8 Video Game Cheats You Were Forced To Use

I'm not sure if it needs to be stated at this point in time, but cheating, whether on a test, on a person, or just in an effort to get ahead over others isn't exactly a good thing, and yet pretty much everywhere we look there's someone trying to skew the system in their favor.

Even video games aren't safe from enemies that cheat the mechanics of the game, players that hack the code in order to feel good about themselves, and of course a litany of cheat codes that allow you to warp the game world in weird and wonderful ways.

Yet there are some titles that are so bloody difficult, or downright unfair that you might end up resorting to cheats in order to level the playing field.

After all, if a video game boss is going to spam attacks at you all day long, why shouldn't you cheese it just as hard right back and make it suck on your moldy rind?

My point exactly.

You can't really speak of video game cheats that were spammed so much they belonged on an OAP lunch special without talking about the one and only Contra Code from the title of the same name.

It's pretty much a code so embedded into the public consciousness that anyone could rattle this off at any given notice, and the fact that so many other titles have put the sequences of up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start is a testament to how utterly essential this was to the game itself.

Contra might not be the most challenging video game out there, but it's not one that messes around, and will happily butcher the player at any given opportunity, therefore this cheeky 30-lives-for-free code was often used to help players reach the end.

Plus you have to think about things this way, would this code have become so prevalent if the game in question wasn't hard enough that it forced people to cheat? Unlikely, so I rest my case.