Now, I know everybody knows the Konami Up Up Down Down code for Contra, Life Force, Gradius, etc so I'm skipping that altogether. I'm going obscure. Ready to cheat?
Back then, we had no internet. If you got stuck with a really hard game, it was a neighborhood problem. You and your friends had to pull in your resources together - all those magazines, all those scrap papers around your console, little notebooks, tear-outs, etc. - that was your line of defense. If you were lucky, you might even have a chance to enjoy beating the game through cheating and forget it ever crossed your path. In some cases, the cheats actually saved the game and made them enjoyable - and that's what I'm talking about today.
Before the concept of making games "balanced" and patching, irresponsible game designers (90% of which were employed by Sega) would create the impossible games without cheat codes, you had no chance in hell to complete. These games were out there, thousands of miles away from the factory, and there was no hope to solve their impossible gameplay problems. No way in hell could these games be finished without the equivalent of a little up, up, down, down, action. Let me kick this off with some brutally hard NES classics. Remember these?
5. Golgo 13 - NES
This game had it all. It played like 14 different games. There was the street shooter mode, the maze mode, the helicopter mode, the submarine mode, etc. And there was absolutely no warm up or warning that you were going to play these, and no way to practice the later modes in the game without investing 2 hours to get there every time. Thus, the game sucked. But! If you had the cheat code to
select stages, the game was so awesome and ahead of it's time. Especially because he gets laid.
4. Populous - Super Nintendo
Had they put Will Wright on this project, we might have awesome Populous sequels today. Instead, Bullfrog's innovative God Mode game was lost because nobody could beat the damn thing, or enjoy it after the 7th level. They were too fast, too many, too omnicient of all of our moves. Damn 3mhz computer! The fact that the game also had 999 levels didn't help, even if they sometimes let you skip a few here and there. So no matter how badly you were being whooped, there was the
full power code. And you bet we scorched the ground with it every 30 seconds! Pssst, there's an
indie sequel project in the works, but that's another topic.
3. Deadly Towers - NES
I can't tell you how much I morbidly despise this game. I honestly can't think of a worse NES title, even Demon Sword was better than having to stomach this turd. It's amazing that the company who brought us the amazing Guardian Legend produced this abomination. I don't know of a single human who was able to complete this game, as the character was impossibly slow, the enemies clung on to you causing ever-damage as you walked, and the dismal graphics and gameplay made it difficult to stomach long enough to actually get good at it. So many of us popped in
the cheat code, owned Rubas, and went on with our lives.
2. Last Battle - Sega Genesis
I love to hate this game. They took Fist of the North Star and butchered it into this weird game
what we believe is arguably the most broken, random dialogue in video game history. The plot is completely ridiculous and made no sense -- and the gameplay didn't help either. Not enough health bonuses, the play control was awful, and bosses would cream you in a few hits. There was only one way to even play halfway through this game. When "Legend of the Final Hero" appears, hold A + B + C, then press Start. Press Up or Down to select the chapter you wish to start from, then press Start to begin play. This only allows you to select a chapter up to the highest chapter you last played, so in effect it's a continue.
1. Gaiares - Sega Genesis
Among one of the original at home bullet hell, smash into walls, big laser, toz-tossing, shoot em ups was Gaiares - which to this day still has limited critical acclaim - is my number one pick. I chose it because it was
the cheat code that made this game great - without it, none of us would ever have known because you couldn't get 5 minutes in without running out of 1-ups.
This was a beautiful video game - ahead of it's time with full screen bosses, high end anime cut-scenes, amazing level design, a wide arsenal of weaponry, innovative play control with the toz system, and absolutely utterly impossible difficulty. It was hard to appreciate this game because, well, it was so unrelentlessly hard! If you could get past stage 1 you had my respect as a hardcore gamer. Even with the invicibility cheat code the game was hard! You would occassionally try to dodge stuff as if you were playing and you knew you were dying ten times every minute. This was not a game for mortals.
But even as invincible, it was an extremely satisfying play experience - also has my vote as one of the top 3 shooters on the Genesis (but that's another story). But I don't know what kind of crack they were smoking, you can't play this game without the cheat unless you're pausing it every second to try to navigate around the 5000 things on the screen. If you never played this game,
check out all 8 stages + bosses here. I highly recommend it - the rom is pretty easy to find; and since nobody knows about it,
the cart is also cheap as of the time of this article (~$10). That may soon change :)
Did I miss a game that sent you directly into the strategy after five minutes? Post it!
Contest:
12:06 PM on 05.02.2006 | 
