Starcraft Trainer

 I've been playing video games longer than I care to tell you about. Probably too long, as a matter of fact. I couldn't even begin to tally up the number of hours (or money) I've spent on gaming over the last - well - a lot of years. But games are fun and a bit addictive and provide a great escape from the everyday without too much in the way of side effects. Sure, there are those who think that games make people more likely to go on mass murdering sprees and all sorts of other nonsense, and there are probably much better ways to spend your time, like with a good book, but overall I think that's it's a pretty innocuous pastime. But with every new generation of games there are those looking for an unfair advantage, and starcraft trainers are no different.

I went through a stage like that myself actually. Looking up cheat codes and what not on the old original nintendo. It was a lot harder to do in those days to be sure, but the internet has changed all that in a huge way. Now cheat codes and hacks and cracks are available all over the internet at virtually a moment's notice. One quick search and you can figure out how to cheat in way that basically make you a godlike entity in the game. A virtual NPC if you will. Able to easily beat what you once found almost impossible, or maybe even completely impossible to do. But after a year or so of using cheat codes back in the day I quit, for good.

It turns out that using cheats makes the game not a game anymore, but rather a rush to the end. And the end of cheating leaves you with a bit of an unsatisfied feeling. Actually it's completely unsatisfying. There is no challenge to a game if you hack it. That's what made those old huge console games so much fun for so long. They only had three buttons and there was no way around having to play the game against the rules. I'll never forget a friend and I finally beating Rastan (yeah I'm old). We whooped and yelled and jumped around like we had actually done something worth yelling about. But it was fun - playing with cheats and beating the game? Not fun at all in the end.

So when it comes to starcraft trainers you can be sure that they will always be around. But really, what's the point in using a trainer to simply finish the game? You'll rocket through the campaign that you paid good money for and then you'll just be done - and bored more than likely. It's a complete waste of time and has some other negative potential consequences as well.

Many trainer programs are actually viruses or spyware in disguise. No elite programmer is going to sit down and spend several hundred hours hacking a game that's just going to change in a few months without some kind of motivation. Typically that motivation is money. But sometimes it takes the form of simple punkness. THey can get a cheap thrill knowing that they are crashing the computer of every person silly enough to load their little subversive program - a program that probably doesn't do anything to starcraft at all.

So in the end, it's my opinion that starcraft trainers and cheats and hacks in general are just dumb. Why pay money for something and then not get anything out of it? It seems a little weird to me, but only because I already know that I've tried cheating and it was a whole lot less fun than doing it the good old fashioned way - and just beating the game outright all by myself. It's a whole lot more fun and satisfying to win.