I love playing video games, but I’m not always very good at them. So when I get stuck, or even when I just get bored, I add a little “cheese” to my gaming experience just like my gaming ancestors before me. And, you know what? It’s great.
What the Heck Is “Cheesing?”
It seems that no one really, definitively knows where the term “cheesing” comes from, but it’s meaning is clear as day. When you “cheese” a game, you’re playing it in a way that wasn’t intended by the developers to get some sort of advantage, and make it easier to win.
Maybe you figure out that a boss has a blind spot, or that there’s a glitch in a game that lets you defeat enemy AI so that they can’t see you. Or you just figure out an out-of-the-box way to pass a challenge or kill an enemy that no one could foresee, making the challenge trivial.
Is it cheesy and uncool? Absolutely. Is it effective? You bet!
When You Have No Skill, Cheese Is the Way
Often, the best cheese is discovered while banging your head against the wall in a difficult section of a game. True, some games have cheap bosses, or unreasonable difficulty spikes, which can be signs of poor game design. However, most of the time I get stuck because I’m simply not good enough to beat that section the “right” way. So I have to start getting creative.
With each new attempt, I push some sort of limit. Can I glitch through a wall? What if I stand right between the boss character’s legs? Can I lead another enemy into the zone so they fight each other? What I lack in skill can be made up for in creativity, most of the time.
One of the reasons Final Fantasy 8 will always be one of my favorite games, is that I figured out how to exploit the divisive magic junctioning system all by myself and completely break the difficulty curve of the game.
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I Will Always Cheese at Every Opportunity
Games are meant to be fun, and cheesing is a whole new level of fun on its own. Sometimes cheesing can make a boring game entertaining, but whatever game I’m playing, I’ll always look for a lazy (and hilarious) way to break it and do things in ways that aren’t strictly what the developers intended.
Before I’d ever gone online to hear the term “cheesing” this is just how I played video games. The object is to beat the game, and nobody was stopping me from finding ways to get around every obstacle with as little effort as possible.
Oddly enough, cheesing is much easier in modern games than it ever was in days gone by. Since every game now seems to be some sort of open-world hybrid-genre behemoth, it becomes much simpler to exploit systems and create unintended consequences.
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It’s Not Cheating if the Game Lets Me Do It
While cheesing in single-player games is harmless fun, cheesing against other human players doesn’t usually go down well. Unless, that is, everyone is using the same exploit, and then it just becomes part of how the game works. Famously, the Tribes games allowed players to “ski” because of a physics exploit players discovered in the first game. By the second game, skiing had been officially integrated into the game and was part of the lore.
My view is that if the game lets me do something, it’s not cheating. So if I figure out an exploit in a fighting game or any sort of multiplayer game, I’ll use it until the developer patches it out, or other players figure out a way to counter it with their own cheese.
Love it or hate it, cheese will always be a part of gaming, and I, for one, will always look for my slice when given half a chance.
