Two games have been dominating my time over the past couple months: Punch-Out!! on Wii and the DS’ Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Both are great games that I’m continually impressed by, and both have me thinking about the way I’ve been playing them.
GTA’s gigantic tiny world and drug-peddling side metagame have kept me from getting much progress done on the main story. Man, those drugs…. For those who don’t know how it works, you come across dozens of dealers throughout Liberty City, from whom you can buy coke, heroin, weed, and other narcotics. The twist is that every dealer has different prices depending on location and demand, so to score big bank, you need to buy low and sell high.
While missions net you a couple hundred a pop, in order to get real spending money, you need to sell drugs, which can earn you thousands in one transaction. The problem is, if you get busted with any on your person, the police confiscate them. Sounds reasonable — or at least I thought so until the first time it happened to me when I had about $5,000 worth of downers on me. After the game restarted me outside of the police station and I realized what happened, an idea crossed my mind: turn off the machine and reload the previous save.
I know, brilliant, right? Now, you have to understand I didn’t want to play this way. I want to play the “right” way, but the alternative of turning a few hundred dollars into multiple thousands again — and the time it would take — simply didn’t appeal to me. And so it went each time I got busted with $7,000, $10,000, or more dollars’ worth of drugs on me. I’d feel a twinge of guilt — but it’s not like any repercussions actually exist.
Similar deal with Punch-Out!! This beautiful game — from its puzzle-esque showdowns to its characters overflowing with personality — does a great job of creating a boxing game for the Wii masses. And as anyone who follows boxing knows, so much is made of a pugilist’s record. Something like 22 wins versus 18 losses doesn’t compare to 33-1, but it’s sure better than a losing record.
My copy of Punch-Out!! arrived a week late (the cost of free shipping), so I began hearing people talk about how tough the game was before I ever got my hands on it. I even heard of some people reaching 100 losses and getting a wuss helmet as an ironic award in order for the game to take it easier on them.
With this in mind, I was pretty pleased when I started off 6-1. But as the fights got tougher, my record began to even out, until it hit the .500 mark late in the game. When I figured out how to beat Super Macho Man but got off to a bad start — I was probably distracted but couldn’t tell you by what — I paused and decided to hit the Restart option for the fight, at which point I easily took out the chump.
When I lost my first match to Mr. Sandman and realized I need to win the next game to finish the World Circuit with a winning record, I decided not to play him again until I went into practice mode and learned his tricks. When the fight resumed, I clobbered the guy and ended with a respectable 13-12 record.
My question is, how much does this dishonesty matter? Should my Punch-Out!! record have an asterisk by it when I relate it to friends? For single-player campaigns like these, the stats are a record of what you’ve done. So if you take some shortcuts to save some dough or maintain a decent record, it’s not an accurate representation of your complete experience. You could argue you’re just cheating yourself.
On the other hand, you know exactly what you did, and it’s not like this goes on any sort of permanent record. Besides, who does it benefit for you to slowly rebuild a decent stash of coke that you felt was unfairly confiscated anyway? (Come on, those cops can be cheap!)
I don’t have a great answer for this. I keep telling myself that I’ll play the fullly honest way, that I’ll live with all the game’s repercussions. I’ll then do as much for a while, even sucking it up when I lose an impressive arsenal of weapons when I get busted in Chinatown Wars. A few missions later, though, I’ll get busted with a slew of drugs and quickly hit the power button.
Online, this type of behavior is reprehensible, especially in ranked games. Offline, am I just cheating myself? What’s the call here, and do any of you take shortcuts and think doing as much is dishonest?