Dear Future Gamer

Further to my letter concerning cheats being left in games (The Need to Cheat, FG69), you said, "... and there's a very real danger in doing this that the difficulty tuning for the game's completely wrong. If you can't get past stage X without a cheat, how do you expect Joe Public to?"

I'm not saying that the cheat is meant for tuning the difficulty but as an aid to testing. Anyone developing software needs the ability to test functionality within certain conditions. It is this statement that means cheats are added. I concur that the difficulty of a level shouldn't be too hard, but there has to be some amount of kudos to getting to the end of the game. Difficulty in the latter stages enhances the kudos for the gamer.

Also, Joe Public may not be the greatest of gamers, and in commercial terms, the success of a title may come down to the ability of Joe Public to complete a game. This, I believe, is the real reason why cheats are left in the code - they can always be taken out!

Jason Gruber

FG: I agree in principle, Jason, having designed and developed games myself (Zeewolf on the Amiga, in case you were wondering). I know how valuable cheats are to test areas of a game but this testing must also be done with no cheats enabled to get a sense of the game's difficulty. Cheats are often also left in for people to purposefully discover as it gives them a "Wow! I've found this secret stuff" feeling, which makes them think they're getting more than they paid for.