What is your policy when it comes to broken moves in games?

[mbd30]

Like a fighting game that is imbalanced so that you can use one particular move such as a dash attack to mow through any enemies, or maybe the holy water in "Castlevania". Do you try to avoid using cheap tactics in order to make the game more of a challenge and/or you consider it a form of cheating? Are you OCD that way?

 

 

 

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

For me it depends. But not for Death in Castlevania. I always pummel Death with holy water due to the fact it is a cheap shot bastard with random placed scythes all over the place and are magnetized to Simon, while flying in a constant figure 8 pattern and is impossible to defeat him with other weapons except for boomerangs so he gets what he deserves. Easy as heck in Simon's Quest and in Dracula's Curse. I have no problem either in the 4th one. I like a good challenge, but for an impossible fight I shut down their movements when I find out a strategy if the game has that tactic.

[Cynicaster]

The one that immediately came to mind when I saw the title of this thread was the infamous “elbow smash” in the original arcade Double Dragon.

 

Most players familiar with the game would probably agree it is a cheesy strategy at best, and an outright cheat at worst.

 

I like to think I take a policy of avoiding the cheat, but if I don’t use it, the game kicks the ever loving shit out of me, so I fall back to the elbow smash to survive. A better-designed game wouldn’t have this conundrum.

[BydoEmpire]

If it's just me against the computer, then usually anything goes - if it's in the game then it's fair game. I do remember playing some older football games with 'money plays' where I would purposely not call those very often because it made the game pointless. I'd set up rules like "use play X only once a drive."

Playing against another person is a different story, and we set up rules ahead of time.

[Austin]

My view is that if it's there, accessible without some kind of code, then it is not cheating and you should not feel bad about it (not that you should feel bad if you do use codes--it's your game, play it how you like). To me it's a part of the game, and more importantly, it gives the player choice on how they can progress through the game. In Castlevania, sometimes I just want to use the holy water, using the invincibility aspect to run through enemies quickly and to take bosses down faster. Then there are other times where I want to mix up the weapons and not use it at all, and the experience and tactics required is different as a result. There are times where I use damage boosting to skip through parts of levels, whereas other times I go through the game normally. Flexibility to me is important when it comes to the longevity of a game and whether I continue to play it decades down the road. If a game has "glitches" (intentional or not) that can be taken advantage of to mix up the experience, then it has a lot more staying power than other games.

[Cynicaster]

I do kind of like to ask myself whether the trick/cheat was visible to the developer(s) before releasing the game. In the case of Double Dragon, it's hard to imagine that nobody noticed the omnipotence of the elbow smash before releasing the game.

 

Another one that comes to mind is Mat Mania, where you can maintain control of the match forever by carefully allowing the enemy to hit you at regular intervals. Once that trick is discovered, the game can be played indefinitely on a single credit. That's an example of one that I'm pretty sure the developer was hoping would remain a secret. Lazy programming.