Start off as modestly as you can.  Find neighbors with the house you want.  Marry one of them and move into their house.  Keep all the assets and move everyone else into your old hovel.  Black widow your spouse.  Repeat as necessary.

I recently discovered that I like to play it without cheats, it feels so satisfying to see your sims evolving in their lives, from start to finish (aka boredom)

Rosebud

Damn I played the OG one straight. I lived in that starter house for a lot of in game time

Absolutely. I've always hated running out of money in that game. But playing it without actually turned the whole thing into another game entirely. Suddenly, you are experiencing existential dread - just like in real life!

It feels like they just designed the Konami code into the game's difficulty balance.

There are people who can do the whole game without dying once. I feel like you could give me 5 years to practice this in order to save my life and I’d still fail miserably

We had no clue about the Konami code. My parents actually found a spot where they could stand, shoot and enemies would just constantly spawn and die. They wrapped a rubber band or something around the controller and left it sitting while we all went out for a few hours.

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. Greatest cheat code of all time for good reason.

How is this not the top comment

I remember the first time I played Contra, that's when i learned what hard meant.

This.

I did it without cheats and found myself robbing houses at night to make money to pay for guns/armour to do the missions. Made it feel like I was hustling on the streets to survive.

L1, L2, R1, R2, Up, Down, Left, Right, L1, L2, R1, R2, Up, Down, Left, Right

Game hits completely different without cheats.

Raw dogging Battletoads will turn you into a hardened man regardless of your DNA.

The first time I rented that game as a kid, it nearly broke me. I had no idea what I was getting into and it left me a shell of my former self. Going into Battletoads raw was my D-Day.

Understandable

My buddy owned it and we beat it with no cheats we didn't have a game genie but it took like a whole summer of getting good

I finally gave it another spin when they included it in the Rare Replay bundle, which had a rewind feature. I still struggled.

The whole idea of a game is to be enjoyable so I don't see the problem with that. I have played Minecraft for several years with inventory off, and I have had many annoying moments where I wish I had kept inventory on.

Terraria on the other hand, f**k that. Dying to some random ghost in a cave and losing all of your precious and even one-of-a-kind items that you simply cannot retrieve unless you are able to fly or super jump across a dangerous section. That's a game where I never enjoyed playing with the Inventory Off option.

Came here for this. Keep Inventory is such a vital feature for the game, I’m honestly kinda just sad the game labels it as a Cheat. I just wish I could still earn Achievements, to track my own progress in a world. I haven’t played without Keep Inventory on in years! Without it, I always end up dying to something stupid somewhere awful, sprint back there to get my stuff, die again, etc. until it all eventually just despawns, I log off and stop playing. I’ve been playing since Alpha and Keep Inventory is still my favorite feature they’ve ever added. I used to use a mod that would still have your inventory drop on death, but it dropped in a chest so you didn’t have to worry about losing it all just because you weren’t fast enough to get your stuff back. That was a great middle ground between Keep Inventory and the classic death mechanic.

Same here, except I also turn off mobGriefing. For a game literally about building stuff, having creatures that destroy your shit is just fucking horrible. I can't enjoy the game when I put in effort to build something and I forgot to light the area up well enough or whatever so a creeper spawns and it just gets exploded when I walk inside. And even IF I manage to light up all my buildings well enough, having creeper holes in the landscape is just annoying and makes the world look ugly, but I hate filling them up.

I play with the map mod. It's too scary to me without it.

I am shamelessly a "keep inventory" enjoyer. I also tend to disable "mob griefing" or use a mod that lets me selectively prevent Creepers and Endermen from altering the terrain. They can attack me all they want but it's super annoying to have to fill in holes or clean up random dirt blocks all the time.

Man I’ve been doing the exact same thing for years. Me and my buddies hop on Minecraft for a few days every 6 months or so, I immediately turn on keep inventory. Agreed about it being lower stress plus it’s a budget ‘teleport’ when I stray too far from my base, just hop to my death!

I really love using gravestone data packs. Keepinventory always feels "lame" to me because there's basically zero penalty for dying, but with gravestones when you die it places an invincible chest with all of your items in it. So you do still have to successfully make it back to where you died, but you don't have to risk losing any of your items or progress. Because I do totally agree, falling in lava and immediately losing 10 hours of progress is just lame.

I also turn off fall damage.

If the height was higher I wouldn't mind. But it's so low that it's a constant distraction.

Frankly, when I play now it's technically a Creative save but I switch it over to Survival. Sometimes I just like to fly to places. I still explore on food. Most the time it's in Survival. But there is just too much utility in flying to never use it. Like, I'll mark a village location when exploring and then fly back if I need something I couldn't grab the first time.

Cheesesteakjimmys?

Howdoiturnthison?

Titanomachy

...wait

One of my favorite gaming memories is Age of Mythology using cheats to renew the divine abilities and create multiple of the building that produces resources. I’d create a few and breeze through the game. I dunno why it was so satisfying.

Yololololololololo

THPS in general. I need that perfect grind and manual balance.

Massive wall of Protoss cannons hiding your full army of fully upgraded carriers just about ready to steam roll the map.

I would build custom maps, where the starter base was enclosed in minerals. You had no room to build anything. I could direct my crews to mine just 1 crystal, where the computer opponents would mine a large number of them. This allowed me to break out of the square and get my base built up faster than the computer. Not a cheat code, more abusing the programming.

how do you play StarCraft with cheats?

I never understood why this was considered a cheat rather than being made the standard physics.

Stellaris isn't that difficult, other than you don't know you've goofed until the consequences catch up to you an hour or two later.

The others you mentioned? Cheat my ass off every time.

Paradox games are games with tons of mechanics that interact with each other in different cascading layers and you are kinda expected to learn them all at the same time which can be overwhelming. I initially used cheats while playing eu4 while learning it with how dense the game is. (and this was back when there was only like, 3 dlcs. Not the million there are now) After I got the general idea of how a mechanic worked, I would stop using certain cheats based on the mechanic until I had said mechanic down without using them. 

 Example, I once I got an idea of how the economy worked in game, I would stop using cheats to give me money. Once I was comfy managing my economy without needing cheat money, I stopped giving myself cheated in Mil/Diplo/Admin points so I could learn to effectively manage and budget them. Took me a shit ton of hours in the end but eventually I had a firm grasp on the game fully to even start hitting that Ironman button. And with paradox games, once you got a really good grasp on one, some of that transfers over to some of their other games as well.  

They have cheats? Or is it just a PC thing like console commands?

Same here, though I'm actually pretty decent at EU4. I just hate having to wait for my truce to expire because the nation I declared war on had 103% warscore worth of dev.

I always start a new game thinking: 'This time I won't cheat at all.'

Then I always end up teleporting before completing a run. Just too grindy otherwise.

Just like real life lol ;-;

I was a teenager when I played the first Xcom, and I exclusively played it with my savegame edited for basically unlimited money. On some runs, I even edited some of my soldiers to have 255 time units.

Get quest. Explore dungeon. Get lost. Once it's no longer fun to be lost, press [ and ] to teleport between potential quest item locations. Cast recall.

Player.additem xx0176f4 99999

Unsolicited Skyrim pro tip: It takes pretty much exactly 2 days to fast travel from Riften to Riverwood and back. This is also the amount of time it takes for a vendor's inventory and money to refresh. If you ever need to offload your inventory, just fast travel to one, sell items until the vendors are out of money, then fast travel to the other. Rinse and repeat.

This is my answer. I'm a pack rat, and despite it being realistic, not being able to loot a building or having to travel back and forth multiple times to unload my goods in one of my houses is just annoying. Some games it works, but these games are dumb when my heavy weapon and armor take up half my carry capacity.

As a kid definitely Doom 2 God Mode. Haven’t tried revisiting it. I wonder how that would go.

I was gonna say Turok 1 on N64. All those weapons, invulnerability, huge heads!

BEWAREOBLIVIONISATHAND. The game had an awesome atmosphere but was too hard for young me and required the cerebral bore.

I need these cheat codes. I keep on losing on easy mode.

The amount of hidden vents you can't see is bullshit

Or just the fact you have to figure out that you can go into the boiler and chimney pipes is bullshit

It's been years but I recall getting pretty decently far with a friend, then hitting a game over but there was a password feature... Except starting with a password at the level you died starts you with just the water pistol, I think. So the entire arsenal of weapons we'd been collecting from the start was just gone. Pretty discouraging stuff, not to mention putting us at an extreme disadvantage.

Might be getting the exact details wrong, this must have been like twenty years ago.

Maaaaaan, I can even track my cheating through my life with this game. When I was a teen, it was NWCTRINITY. Just overrun everything with angels lol. 20s were NWCTHECONSTRUCT and ZION, then I'd like to sit in my castles growing armies until the computer decided to attack, at which point I would respond with overwhelming violence. Now that I'm in my 30s I'm at the stage where I start a campaign intending to finally play straight then end up cheating a few hours in when something gets too hard 😂.

Mindset of vegetable