G4 had a very mixed lineup back in the day, some real classics like cinematech (which is still ongoing on youtube) and judgment day and some of the worst spike tv as heck garbage you'll ever see like X-play and game on, it was more good than bad though and i say this as someone who has watched at least a few episodes of every show the channel had to offer and the best of these was almost not a question, it was cheat. the show seems really quaint now and probably would't even run today, hell even back then you could have argued it was a little pointless, it's a show about cheats mainly plus some advice and tips especially in the far later episodes when we hit the ps360 era and games just started to stop having cheats. the idea of a whole tv show just for this is so quaint and charming, it's a real product of a time that just couldn't exist now and that's definately part of its charm but i think even beyond that it's just a fun show to watch.

there's two eras of the show with wholley distinct vibes, the rouse era and the holt era. the rouse era is when the show first started and was hosted by cory rouse and it was called "cheat: pringles gamers guide" which is just, such a name. this early era is much more corny with its humour, the slight edge of later g4 is completely absent and it fights right in with a lot of what was on this channel at the time, it wasn't an edgy or crass channel, sure some shows like game on had that frat vibe, but it was not the norm and shows like this really showcase that, it's corny and cheesy, some more terminally online people might even call it cringe, but i think rouse was a charming host, very "HEY ARENT GAMES COOL, HECK YEAH" and that's a vibe you rly have to respect, it helps that rouse does feel like he really does play the games he talks about, you get that vibe from him, many of the g4 hosts did play xbox live games with the forum members, weather or not he was i'm not sure, but i'd imagine so. seeing how many cool cheats were available is not only genuinely useful, but it's also just a reminder of a time when this kind of thing still existed, before achievements and game balance even in offline games took over, sure these things are good, but god if it doesn't make you miss things like big head mode. sadly episodes from this era are a little hard to come by, some can be found like a ninja themed episode with some badly aged maybe racist jokes, a sports themed episode with battlefield thrown in and a james bond episode, plus a few random others here and there (i watched one on dynasty warriors and metroid while writing this) but episodes from the latter era are much more common and if i'm being honest, maybe a little better. that change would come about in the form of the tech TV merger. when talk about G4 it's easiest to talk about it in the form of its three eras, the original era defined by cheesy jokes, earnesty and some actual progressive ideas for its time with how much the channel would feature women from the industry, the merger ERA defined by, well, not video games as most of those shows were cancelled, changed or replaced as the channel desperately wanted to be a new spike tv (aka edgy, misogynistic and just, very gross frankly, i watch a lot of old game tv and the absolute worst of it always came from spike TV) after its merger with another channel called tech tv which is actually where x-play came from, this is what i tend to call G4s dark age, very few game shows, what was there was often not great and there was a lot of shows that just aren't interesting to talk about at least for me, i wasn't around for this era as i didn't start even playing video games until i played FF13 as a teenager which was long after either of these eras but just reading up on it is a rough read, lots of reruns of cops, racist game shows like banzai and general spike TV garbage with some other non-game original shows thrown in, after this the channel died until the 2020s where it came back in the reboot era. i have nothing really to say about the reboot era, frosk seems cool, shoutout her, the other influencers on there just aren't the kind of thing i'm interested in and the fact they paid to syndicate youtube videos instead of older tv shows, shows that are mostly lost media and could have most likely easily have been archived by new G4 just rubs be the wrong way, also choosing to only really bring back the channels worst, edgiest shows was also.... a choice, but at least it's not banzai, you know. this middle era is where cheat found itself but unlike other shows it ended up doing well here, for a while at least

later cheat episodes and most of the ones you will find are hosted instead by kristin holt, a former american idol contestant that somehow managed to get the role on the show, but she actually fits it well, shes a good host that has fun with it and has a lot more of a presance than cory ever did, sure it's clear she probably doesn't know a lot about the games themselves, but it also doesn't really matter, she does good in the spot and has a lot more charisma than rouse ever did and she was funny, the way this show was written felt like a mix of the two major eras of old G4, the show had some of the edge and ick of merger G4 but it still had a lot of the cheesier jokes and tended to not go overboard with things like other shows on the channel, in a sense, it's the best of both eras in a show. this era focused on late ps2, some retro episodes with VC games and even some pc and ps360 games including a whole ps3 themed episode for the consoles launch, there were also more episodes focused on single games like resident evil 4 or resistance. it was a much longer run of the show seemingly and was one of the last original shows to air on G4 before it also got cancelled and was rolled into a segment on x-play where it would stay for a while before being cancelled outright, how late it did last is i think part of why it's so easily available online, many tapings on youtube from the era it aired and in much higher quality than a lot of early cheat or other G4 shows like judgment day which often are just available in the form of actual VHS rips, it's not full HD but you really have to make do with shows this old and new eps are still being regularly found and uploaded all the time. it was one of these clips that was actually my first exposure to the show a long time ago, around 2011 i was playing one of my favourite games for the first time, dead rising, and got stuck because of the games difficulty, but i looked up a video on advice for it and found one from very late cheat showing off easy XP and the locations for the machine guns, both of which i still know and were real lifesavers, both because deadrising is difficult and because i'm just not very good at games.

i often see people question why people would go back to these kinds of shows and it's always been an easy question for me to answer, it's weirdly nostalgic for me, i say weirdly because i wasn't around for this like i said earlier, i didn't grow up with games at all and i also never lived in america so there was no way i ever would have seen this channel, but it still feels nostalgic to me for a time i never got to experiance, maybe that's why to an extent, a longing for a simpler time in the industry when things seemed better, weather they were really better or not is irrelevant because it's the feeling that matters there, but it's more than just that, it's historical context and it's an earnestness that you just don't see in modern games shows and it's a quaintness in how they would be,things like a whole show just for cheats or a big behind the scenes interview show like elec play (elecplay was a show i actually covered previously that i also feel very passionate about, it had a ton of fantastic interviews and previews for games that are amazing to watch and the reviews section was also very entertaining, vic as a games journalist was genuinely ahead of his time in a lot of ways and i respect his work a lot) or a tv show just to showcase trailers and cutscenes, these are things you would never see today and i think that's just neat, sure some shows have aged poorly, but that can also be part of the fun of it, watching garbage like fresh baked games or the awful spike tv game awards with my partner and making fun of them is a really fun experiance and i wouldn't trade that for anything, i don't really engage with youtube anymore so this is my youtube more or less if that makes sense and that's honestly how i think i prefer it . seeing things like cheats that i can actually use, advice for games i want to play and honestly just seeing era-appropriate footage of these games is neat for me, so cheat has value there, plus it's also just nice in the later episodes seeing someone who better represents people like me talking about games, G4 was good for that for a while, G4tv.com the show had 2 women hosting with tiny wood and laura foy (and a baby geoff keighley in later episodes and scott reubin in the earlier episodes), filter had diane mizota and cheat had kristin, hell even x-play was shockingly good here since it did have morgan webb, representation matters especially here and G4 somehow did it better than a lot of the modern internet sphere, i think a lot was lost when places like this left, now people who may before have watched shows hosted by women will watch incel manbabies complain about diversity on youtube and slowly become radicalised while tech giants do nothing about it, people who know me will know i do get heated when a lot of critisism of old G4 comes up because for a lot of it that critisism just isn't that valid, sure it may be for some later years stuff but for a lot of the *real* G4, it was a lot better than what we have now and i think there's a lot of revisionism within the general games sphere as to what G4 ever really was, people just don't bother to check if that stuff is right, it's difficult to blame them when so much has ben lost and that critisism is so widespread that it is easy to believe it, but i promise you, it really isn't that bad and it never was.