread was about using exploits.
No, I tend not to use them, I like to play the games as intended- if it's against someone else.

If people say "hack" if I'm playing well, then they're being silly and I ignore them. But most usually that happens when I do a silly fluke like leaping off of a high building and shooting someone in the head with my sniper rifle -while they're also leaping off of another high building miles away. That's happened a few times... But it was always a fluke.

There are some holes in the game just too good not to exploit.
Like mew.

Fuck yeah.

Hahahaha, this thread is awesome!

I'll bet that I've found many, MANY ways to 'exploit' over the years but the following two are my favorite (by the way, I'm old school, you may not know these games... :S )

1) The old NHLPA games in the 16 bit era. There was a move you could pull off in which you could score EVERY TIME! My brother and I would rack up scores of like 42-45. We eventually banned the move in our house and aptly named it "The Cheap Move." If you are interested in how the move is done (I don;t know why anyone would be), PQ me.

2) The second is a move I REFUSED TO PULL OFF! In Super Bomberman for the Super Nintendo, if you get the glove early on, or if you are the Gold Bomber with the glove as your special item, you can lob a bomb off the screen and onto the opposite players corner. I find this move SOOOO CHEAP and I refused to utilize it when I play. I had a friend who disagreed with me completely and would kill me with it all the time. This move was infuriating, it wasn't "cheating" but it was so unfair and exploitative.

That's my two cents.
Cheers
Frank

Product Placement

Splash Damage
i've been known to be awesome and people accuse me of cheating because they can't keep up. But only in Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

How do you cheat in Guitar Hero?

you don't.

I do some physics-breaking with some of my vehicles on Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts that people tend to kinda suspect foul play with, but it's mostly just crap that I experimented with and found that it had weird physics reactions.

Inkmonkey
I've been known to continuously use one really hard to dodge move in fighting games and been called a cheat for it. I'm not very good at fighting games, though, so if I don't do something like that I'm pretty screwed most of the time.

You're supposed to just randomly mash buttons or else it's pretty much cheating.

cheated in sonic adventure 2 and i finished that awesome game in 12 hours.aaand drunk duck's brother site,smackjeeves,one of my friends there accused me of cheating.

Using the down B move with Pikachu in Super smash bros. Cheap, but not cheating.

Pineapple
Using the down B move with Pikachu in Super smash bros. Cheap, but not cheating.

Man, I remember when I thought that move was cheap. It was around the time that I thought playing as Kirby was cheap because he had multiple jumps. He was a bit overpowered in the first Smash Bros., but not nearly to the level I thought he was.

In The Thing, each boss had a "sweet spot" where you could stand and just shoot at them from a distance without taking any injury. Then you could just cut their health down with concentrated fire from the machine gun and then finish them off with a few incendiary grenades (or in the 2nd boss's case, electrocution).

Here's a super secret strategy for all old 2D fighting games.

1. Trap opponent into one corner of the screen.
2. Do same move over and over again (that they cant get out of).
3.???
4. A winner is you.

Inkmonkey
Man, I remember when I thought that move was cheap. It was around the time that I thought playing as Kirby was cheap because he had multiple jumps. He was a bit overpowered in the first Smash Bros., but not nearly to the level I thought he was.

That Pikachu move amuses me so! Especially as Rob's side and B reflects it and makes it hurt Pikachu! Ho ho ho!

But back on subject....Let's see...
Well, it wasn't exactly me being accused of cheating, but a while ago a friend said that you couldn't get out of this place of hazey maze cave on Super Mario 64. Once we all disagreed, we turned the game on, and instantly proved you could. As he is an arrogant little prick, he demanded it was impossible anyway, and that we found a glitch to get out of it. Annoyance!

I've been able to snipe a fair amount of Demomen who are mid-air from sticky jumping in Team Fortress 2 on Convoy v1 from one convoy to the other. Half the time, someone yells hacks on me, or just gets really pissy with me in general for it, but really, it's hard NOT to hit such a large object hurtling your way. Not to mention they always make the jump from the same spot, so I know where they're going.

Then there are all the times that my sentries have turned on invisible spies. Good times.

I joined a game.

wow... Playing Forza Motorsport 3... First I got myself a good car. Second in the game I chose a course that pays over 110k credits with 17 laps for winning and turned all of my "assists" off. Then I hire a driver to race the thing for me (he requires 50% of your winnings). I do this for a couple of days and got 700k+ or more in credits (I'd have gotten more, but I also play the game too) which is nice because 17 laps with a total of 118 miles would probably make me too tired to play much...

The neighbor's kid (who can't get by unless he actually uses cheat codes) looks at what I'm doing and yells... "EXPLOIT!!!" -_-'

My group occassionally gets accused of cheating in Urban Dead. The fact is, we're not. We don't even use "spies". Anyone caught breaking one of the few actual rules in the game, especially "zerging", gets banned.

The fact that we do descend on large groups of human players is coincidence. Our attack strategy is to sweep across the map go after buildings that are the most likely to have humans in them (malls, police stations; buildings that look very obvious even to novice players). Sometimes we hit the motherlode, sometimes we don't.

I suspect the reasons for these accusations is that we're a massive horde and, since we're all living, breathing, thinking people, we can organize and come up with effective strategies. That, and people don't like to admit that they've been outdone fair and square. Human players have to stay indoors most of the time or they'll get eaten as soon as their AP (action points) run out for the day, whereas zombies can roam freely and spend at most a mere 10 out of a maximum 50 AP to get back up if someone kills them. Admittedly the game is a little unbalanced right now, but future updates will likely fix that. Besides, you can't have humans outnumbering the zombies in a zombie apocalypse game; that'd just turn it into a "zombie inconveniece" or a "zombie problem" game.

Grave
Admittedly the game is a little unbalanced right now, but future updates will likely fix that.

Kevan has to actually update the game beyond the token meaningless holiday novelties for that to happen. I'm on the survivor side and a lot of us have spoken about the possibility that from appearances, he's just given up on the thing. Maybe he's able to collect enough from the donations or he's been busy for nearly and somewhere in the back of his mind, he means to get back to it. I don't know.

I've been in Urban Dead for years at this point, but damn, if that player base isn't filled with sociopaths. Makes WoW look reasonable sometimes.


As for cheating appearances, I've been accused once as a pyro in Team Fortress 2. A spy with the Cloak and Dagger didn't/wouldn't understand that crouch moving when your cloak meter is empty still makes him half visible, so I happened to, well, constantly roast him alive. "HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW I WAS THERE?! HACKS!"

In Borderlands when dueling other players, I get accused a lot of using modded weapons because I found/bought a shotgun with 170 x 7 damage, x3 explosive chance, and has 88% accuracy (which is just UNGODLY for a shotgun- that's better than most machine guns and SMG's in-game), and with all my action points spent on bigger magazine size and faster fire rate, this monster gets a 42-round clip and a fire rate of 4 rounds per second. Every time I win a duel with this thing, the first thing my opponent asks is if it's a modded gun.

Youtube Video: Phantasy Star II- Nei vs NeiFirst

Gotta love it when one of the big bad bosses of the game accuses you of cheating. :)

For the curious, there's a battle between these two girls near the end of the game. Just load up Nei with a bunch of Trimate healing potions and it's possible to win without dying. Too bad she ends up dying after the main battle anyway (but you can resurrect her in the PS2 version which sadly won't see release in the U.S.)... :)

Aww man, Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Tatsunoko Vs Capcom, Brawl...

I play mostly Fighting games and my entire life I've heard the same excuses for almost every different fighting game i've played. "That Characters CHEAP"

The difference between someone with skills and someone without is practice, thats just all there is to it.

People get mad when they lose and take it personally as if me beating them is an insult to their intelligence or something lol. But it doesnt take a genius to figure out that not many sports players are rocket scientists or even smart enough to unscrew a lightbulb, they just practiced and made the right moves. Thats all there is to it. You cant get mad at someone for spamming you.

Skilled players would lose crazy tournaments if they couldnt figure out a way around a spammer.