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I do not believe in the usage of a cheat device on the first playthrough, and I don't use FAQ's unless I --REALLY-- need to. This way I'll get full enjoyment without spoilers.
AR is useful in that it has a FreeLoader option (Playing imported games.) And I like that. So is it okay to use an AR? The answer is, depends. If you've owned a game for a long time and played it to death, and you find nifty AR cheats, then it's probably okay, since it wont matter anyways.

Take for example me and my old friends. We'd been playing Super Smash Bros. Melee for about 5 years, and were getting rather bored of it. So my friend brought over his AR, and using those cheats we got another 2-3 weeks out of the game.

So it's all variable. Personally I think they ruin a game the first time you play it. And I've seen an AR ruin someone's saves on their memory card before, so it's a digression use only.

Yeah, power and hacking comes with some side effects. xP Plus I agree cheating is quite boring. They dont even make AR for this generation of consoles anyways right? Wait, the DS has an AR?

Thank you TJ for confirming my worst fears. Any desire to use AR or GS that I may have had are now completely gone.

I have a bunch of opinions on this "cheating" thing. I think of it as a spectrum. On one side is "THE WAY THE DESIGNERS INTENDED YOU TO PLAY THE GAME." Anything that's in the game but not something there intentionally, like a glitch or simple an exploitable strategy that wasn't their "intention" would be considered cheating by this standard (this is why MMORPG makers are constantly patching their stuff). But at the same time, there are a lot of "cheat codes" that are programmed into the game. A lot of them are secret, but the programmers specifically put them in there. Do they want players to not use them? When DO they want players to not use them?

Then we have what I like to call "exploits." An exploit is anything that works well within the established rules of the game that just...seems kinda unfair when you do it. Example: In Sims 2, Popularity Aspiration Sims get a lot of wishes that involve interacting with people they know. These wishes tend to loop after a certain point, so you can do them over and over and rack up Aspiration Points to buy rewards (probably more than with any other Aspiration). Doing this, I would buy the item that refills all of your needs. My characters never had to sleep, I didn't eve HAVE a bed, and I had more time to get other things done. Now, I wasn't doing ANYTHING shady. The points I got were legit. The rewards I bought with them were legit. My usage of them was legit too. But is it the way the designers probably intended the game be played? I doubt it.

Next would be glitches. We all know what these are, things in the game that are blatantly NOT supposed to be there. Things like item duplication tricks or being able to damage an enemy over and over while the game is paused. There might be a bit of an argument on what is an exploit and what is a glitch, but I personally think that if it's something that breaks the challenge of the game altogether, then it's a glitch.

Then we have hacking into the game with cheat devices. Game Genie was awesome. Heck, I even used it on my Chrono Trigger for SNES...after I had done EVERYTHING humanly possible on the file prior to that. Without that I never would have been able to do things like listen to the music that was programmed into the game but not used, or walk around 1999, or see the character selection screen with extra slots in it. But still, my understanding is that GG didn't break games quite as easily as AR seems to.

On a completely different matter are FAQs and player's guides. I will admit, I've used them a lot more ever since GameFAQs came into existence and made it all FREE (and they're great places to find out about those exploits I mentioned that I love so much). And to be perfectly honest, I would probably use them a lot less if it wasn't for the following: 1) I'm a completionist whore, 2) Some games that I play have specific points where, after you pass it, you can miss things entirely, and 3) I have a limited amount of free time. Those things combined make it pretty hard for me to finish a LOT of games nowadays. So when I DO use FAQs, it's usually for an RPG or something similar. I REFUSE to use them for certain purposes though, like in the Ace Attorney series and to figure our (but not locate some) puzzles in Professor Layton. If it's going to ruin my gameplay experience, then why do it? In an action/adventure game, it doesn't matter if I'm told how to kill something, I still have to have the skill to kill it. In a game where all you do is THINK, FAQs kinda defeat the purpose of playing.

So where am I on all this? Time for the TLDR:

- I don't use cheat devices because I don't want to break my crap.
- Game developers have a specific way they want you to play the game...but who can tell what that really is?
- Exploits are fun and awesome and I use them all the time unless...
- ...they're like glitches that break the game's entire challenge.
- I use FAQs on a case by case basis, but I'm generally not opposed to them because I am busy people.

...where on Gaia is the Konami code?

Hah, I'm so going to put that in randomly for the rest of forever now.