Years ago, I'd spend hours puzzling out how to beat a particular game. Hours might turn into days, days into weeks, but I took a certain pride in never buying a game guide or checking out a net walkthrough to defeat the problem.

Now I'm a geek dad, with less time to game than ever, and when I encounter a problem that looks like it'll take hours, well, I'm not to big to cheat. Because without cheating, there's no way in hell that I'm going to finish any of my games (finishing games was actually a topic for a different day ... specifically April 14, when I talked about that topic on Radio Active #5)

Super Mario 64 DS is a perfect example of my new-found appreciation for cheating. It's a fun game, and one I've already spent many hours exploring on my DS. But recently, as I was exploring the Snow World, I came across two red coins encased in ice. I tried a couple of different techniques to break them using Mario, and even spent some time exploring other worlds in the hopes that I'd be inspired to solve the Snow World problem.

No dice. Try as I might, I couldn't crack, shatter or pound that ice away from the coin. And those ice-locked coins were standing between me and the next level. So I sucked it up, jumped on the web, did a search on "Mario 64 Ice Coins", found a forum that discussed it, and discovered that what I needed to play as Yoshi, eat some fire, and then belch it out in order to melt the cube.

Problem solved. With only a little bit of cheating.

I still try not to cheat. I'd rather rely on my own brain to solve a problem than to resort to some Internet FAQ. Given the choice between finishing the game and abandoning it because of one particularly annoying puzzle, I'll take finishing the game every time.

I should note, however, that I'm only talking about cheating in offline games, While some of the same rationalizations might apply to online cheating, when competing with other people, I like to survive and thrive based on my own wits. Getting a hint to beat Super Mario is one thing; messing around with my Xbox in order to cheat at Halo 2 is something else entirely.