/vr/ - Retro Games

Alright, I'm late to the party and there's no way I can follow whatever autistic slapfight of an argument that's happening here so I'm just going to throw my shit on the dung heap.

Are save states cheating? That seems to be the point of contention. Using them to dodge password systems or as an alternative to leaving your machine on overnight in games where you can't save at all, you can't really call that cheating.

Now let's think about games with poorly implemented save systems like Crash Bandicoot 1. It's fucking obnoxious to have to collect the three faces just to be able to save your game, but hey, that's part of the challenge of the game, isn't it? So if you save state after every level you play and use that as your save file instead, it's cheating. But is cheating always a bad thing? If you're cheating to make the game more enjoyable for yourself and essentially fix a design flaw of the game (that would be removed in the sequels), does it even really matter? Maybe you'll always have to add that asterisk to your answer when someone asks if you beat a certain game, but fuck it.

Now I'm not someone who likes using savestates at all apart from the aforementioned examples of using them to dodge annoying password systems and whatnot. I am starting to open up to the idea of using them sparingly to get around design flaws that otherwise would spoil the game on me. A good example is Tenchu 2, a game I owned as a child but never beat. Why didn't I beat it? Because despite the fact that it's a stealth game, most levels stick difficult bosses right at the end that you're forced to fight head on and there's NO checkpoint before them. When you die, back to the start of the level. Honestly, it's a shitty mechanic for this kind of game. So I think I'm just gonna go back and replay the game, savestating whenever I encounter a boss. I'm not gonna get any e-cred for this, but screw it, I might actually be able to enjoy the game this way.