In the last few weeks I have rented a couple games for my 360 that have both gotten a pretty bad rap: Alone in The Dark and Bully: Scholarship Edition. Both games were plagued with glitches, control issues, and both left a bad taste in my mouth. More specifically, AITD was filled with great concepts and ideas but failed to deliver either. Constant death animations and level restarts/skipping was what the core gameplay was like for me. If I were playing this on the PS2 I would have loaded up the Code Breaker/Game Shark and put in infinite health, allowing me to actually *GASP* enjoy the game!

After failing one mission on Bully over five times in a row, I would have also put in infinite health. There are cheat codes that you can do on a second controller, but I'm too lazy to get a second one and have it on every time I go to play. Other issues aside, I would probably have played this game more if easy-to-use cheat codes were available.

This brings up one of my questions: Are certain games more enjoyable when you are able to cheat?

I am completely against multiplayer cheating (except map exploits, that's ok). But for single player games I'm fine with cheating. And after ditching AITD, I would actually encourage cheating for certain games. When a story for a game is the only reason worth playing it, being able to skip over poor gameplay aspects should be fine. But with achievements, cheating is kept down pretty tight. As for AITD, I might actually look for a copy on the PS2 and fire up the old Game Shark.

Another question is this: Do game reviewers use cheats and if so, what are your thoughts? How much of a game do reviewers play through before making their final judgments?