Bob Colayco Associate Editor	Now Playing: Rise of Nations (PC), Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide (PC), NBA Street Volume 2 (GC), WarioWare Inc. Mega MicroGame$ (GBA), Eagerly Awaiting: World of Warcraft (PC), Half-Life 2 (PC), Doom 3 (PC), Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox), someone to properly remake X-Com

We're All Dirty Cheaters

As an associate editor at GameSpot, part of my job is being the game guides editor for the site. This means I manage the production of the guides: I assign projects to authors, get assistance for them from developers and publishers when possible, and coordinate all the different departments here who need to work together in order to provide the game guides that we post on the site. One of the big downsides to this part of my job is that I am often forced to read about many top games from start to finish before I get a chance to play them myself. For example, when we posted our Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Game Guide, I watched and fast-forwarded through hours' worth of Zelda gameplay video in order to pick out screenshots for the guide. In doing so, I watched the end-game battle and plot sequences, ruining the surprises for me. I'm still having fun slowly playing through the game, but I have to admit, knowing exactly what lies ahead takes away a lot of my motivation to just sit down for two or three days straight and blast through the game.

The minus world! Why's it cool? Umm...because the number is in the negatives!

Given that walk-throughs, cheats, and strategy guides for single-player games take a lot away from the fun, why is it that guides are so popular? Nobody reads a plot outline of an entire film before walking into a movie theater. So why do we ruin it for ourselves when we play games? As an unabashed strategy guide cheater myself, I think what it boils down to is time. A movie is going to take two hours whether you know the story ahead of time or not. A game can take an extra five hours if you simply can't find that damned key! Whether it's because we're too busy or too lazy, we want to see all the cool stuff a game has to offer, and we want to see it now. This is a society built on instant coffee, ephedrine, microwave dinners, and forgetting to take our Ritalin. What about all that fortune cookie wisdom about life being about the journey and not the destination? It's all a crock.

I lost two full weeks of my life to Neverwinter Nights.

If I run up into a puzzle or a side quest in Neverwinter Nights that doesn't make sense, I'm going to crack open a strategy guide if it takes me more than five or 10 minutes to figure it out myself. Am I ruining the experience for myself? You bet your biscuits I am. Does it matter that much to me? No, because if the choice is between taking a shortcut on a few quests or never finishing the game, I'll take the former every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In my younger days I used to berate people for resorting to strategy guides. Now that I'm older, I can see it from the other side of the fence, and I don't hold it against anyone who uses a strategy guide. After all, it's part of my job. Now, people who use multiplayer cheats...that's a different story. There should be a constitutional amendment drawn up that decrees that multiplayer cheaters be dragged into the center of town and publicly stoned into submission by an angry mob. But that's a subject for a different GameSpotting article.