How to cheat your way out of boredom

YOU BELT down the road on your motorbike, and you pull alongside another biker, and wham] - you punch him off his bike; his body smashes against the Tarmac. He was called Sid, and now you're after Biff, so you can punch him off his bike, too (Road Rash); or you're in a bar-room brawl with a heavy looking guy who picks up a pool cue, so you also pick up a pool cue and whip him to the ground; when he gets up, you crack him with the cue again; when he's down you pulverise him with a bar stool (Pit Fighter).

Pit Fighter and Road Rash are pretty much the norm as far as Sega Mega Drive computer games go. You are a pumped-up, tooled-up hard case, you negotiate a series of badlands, maiming people on the way. This is a reflection, not of bloodlust, but of marketing skill: loud noises, sudden movements and the promise of violence are the most likely things to get a kid excited, to keep him mesmerised, hunched over the screen for hours. It would be harder to get him interested in something soft and gentle, a game where you grow trees and protect the environment, for instance. He wants to be entertained, to enter a world where it's not just a possibility, but it's expected of him to pick up a hard object and drive it into someone's skull. That's a catchy idea. Also, something else is niggling away at his brain: the rumour he's heard that if you get to the third level of Pit Fighter, you get to fight with a woman in thigh-high boots and a basque, to kick her in the head, even.

How vicious] How brain-rotting] How expensive: these games can cost more than pounds 60. They are designed to stop kids getting bored, niche-marketed to fit into the fad-ridden, trainer-mad, logo-etched world of the modern kid. The worst thing, though, is that after a while these games stop stopping you getting bored. If you think about it, they have to. It makes marketing sense. The games must be balanced between being compelling (so the kid nags his parents to buy them), and being boring (so the kid nags his parents into buying a new one). These games are actually designed to bore you. They're played at various levels of escalating difficulty; when you get to the end - the final opponent, the most vicious fight - you are from that moment, by definition, bored with the game. So how do the manufacturers help you get bored quickly? Simple - they allow you to cheat. The games have built-in codes which enable you to short-circuit your way to the end. What a concept - a game for schoolboys which institutionalises cheating. Brilliant]

Computer game culture is full of rumours, secret codes and tips. Of course, knowing how to cheat will shorten the lifespan of your game, will bring the next phase of boredom more quickly. But what a choice for a child. On the one hand, do the sensible thing, and make the game last. Or, be cool, crack the code, get to fight Pit Fighter's Masked Warrior on your second day . . . and hope your parents are feeling generous.

So you get Road Rash. And you're throttling past Rude Boy and - bam] You whack him off his bike, and you touch-tap the controls to avoid the on-coming car, ooh that was close, and now you're catching up on Grubb, Sid, Biff, even Viper, and you know that Viper's armed with a club for God's sake. It's going to be tough.

But watch this. You happen to know a way to cheat your way to the final. What you do is this: you make sure you finish in fifth place in the first race, then go to the password section and tap in a line of 1s, changing your password. Now the computer thinks you've qualified first in every race. You've cheated your way to the final]

How do you know how to do this? Because you bought the Sega Power Tips video. This is not an official Sega product; it's in the Sega slipstream - with all the videos and magazines that have a symbiotic relationship with the computer game manufacturers. Now you can find out how to get your helicopter across the airport in Desert Strike, how to get through Los Angeles in Terminator.

It's likes having Coles' notes. The dead- pan narrator gives you his advice while you watch examples of strategies on the screen. He shows you what you can and can't get away with. In Road Rash, for instance, 'this is what happens when you try overtaking on a blind quest . . .' The motorbike screams over the quest, and . . . smack] It's gone head into a car and you see it tumbling back across the screen. 'Sometimes,' says the teacher, 'it's worth the risk, but more often than not, there'll be a Volvo waiting for you.'

I can't remember much cheating in Monopoly, Cleudo, Risk . . . these were games designed to appeal to the vicious side of our nature, games about ruining people financially, killing them with blunt instruments, invading their countries. The difference was that the ruining, clubbing and invading was a communal entertainment. These games got more interesting the more you played them, because what was really interesting was not the game itself - it was your relationship with the other players, the other people.

But there are no other people here. I'm playing Pit Fighter. I've been using my crib, my Sega Power Tips video, I've mugged this game up pretty well, and now I'm on the final level: I'm up against the Masked Warrior. What the guy on the video tells you is, you move towards the crate, pick up the crate, and . . . smash it over his head. Wham] He's down] The wooden slats shatter in a rather satisfying way as the crate makes contact. I can do it now. But this is the very end of the game. The game is over. So here goes. Start again. Get all the way to the final level. And here we are facing the Masked Warrior again. Pick up the crate again. Smash him over the head again. Yes] And again] Pick up crate, smash head. Hmm. Crate, head. Crate, head. So what's happens next? I'm getting bored. In fact, I'm bored out of my skull. I've heard Predator's pretty good. Or Spider Man. Or anything. I want to go to the shops.-