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A few months ago Red Faction Guerrilla brought back a feeling that I probably hadn't felt since the N64 times. As soon as I realized this I became alarmed at how many games these days were functionally over once you finished the campaign. It also made me realize why I care so little for achievements and trophies.
After I beat Guerrilla I decided to check out the cheats. With invincibility turned on the cheats that piqued my interest were "Super Sledge" and "Super Debris". I have no idea which cheat affects what, but I know that the result was some of the sickest fun I'd had in an action game in a while.
Basically, with both cheats turned on, a single melee attack will instantly cause a truck to fly over 100 feet, and any person hit will fly with enough force to smash through a wall. Combined with Guerrilla's emphasis on dynamic destruction, I couldn't go back to playing the game normally anymore. I became addicted to this whole new game within the game.
I started having flashbacks of how I would mess around with GoldenEye, blowing everything up with infinite ammo and screwing around with the game logic in general. I thought back and wondered why the hell Call of Duty didn't let me do this after I was done with the campaign. Whatever happened to God Mode?
Half the fun I got from N64 games was just from messing around with cheats after I beat the main game. Turok is a prime example – big heads, puppet people, disco lights, wireframe mode, the works. I remember God Mode for that game being discovered for the original game well over a year after it came out.
The pinnacle of this was probably the debug cheat for Star Wars Shadows of the Empier. You know, the one where you had to press just about every button on the controller, and then move the analog stick with your face. If you don't know, then the cheat allowed you to mess with all kinds of parameters like gravity – you could jump so high that falling back down would kill you.
Even before that, the Genesis Sonic games were notoriously cheat-heavy. I had Sonic 2's level select cheat down by heart. The original Sonic's debug code was basically the console equivalent of opening the developer console in a PC game – you could set any object in the game anywhere you wanted. I hope to God Sonic the Hedgehog 4 has some kind of insane cheat where I have to do a specific sequence in the sound test (where did those go?!) and then press a combination of buttons at the title screen.
One of the best things about a lot of cheats and cool unlockables back in the day was that you had to earn them, that's what made me such a completionist back in the N64 days. To get invincibility in GoldenEye you had to beat the second level in two minutes and five seconds on the hardest difficulty, and I remember how we celebrated when a friend of mine did it in 2:04. Then, at the end of the day, when you beat everything, you got 007 mode where you could set parameters like enemy health and level of alertness.
Another example is Bomberman Hero – I got a perfect score on every single one of that game's 80-some missions because I had to in order to unlock the last world and get the real ending. Sonic Adventure 2 gave you a pretty cool Easter egg for getting 100% on it – a 3D recreation of the first level of the original Sonic.
Doing any of that stuff on an Xbox 360 game today won't get you anything more than some achievements and that's why I don't care for them. The trophies and gamerscore you get don't count towards anything. In most games these days the most doing anything will unlock is maybe the hardest difficulty mode.
If getting a platinum in God of War III or beating the game on Chaos mode unlocked some kind of super weapon that made every enemy its bitch just so you could laugh at them, I'd be all over it. Imagine if inFamous gave you some kind of new superpower that completely changed the dynamics of the game after you got 100% of all quests or got a platinum? Man it would be awesome if Just Cause 2 had some cheats waiting at the end of the line, but I won't bet on it.
Now I won't say that cheats and unlockables are totally gone from games. God of War III does give you things for completing it under different circumstances along with the Godly items. Uncharted 2 also has a whole in-game money system for unlocking all the extras. Grand Theft Auto IV retained the series tradition of cheats.
Those games stand out however for precisely those reasons. You wanna go through the whole gauntlet of extra hard objectives in those games because there's actually a nice carrot waiting at the end of it.