Did cheat codes ruin your experience of playing Doom?

[Scuba Steve]

Cheat codes are legitimately the only way many players can enjoy projects like Sunlust.

[kinker31]

21 minutes ago, Scuba Steve said:

Cheat codes are legitimately the only way many players can enjoy projects like Sunlust.

Don't forget OP Weapon mods! My personal choice is a coin-toss between Guncaster and Russian Overkill.

For other maps/mods, I try(...?) my best to not pull out the IDDQD, preferring to use "give health" or "summon (ammo/backpack)" or worst-case scenario, my resurrect keybind for when the going gets really tough, and I only use it when I can't even resurrect my way out of whatever pickle jar I landed myself into.

[OliveTree]

I think it kind of made my first playthrough less interesting overall but I also think it didn't have any long term degradation on my dooming experiences.

[Aaron Blain]

Playing with cheat codes is like eating the icing and throwing away the cupcake, except that you're not wasting any real resources. If only a small subset of the game's substance appeals to you, then just go ahead and enjoy that portion of it. Why shouldn't you? I've loved RTS games all my life and I have virtually no interest in their campaigns. If you enjoy exploring and interacting with monsters, there's nothing wrong with that.

 

Doom is an odd case for me. I was born in 1984, and when Doom came out I was deeply intimidated and frightened by it. I played exclusively with cheats for years even though I was a whiz on the NES/Genesis. I was pretty decent at Wolf3d too (I didn't know about M-I-L). I didn't let go of cheats until I was a teen, and I didn't discover pistol starts until maybe 2012, which changed everything.

[Chow Yun Thin]

I don't think cheats ruined my first experiences with Doom. I definitely started playing with cheats and had my fun wrecking the hellspawn and knowing they can't do a thing to me. At some point, I found that getting old and started luring enemies around to get them to infight and I, as the untouchable ghost, watched them tear each other down with sadistic glee.

 

I think I stopped using cheats when I stepped in the teleporter in E1M8 and freaked out when IDDQD failed and I got my shit wrecked. It felt like the power fantasy rug got pulled out under me and showed what the actual scenario was: a lone ordinary space marine fighting off the forces of hell with no backup. It was a whole another experience, where the enemies were capable of killing me quickly and I had to develop a bunch of skills that I didn't have while using cheats. Strafing in particular took a while to learn, first with the strafe+turn keys, then eventually the dedicated strafe keys. It also didn't help that the original dictionary definition was "to shoot something from an aircraft" and I had no idea what that had to do with me. But I learned, I applied, I overcame.

 

I did use the buddha cheat later on with the caveat that if my health hits 1, I finish the level and replay it immediately. Now that I think about it, there's no real point to using buddha if quicksaves are there. Maybe I just didn't want to see Doomguy die.

[Oldschoolgeek32]

Somehow yes

 

Once I learned how to use "IDKFA" and "IDDQD". It kinda made the game unbalanced to play and it felt easy when I kept using cheats for a long time . For quite a while, I kept using Doom cheats until I realized I wanted a true challenge. Once I stopped using cheats, my experience with Doom got really better! :)

 

As of now, I simply use cheats in testing and making maps. 

[Payload4367]

Nope. Never use them unless testing some wip maps. If I can't find a difficulty in a wad that I can deal with, like some slaughter wads, I figure that wad is not my style and move on.

[Gokuma]

Knowing cheat codes ruined my initial playthroughs of episodes 2-4 and Doom 2.   I at least beat E1 on SNES first.   But then I think I used Game Genie for infinite life for episodes 2 and 3.

[Percy T]

When I first started playing, I knew about them, however I never used them because I wanted to have fun and actually have a challenge. Although I'll admit that I may have typed resurrect in the console a few times during my first Episode 4 playthrough ;-)

[Lila Feuer]

Nah. The knowledge of cheats spoiled me into using them wherever I could as a kid, but it just meant I didn't really take the game seriously enough to memorize any levels since I warped around a lot and got stuck easily and was generally not very patient. Even with invincibility and all weapons and keys and the odd noclipping you can only get so far / learn so much. This ultimately lead to me revisiting everything later on when I was a teen and better enjoyed the games.

[Roebloz]

On 10/16/2020 at 9:27 AM, Dark Pulse said:

Considering the first version of Doom I owned was the SNES version and that lacked cheat codes entirely, I pretty much didn't have a choice.

 

Damn thats an odd port to have your first Doom experience with. Doom 2 GBA HAS cheat codes, but I didnt find them until a few years after. Also interestingly, if you use a certain Game Genie code to give you all weapons, it also gives you the demons weapons (Also a weird one where it seems to be a reverse explosion that you shoot...?) and nothing is more fun than powering through the game and being able to use any demon weapon you want.

[D4NUK1]

As a kid, only knew about Cheats after beating Ultimate Doom, and it's was like on Doom 2 Map 09 or 10.

Only used the IDCLIP for exploring as i really liked see how fast i can see the maps, and how was created, and IDKFA, because im some levels don't want to explore and just kill stuff, mostly on the city levels on DOOM 2.

If was not cheats, i'm not sure if im enjoyed DOOM 2 the same as Ultimate DOOM.

[Castelia]

I wouldn't say the presence of cheats ruined the overall experience for me, since I mostly tried to avoid using them.

I knew about cheats from the beginning, and I managed to not use them while playing Doom 1. I only used a cheat once, and that was when I died on Doom 2's MAP23 and accidentally saved instead of loading. I knew I wasn't good enough to play again from a pistol start, so I only gave myself my weapons back, but being the Switch port, I got a little star next to my save. I felt kind of bad for cheating, but it probably would've been more frustrating trying to redo the entire level from scratch at the time.

 

Life story aside, I consider cheats fun little additions for when I can't be bothered playing normally or when I'm testing something. I personally try to avoid them, though.

[Jello]

On 10/17/2020 at 9:57 AM, Aaron Blain said:

I was pretty decent at Wolf3d too (I didn't know about M-I-L). 

That's kind of interesting, I've never seen it typed as MIL. Every time I've ever seen that cheat it was ILM. Probably because that's the way it would be typed going from the top to bottom of the keyboard.

 

But no, I never felt bad for cheating. The first time I played Doom, it was the shareware version at a friends house, and they already had the cheat codes. At least IDKFA and IDDQD, and myself, being 8 years old, was just fine using them. It was still a terrifying, yet fascinating experience. I had never played anything like it before, and the pinkies in particular were extremely frightening. They just seemed so ridiculously huge and aggressive. Of course they quickly became pushovers, but it was just unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had watched some horror movies, and Aliens terrified me, but actually being part of the action put Doom on a whole different level.

 

Eventually, after getting Doom 2 and Ultimate Doom I stopped using cheat codes because I wanted to legitimately beat the games, started out on Hurt Me Plenty and I did just fine. And it was more enjoyable not using cheats, but I certainly wouldn't say that using them hurt my appreciation of the game any. If anything, it just helped me get used to the mechanics, soak in the atmosphere, and prepare me for non-cheat runs. Now I hardly ever use them, I like playing UV. And I've even managed to overcome my own hubris and I'll turn down the difficultly to HMP if a .wad is just too damn hard on UV. That took quite awhile to come to terms with.

 

But I'll still use them if I feel like it. It's not like I'm trying to beat a record, or playing against other people. I see no problem using cheats if you're just playing a single player game for your own personal enjoyment.

[Dark Pulse]

On 10/18/2020 at 7:36 PM, Roebloz said:

Damn thats an odd port to have your first Doom experience with. Doom 2 GBA HAS cheat codes, but I didnt find them until a few years after. Also interestingly, if you use a certain Game Genie code to give you all weapons, it also gives you the demons weapons (Also a weird one where it seems to be a reverse explosion that you shoot...?) and nothing is more fun than powering through the game and being able to use any demon weapon you want.

Well, in my defense, I think my ACTUAL first experience was on, ironically, a school PC. My counselor had the shareware version on it, when I was like, I dunno, 8 or 9. I don't remember getting past E1M4 or so. (Also didn't help this was when my motor skills and eye-hand coordination were still really damn bad.)

 

But I owned no PC of my own until the early 2000s (I grew up quite poor), so yes, my first experience was the SNES port. I specifically remember how I got it: Mom gave me about $40, and on a weekend visit with my dad, we went to a flea market - the (now-demolished) Super Flea. I ran into someone selling the game. He wanted $30, I only had about $23, and I convinced dad to give me a few more dollars. I offered the guy $27. He took it. And so I had my first copy of Doom around 1995 as a 9 year-old (soon to be 10).

 

So for a few years, that was all the Dooming I got. But then once I got a PS1, I eventually found Doom PSX in a local Media Play, and yeah, I played the hell out of that for awhile.

 

A few years later, I got my PC, found Doom on the old P2P stuff of the day (Kazaa) - found both the censored German version and the French Doom II WADs on it. I remember playing them in Doom 95 before finding out about Legacy, and from there, JDoom, then eventually ZDoom. Steam eventually became a thing, Doom eventually became available on it, I bought the id Super Pack when it was on sale for a really good price, and now I don't have to worry about any legal morality guilt anymore.

 

And that's my Doom purchasing history in a nutshell.

 

(For those of you who are still getting pirated copies - seriously, there's a bit of a difference between 2002 when it would've actually been genuinely a bit hard to track down legit, and nowadays where all you need is a Steam account and five bucks - less if you wait for the sales, like the one that will no doubt be happening around Thanksgiving/Christmas. It's literally the price of a 2-liter of Coke and a big bag of Funyuns. Stop being cheap.)