Coelacanth

I’d say that is Dante’s Divina Commedia.

I was just trying to make a joke about Razer’s absolutely godawful QC.

Who will steal a Razer mouse? It will break in a week, hardly worth the hassle.

This version or Waltz #2 by Elliott Smith does kill me.

Also the piano version of Smoking Section by St Vincent. The outro of desperately repeating “it’s not the end” in an attempt to convince yourself hits me just as hard as the darker lyrics of the first half of the song.

It’s also just like… gaming is different now and the culture is different. Games take themselves more seriously in ways they didn’t use to in say the late nineties/early aughts. There was a whimsical air to early games where you know, it wasn’t a big deal if you used cheat codes, you were just having fun by yourself at your PC. These days games are to a much further extent curated experiences that take themselves seriously and where it’s important to get the full “artistic vision”.

Also in the pre-internet times it was often a benefit to have secret stuff like cheat codes to generate buzz. I’m reusing an example from elsewhere in this thread but it was good word of mouth at the school/work place to have people spread the word about neat things like the Big Daddy car in Age of Empires or whatever. These days you could just find it with a quick search, and the magic and appeal of that kind of stuff is gone.

And again I want to pushback on the MTX angle a bit simply because we are still far from being at a stage where every game has them, even AAA games. Hell, if anything the GAAS and MTX wave seem to be abating. I would be much more on board with your argument if microtransactions were absolutely omnipresent, but we’re not there at all, even in the AAA space. And I could absolutely see a retro-themed indie single player game add some old school cheat codes, I actually think at this point it would be a pretty solid marketing trick.

I sincerely doubt that is the sole or even primary reason they existed. You cannot tell me the Big Daddy car in Age of Empires was an invaluable part of playtesting.

I mean, I don’t think so personally. Like I said, we haven’t really seen any type of throughline of cheat codes being replaced by the equivalent effect but in microtransactions. There are tons of games out there with absolutely zero microtransactions and yet still no cheat codes. If some companies were replacing cheat codes with MTX it would follow that at least some of the vast plethora of other developers that don’t use microtransactions still include fun old school style cheat codes in their games. But that isn’t the case. What is the case is that more or less no game full stop has cheat codes anymore. But what do they all have? Achievements.

I get that microtransactions suck and I do hate them too but I don’t think we can just blindly blame everything on them.

I haven’t really seen this trend like… at all. Even Assassin’s Creed style games where you can buy XP packs or certain items or whatever is not really the equivalent of old timey cheat codes.

If anything I would probably argue the introduction of online Achievements probably halted the prevalence of cheat codes.

I hate this. And presumably this is happening because some sort of market research consumer psychology findings show this is preferable and leads to more sales. Which somehow makes me hate it even more.

Now this I can get behind. As a coelacanth I am unsurprisingly quite fond of living fossils.

I thought Ginkgo had no proven health benefits? I’m keeping an eye on Lion’s Mane Mushroom though.

Apparently all the coffee I’m drinking is the only thing holding me together. Well, I’m already feeling the effects of impaired memory even with that, but good to know the irreversible brain damage could be even worse, I guess.