Curious, when level select cheat codes stopped being a thing? Anybody know when they stopped existing?  I want to play majoras mask on a different system for the 8th unsuccessful time. I don’t want to start over. 

Btw, what’s your favorite game with cheat codes? I didn’t own a PS2 for a really long time after launch. But my friend let me borrow his and Grand Theft Auto 3. I knew I didn’t have enough time to earn rocket launchers and ammo, so I cheated and with heavy artillery I could destroy some liberty city. I haven’t used any codes since the old GTA games. 

Rosebud on The Sims taught me all I needed to know about cheatcodes; they seem awesome at first, but ruin not only that game, but other games in the same genre because you suddenly are conditioned to thinking things should come easily in that genre. I am firmly against cheat codes now. The whole point of a video game is to escape into that world and overcome that game's challenge.

Sometimes. Though, cheat codes make difficult games more accessible especially for casual experiences. Honestly GTA is a lot more fun with cheated weapons; the same way GTA online is way better with money drops. Sometimes you just want to god mode and not grind. Other times, for sure, you want to escape into the developers story and world experience. Adding the right cheats (or not) is an art in itself. 

Majora’s Mask and any other Zelda game have never had any cheatcodes, so you’re gonna have to start over if you want to replay that game or be lucky enough to have an old savefile somewhere. In fact, I’m pretty sure the closest thing to a cheat code in any Nintendo game is the warpzone in SMB1 but I’m not sure, unless you count Gamegenie or glitches.

Anyway, ontopic, I never really used cheatcodes, at least not level codes or god modes or anything. Obviously I used the “cheat codes” of GoldenEye but that not really the same.

There’s an exception though, I cheated plenty in The Sims and SimCity games to give myself money and make them a pseudo-sandbox because I was only interested in making something nice (and in SC’s case a whole city at once) and not in the actual gameplay. Until in SimCity 4 when I found out how you could manipulate your savegame files and give myself 10 billion Simdollars. Or well, 9,999,999,999 to be exact because that was the max.

Mario Golf, Pokémon Puzzle League, and F-Zero X are the only Nintendo 64 games from Nintendo I can think of with cheat codes.
Even then F-Zero X is probably the only one that was entirely developed internally at Nintendo.

Sometimes I still miss how common cheat codes were before the generation of consoles that started to go more regularly online.