I can't think of anything that fully scratches the same itch. There are a lot of games that do certain things better than Skyrim, and everyone here has already recommended them. But Skyrim really nailed that immersive sim vibe. It didn't just feel like a game I wanted to play, it is one I want to inhabit and keep coming back to.

Oddly, the closest thing I could think of that scratches a similar, but not same, itch would be farming sims like Stardew Valley or something.

Agreed, there is always at least one worker at these places who has a strange sense of misplaced loyalty.

Self-checkout or not, minimum wage is not even remotely enough to expect cashiers to be anti-theft enforcement.

At this point I only have enough bandwidth for work and video games. The latter counts as mental health care. That leaves physical health, relationships, family, sleep habits, and exercise on the chopping block.

Video games is also self care.

Yeah, it's pretty cognitively dissonant to hold those doctrines, because the Bible is so full of self-contradiction that every Bible-believer necessarily has to pick and choose which doctrines they adopt.

Plus, by their own measures, their obsession with the book really is a form of idolatry, or bibliolatry as they call it.

That's exactly what they say. The Chick comics go so far as to call the Catholic church the antichrist. They're kind of hilarious.

As long as the Bible remains the way it is, this will keep happening. And as long as churches keep propping up doctrines like sola sciptura and biblical inerrancy, modifications to passages in the Bible will remain a niche thing.

Which game was this?

No, cheat codes as debugging tools is like 25% of the story at best. That may be how they got their start, but it completely misses how they were very much a wider cultural phenomenon for some time.

In 007 there's a cheat to make everyone's heads comically bigger. In Tomb Raider, entering a cheat input incorrectly causes Lara to explode. In Heretic, if you enter cheats from Doom you'll get the opposite of the intended effect. In Gauntlet: Dark Legacy there is an entire litany of secret character models you can play as, if you choose the right character and give them the right name. There's a cheat that turns Banjo-Kazooie into a washing machine. Another one that initiates a zombie mode in Scott Pilgrim. There was a golfing game where hitting the ball 100 times and then inputting a shortened version of the Konami code generated a completely different Fantasy Zone minigame.

Do those sound like helpful debugging tools?

There was a time when entire websites were devoted to cheat codes and easter eggs (of course the most enduring ones were the broader sites that included whole walkthroughs like GameFAQs), and entire books would be published just for cheat codes.

Ultimately cheat codes were far more about easter eggs and unique game experiences than they were for debugging purposes - especially since as plenty of people have already pointed out, it wasn't long before better debugging tools were invented anyway.

The end of the day it was just a trend. People had interest in these things, then interest subsided.

True, if I didn't have to worry about motor vehicles, I'd probably be a lot more lax about wearing helmets, and their design would probably differ too.