Random Video Games That Secretly Reward You For Cheating (13 items)

• 

  (#1) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

  • Nov 17 2004

  For some reason, Hideo Kojima really didn't want you to fight The End head-to-head. At least, one can reasonably conclude that considering the Metal Gear creator offered more ways to defeat the legendary sniper than just facing him in battle. There's an active way to defeat The End, and there's an extremely passive way to do so.

  You can actually defeat The End before you even meet him. The End makes his first appearance outside the Ponizovje Warehouse as you sneak through the jungle nearby. He holds a brief conversation with The Fear, and during this time you can snipe him, taking him out so you never have to face him later.

  There's another even less active (but brilliant) way to defeat the ancient soldier. This method requires you to actually enter into the boss battle against The End, but you don't need to finish it. You have two options to defeat him by doing virtually nothing at this point: you can either save your game and wait a week before returning to it, or you can save the game, exit it, set your Playstation's internal clock forward by a week, then return to the game. Either way, The End will die of old age while waiting for you. Snake will be forlorn with this approach, feeling The End deserved the glorious death of a warrior, but who cares? You just saved yourself a whole lot of bullets.
• 

  (#2) 'Doom' Allows You To Kill Anyone With The BFG While The Game Is Paused

  The 2016 Doom has one of the cheapest cheats you'll ever see. First, it requires the BFG, a gun so powerful it already feels unfair. Then, it requires you to be able to press the menu button. That's it.

  The way it works is that immediately after you fire the BFG, quickly pull up the weapon wheel. This will effectively pause the game, yet your shot will continue onward. Not only can you not get hit, but whatever you're fighting will freeze in place and pretty much just wait to get blasted in the face. You can beat the Cyber Demon boss with a single shot because the plasma missile does continuous damage, and if you pull up the weapon wheel at the exact right moment, you can watch it drain the frozen monster's health from the safety of your pause screen.
• 

  (#3) Super Mario Bros.

  • Sep 13 1985

  Each installment of the Super Mario series allows you to warp between worlds in one form or another, and it's something they established from the very beginning. The very, very beginning. In just the second level of the original Super Mario Bros. you can reach a warp zone quite easily by riding the last rising platform up a little higher than is necessary to beat the level in the traditional route.

  That will take you to the first warp zone, where you can skip all the way ahead to the fourth world if you so choose. Once there, the second level of World 4 offers the exact same thing, this time allowing you to warp to the eighth and final world. With almost no effort, you're at Bowser's doorstep.
• 

  (#4) Mario Kart 64

  • Dec 14 1996

  Pretty much every game in the Mario Kart franchise is full of shortcuts - some by design and some unintentional - but Mario Kart 64 might take the cake with 12 of its 16 courses offering a shortcut in some form or another. On one end of the spectrum there's the relatively innocuous cave behind the waterfall on Koopa Troopa Beach, which requires using a mushroom off a conspicuously placed ramp.

  On the other hand, there's Rainbow Road, by far the longest (and arguably most treacherous) track in the game, but shortly after the beginning of the course, you can jump off the edge of the track, landing on it far below, virtually cutting out half the course. It's a risky maneuver, but if you pull it off, you pretty much can't lose.
• 

  (#5) The Witness

  • Jan 01 2012

  The Witness is a next gen puzzle game heavily inspired by Myst. The largely solemn experience is just a series of progressively more difficult puzzles. When you first start the game, you're introduced to the very easiest "puzzles" (which at this point is no more than tracing lines), allowing you to open a couple doors and walk out into glorious sunshine.

  This is one case when you should look directly into that sun, because if you do so from a certain angle, you'll notice it aligns with a gate, creating a similar traceable line puzzle. You can use this to unlock that gate and you immediately walk into the final area of the game. Less than two minutes later, you'll stumble onto the final scene. 
• 

  (#6) Dead Space

  • 2008

  Dead Space allows you to duplicate your items in Mission 3, effectively producing as many as you want, making the game infinitely easier. As IGN explains:

  This is one of a few places you can exploit the game's placement of items. In mission 3, you are tasked to restart the Ishimura's engines. On your way to the engine room, there is a node locked door next to a set of malfunctioning, fast shutting doors.

  Do not take items from the node locked room, but unlock the door and use the kinesis module to move the items (money, medikit, schematics, ammo) out of the secret room and leave them anywhere on the ground.

  Use stasis to bypass the fast-closing doors and go to the end of the hallway to a save point outside the engine room. You do not need to save, just touch the save point. This gets you far enough from the node locked room to duplicate the items.

  Travel back to the node locked room (past the fast closing doors) and some of the items in the secret room will be there, as well as the ones you used kinesis to move out last time.

  This exploit stops working if you take any of the items (i.e., if you take the medikit, the medikit stops respawning) or when there are too many items on the screen (about 30 or so). If you need more stasis to get by the door, use the "Restore Stasis Energy" code seen on this page.
• 

  (#7) Super Metroid

  • Jan 01 1994

  Power Bombs are extremely powerful weapons in Super Metroid. So much so, only a few exist throughout the game. As such, you have to wait a while before you come across your first one. That is, unless you use the shortcut. In the Norfair area, there's a tall shaft you'll come across you might entirely avoid, but if you can manage a series of wall jumps while avoiding some enemies and finally taking a well-timed shot at one block in the ceiling, you can make your way up into an advanced area. It'll take you through just a couple platform stages until you reach the first Power Bomb, normally unavailable until hours later in the game. 
• 

  (#8) Destiny

  • 2014

  The Abyss part of the Crota Raid in Destiny can be incredibly frustrating. Fortunately, there's a way to avoid that, but it's no simple illusory wall. This shortcut requires your character to have very high agility, plus you need to have the jump-height boosts on to make the attempt.

  Not long after you enter the Abyss, you'll come to an area with a number of rock outcroppings. One of the first you see is one of the tallest, and if you jump on top, you can then do a huge leap from there up to the right. If you have all the requirements, you'll find yourself on something of a shelf overlooking the Abyss, but you'll have far fewer thralls to deal with and you can pretty much stroll to the boss.
• 

  (#9) NieR: Automata

  • 2017

  For all those completionists out there, you may want to look away; this one might hurt. Some people spend hundreds of hours on each game trying to earn trophies that are sort of meta-achievements in next gen games - they aren't required to beat the game, but they're a fun (and time sucking) way to feel like you've really accomplished something.

  Getting trophies can vary a lot in terms of difficulty. In some series, almost no one can collect all the achievements. In NieR: Automata, however, pretty much everyone can earn every trophy easily, provided they have enough cash. Once you've beaten the game three times, a secret vendor will become available in the Resistance Camp, the Strange Resistance Woman, who will sell you every trophy the game has to offer for in-game currency.
• 

  (#10) Star Fox 64

  • Jan 01 1997

  In the classic Star Fox 64, you may remember a train boss battle where you face-off against the whimsically named Mechbeth. You could always try to take down Mechbeth the old fashioned way, trying to blast him with smart bombs as he sways back and forth with perfect timing.

  Or you could ignore Mechbeth entirely, and still take him out. There are eight switch flags and a final "switcher," as Peppy puts it, throughout the level. If you hit all of these as you progress through the stage, you change the train's course before the end of the level, sending it hurtling into a weapons facility and destroying the boss for you.
• 

  (#11) Dark Souls

  • 2011

  The Demon Ruins of Dark Souls can be a nightmare. Prepare to lose thousands of souls in the lava area. However, there's a way to bypass it entirely. If you belong to the Chaos Serpent covenant, a shortcut will open up just before the Firesage Demon boss (another character that's great to avoid), which allows you to stroll down a tree root and drop into Lost Izalith, easy peasy.

  Considering how many covenants there are, and how esoteric their rewards and functions are, it really does feel like cheating, especially if it just happens on accident. You may not even understand why you're getting a shortcut there if you come across that point for the first time as a member of the covenant. Don't ask questions - just take advantage of the situation.
• 

  (#12) Kingdom Hearts II

  • 2005

  Not a fan of the Pridelands? Could you do without Halloween Town? No problem. In Kingdom Hearts II, there are a couple worlds that you can skip entirely with no penalty (other than missing out on unique items therein). There's really not much of a trick to it, you just don't go there. A lot of people don't know that you can just opt not to go to Pridelands, Halloween Town, Atlantis, Agrabah, or Hollow Bastion. If you're on a speed run, just breeze on by those.
• 

  (#13) Batman: Arkham City

  • 2011

  In the Catwoman DLC of Batman: Arkham City, you can allow Selina Kyle to screw Bats over at one point, just as she's done countless times in the source material. At the very end of your playthrough as Selina, you steal some jewels, but find out shortly after that Batman has been trapped under some rubble, and could possibly even be killed if you don't go rescue him.

  The game is leading you towards the "right" decision, i.e., putting aside Selina's selfish greed to go save her sometimes-lover. But there's nothing actually forcing you to do it. If you so choose, you can walk right out the door, saving yourself a ton of hassle while leaving the Caped Crusader to his fate. 

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking