Just one more.

Just a bit…

…Couldn't hurt…

It ruddy well can hurt!

There's nothing to convince a man he's got a problem like an Alp sticking out his nose. (No, I do not snort them, I merely try to eat them whole, Billy Connoly style. See greatest hits sketch.) This chocolate-lust couldn't have come at a worse time as dragon blisters in my mouth chip away at the very threshold of pain.

IT HURTS. It burns…

I keep taking just one more anyway, making myself false promises I can never keep and thinking it can't hurt that much…not so small a piece...then I'm writing in agony for a full hour. Thus, due to this rare opportune bad mood I must bring forward my obligatory, nay, my inevitable rant on sharking!

Hey-hey-hey!

Oh, cheer up.

From this point on I'm not going to say 'sharking', I'll say 'cheating'. For us poor UK (Scotland!) folk, sharking conjours up images of Dolphin enthusiasts. Bloop! If there's to be any moral debate now, lets start with definition, cheating is a harsh word for the advocator, which I certainly am not, but it is justly harsh. Cheating. There's no special nice word for cheating specifically in Pokémon - its worse if anything because of the age group - and theres nothing else that comes from using a cheat device, a cheat code. You do not at any point attach the Game Boy to any form of marine life (unless your SICK like a certain person! A certain man! Or should I say a certaiN-Man!) and the connotations of the 'S' word are totally wrong. This article looks at the morality of cheating.

…is like saying someone has a right to fix national syndicates if they've bought enough lottery tickets (14 million would be how many you'd need, by techy law, to do this) and missing the whole point. I have easily played over the limit myself, no doubt several times, but that is not a valid boast because the point in the game is not the time taken, the point in *game* is *fun*.

I am not arguing that if you've had enough fun you can shark, OOPS! I mean cheat. Please forgive…How many times have I done that now? Gah. Anyway, this game must, must, must be played for fun - you do not get 'fun' from cheating rather you take it away from the victim, the person you play.

I've played many a battle against a cheat. No doubt those of them looking at this now are convinced its them I'm about to talk about and it might as well be, I hope it is. When I battle a cheat, knowing that somehow they've cheated, I know before fact that I will not win. Don't know how they have cheated mostly, simply assume winning is impossible - and this psychological disadvantage has cost me battles close to important. When they are important, I am always chronically nervous and simply press buttons if they shark then I know this is a useless process, the fun is taken out of the game for me, its ruined my battle/day/tounamnet/desire-to-continue-playing but hey, saved the lazy bum some time. I have played the game most probably more than these people and I deserve the right to battle them on that arena - not something altered even slightly by cheat device.

It isn't easy - for me at any rate - to class an experienced someone who cheats as veteran, in fact it's impossible: maybe they are a veteran of something yes, but not Pokémon. Anybody can cheat. And win.

Even branners.

…Newbie and Veteran are both people, it doesn't matter a jot what a self-proclaimed elite think of them. So allow me to rephrase that:

"Cheating gives people a just advantage over lucky people"

A person has no right to take advantage (alter moves, pick or choose in any way, shape or form stats, not train…) over another person. Knowledge does not make one better than another, learning another mans strategy does not make one a genius and calling a demograph 'newbie' makes one worse because that’s something that a 'newbie' would not do. Certainly they wouldn't scream 'veteran' at anyone who cheats.

Everyone is presented with the same odds that nobody has a right to alter and in doing so they certainly are not making things fair.

Then ruddy well do it!

DO YOU THINK I HAVE THE TIME OR PATIENCE to listen to you WHINE when I've got one the ALPS stuck down my THROAT?!

PROBABLY your own STUPID fault for CHEATING in the first place! In the words of Iyse when asked to sum himself up in sixty words or less: Duh!

'Oh I think I'll cheat against Darth D…oh, woops! Game data gone!' - this is hardly an excuse if you lost it cheating!

I would sooner retire, pension an' all, before cheating an' I HAVE lost game data at crucial points. Never ever ever cheated. Not even to duplicate lost pogeymen - Do you know for sure how full their Stat EXP was? Even if you do, someone else has the same thing happen to them, has no cheat device or moral lack - and you have WRONGLY taken advantage over them. They are in the right. If you have cheated you are bad.

Go home to your MOTHER! For goodness sake GK…

No, you're putting yourself at an advantage if you do.

If you're going in to battle a cheater specifically, then my answer is: Yes, everyone has got the guts to do that

Sharking should be a 'newbie' thing. A drug for the inexperienced player. This is supposed to be an advanced Pokémon strategy site, we're perfectly happy to declare ourselves better than everyone else, but there are still a contemptible amount of us who do not lift their style of play out the gutter. They are not better than anyone else unless they train pogeys differently from a cheating newbie.

Blah, blah, blah.

I hope you're quite sick of the word 'cheat' now and if any aspiring English students want to write in and guess why it was used so often then the first one gets a prize (note: They don't actually get a prize).

For more information, or better points, see last weeks column which was not originally intended to be about…this weeks column…oooo…

Dragonite21 said "Your either of the opinion that your pogeymen are a bunch of 0's and 1's or that they're proper creatures and its hard to convince either side that they're wrong" (or something like that!) and this is pretty much what I want to conclude with…though neither of us are of the sappy mentality that both can be right and there is no wrong. One offends the other, and there's no denying that the 'other' is right. Cheating is the inverse of playing the game as you should, contradicting what is right entirely. If you believe that there is nothing wrong with shifting around data, get into programming. Leave us alone. On the other hand, if you have any will at all to play the game the way that every single trainer the world over knows is right, I respect you.

I apologise that this weeks column sucks…I've had a really sucky week! So don't come round to my house, I warn you! Not until the toblerone is finished…

Mon the workers!

Next weeks will be better, I promise!

If you have any questions or comments, which I probably will use here in all likelihood (conserves my list of topics if I can just go back…) then please, by all means point an e-mail at sharkingsucks@knighthammer.fsnet.co.uk or contact me in the IRC chat room, I'm on often under the name Funnergoat.