Breaking the Game Illegally - Hacking

Each game has its rules and contraints. These are put in place to keep the game fair and balanced within its gameplay. Such as only having three companions follow you and assist you in combat. Other times, things are done to keep the game within the power of its engine. An example of this would be having corpses decay after two hundred of them are present to prevent overloading the memory of the computer or console.

At the same time, most games are fun for only so long. You beat the game, you're really good at it, and hungry for more. But there's no more to the game and there's been no mention of a sequel yet. So what do you do? You break down those constraints and mess with the heart of the game, you hack it.

By hacking, I don't mean modding. Modding is using the game's builder toolset to make new areas or monsters. I might cover that later, but for now we're talking about what you can do with something like an Action Replay or Codebreaker. These devices directly alter the data read in from the game disk. The results can on one hand be amazing, hilarious, or just plain stupid.

One can (and many people do) use these to give themselves unlimited time or health to breeze through the game easily. I am going to leave those out as I think they're pretty self explanitory and boring to watch. What I am going to look at is some of the more interesting or amusing results of hacking and some of the challenges that people pit themselves against.

First up, and fun one. Many times on a PC version of a game, the developers will leave the console intact in the release version. The console is where all the behind the scenes action takes place in a game. When an NPC gives you an item, the console will display somehting like "player.additem 034bbc45 1". This says, to the player's inventory, add 1 of this item, where the item is referenced by that indescipherable blob of letters and numbers. The developers use the console during development to test things out and bypass bugs until they can be fixed. As I said at the beginning, many times developers leave this in place in the release version. With a little practice and patience, players can learn to use some of the more unique commands to produce interesting results. Here we have Fallout 3. One of the commands is timescale. The timescale is the amount of time that passes in the game for every second of real time. The default is 30, 30 seconds pass in the game every second that you play. Here we have a player messing with the time scale. At first you just see some rather quick night and day cycles, but at about 3:15 he goes inside and observes the "lifestyles" of the NPCs under quickened time. I find it rather amusing.

Warning: This video opens with an epilepsy warning and I believe it. I recommend skipping to 3:15 immediately if you have a problem with flashing lights.


So, there can be a fun side to hacking, and for many people that's the only real goal. They're just trying to squeeze a little more fun out of the game. When hacking a single player game, this is pretty much all it is. When doing so in online multiplayer games, then it can give that player an unfair advantage.

Now, to look at some of the challenges people have set up. Kingdom Hearts II is a particularily good example because the engine is amazingly robust. You can sub bosses in for allies, bringing the ability to fight multiple bosses at once. You can only do so many though, or the game crashes. But you can also fight in areas only seen in cutscenes, use your drive forms (transformation ability) to turn into another character, or give yourself the moveset of one form while appearing in another. Let's look at the results for each of these attempts.

Fighting three of the same boss. Notice that the screen darkens during his ultimate attack, and that it does so for each doing the attack, and that all three do that attack at the same time at one point. Very hard to see.


That same boss (he's a popular one) fought in an area that only appears in the intro scene.


This boss is supposed to be fought with this character using two weapons at once. Instead, he's been hacked to still only use one and can use the drive command to drive into his form where he has two weapons. I particularily enjoy the first time its used and on completion of the effect the boss does the reaction from the cutscene when the player first pulls out two weapons. "Two?!"


And finally, the move set of Final Form on the Antiform. (Sorry he picked Marluxia again to showcase this on. I TOLD you he was popular!)


So, at the end of the day, hacking a single player game is pretty harmless and can add extra entertainment value to a game. Hacking to give yourself tons of cash in an online game is considered quite rude, unfair, and can get you permanently banned. Hacking is something you should do in private on your own time, not in front of others.

Please Hack Responsibly