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Finding Cheat Codes For A Living
selan writes: "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the guys from GameShark who spend their time digging up cheat codes. 'For hours on end, hackers here squint over thousands of lines of numeric coding that translate to great feats of accomplishment on a video game.'" Good work, if you can get it.
What they are doing is illegal...
Sad, isn't it?
Maybe the great working is playing the games for a living... looking at bare hex/assembly all day sounds a bit too much like debugging other people's code to me. (Which is only fun if they are around to make fun of...) And god help these guys if the DMCA nazis get a hold of them... "We liscenced you the game, we didn't say you could look at it."
Game Genie/Game Shark codes...
Trainers either, for that matter.
When I was about 15, I mowed lawns all summer in order to afford to buy NES cartridges. One of the 'cartridges' I bought was a Game Genie adapter.
Once I had done all the 'special effects' on the games I owned, I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Sure, it was fun to always have the elusive Hammer suit in SMB3, but at the same time, if you don't have to work hard and stay alive all the way through World 6 or 7, then you don't really appreciate it as much and don't play so carefully in order to keep it.
Now days, even the graphics altering abilities of such devices or programs aren't that impressive. There's very little you can do graphics-wise to a 3D, immersive game that doesn't break the game play. One of the few legitimate uses I've seen for this is to allow the player to play as characters that he wouldn't usually get to... such as Bowser in Super Mario 64. Even then, the animation and clipping is broken, hurting the play experience.
Some trainers do have positive uses. Here, I'm thinking about the trainers that exist for games like Roller Coaster Tycoon that allow the player to more or less play in the 'Free Form Building' mode that everyone agrees is missing from the game.
The conclusion that I've drawn from these observation is that trainers usually detract from gaming... at least for people who are interested in playing. If a game needs a trainer in order to be enjoyable, such as RCT... then there's something wrong with the game.
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I am not exactly sure how they make "big" money on this...maybe there is a side of marketing that I am not thinking about but when is the last time you saw anybody pay for cheat codes?
Well, the codes themselves aren't big money, as (as far as I know) nobody sells just the codes. However, the codes do enable them to sell the hardware (or you could say hardware sales subsidize the code finding efforts). And every code they develop and make available adds one more reason for someone to buy a Game Shark
Looking at this another way, suppose you are play video games and are not opposed to the idea of a game shark. If the Game Shark didnt support any of the games you play, would you buy it? Probably no, but what about if it had codes for a handful of the games you play. Then you might buy it. If it supports every game you play, you are more likely to buy it. But what if it does support new games as they come out. That would make you less likely to buy it. In otherwords, to ensure sales of Game Shark, they need to support as many games as possible, and continue to support new games as they come out. This way they build a loyal following. Then, as new games systems come out every couple of year, they quickly come out with a new product for that system and have millions of instant repeat customers.
...
What about this cycle:
Is that so despicable?
After I beat Baldur's Gate for the nth time, I amused myself for a while by experimenting with the various cheat codes, toying with the save file format with a hex editor, and otherwise trying to push the boundaries of what the game would let me do, which in itself was made for interesting challenges. Isn't that perfectly natural for someone with a hacker mentality?
In the process, I learned a little bit about how the game worked. It was fun for a while. Of course, silly me, that's why I buy games -- for the fun, not so I can prove how cool I am or look down on others for the way they choose to have fun with the games.
The kids who said "no, this is how you're supposed to do it!" were always the most annoying ones.
No. More like "Good work, if you're a freakin moron".
I mean, is that would you guys *seriously* aspire to? - arsing around all day looking for video game cheat codes??? And you wonder why you're still virgins? LOL.
This reminds me of my girlfriend's nephew. Recently I have been playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein a lot. I finally finished the game and the kid (I think he's 16) was over so I let him play. He's rarely ever played a game without cheat codes, in fact he went through Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time completely following the strategy guide he bought page for page.
Anyway, I come home from work and he whines to me that this level is too hard. For anyone who's played the game, it's the one where you have to get the snooper rifle and not let any of the guards see you. So I sit down and tell him, yeah, this level was pretty tough, I had to play it about 5 or 6 times because I kept trying to kill the tower guard. I start playing and I notice he already has the snooper scope, which is odd since getting the gun is part of the mission and he's a long way from where the gun is stashed. Then I notice he also has 996 ammo. For those who haven't played, the snooper scope is an awesome sniper rifle, but you usually only get like 10 ammo with it to cover 4 maps, so you use it sparingly. Having 999 ammo, you don't need to do this.
So I made it about halfway through the level and I climb up a tower and accidentally fall out, and surprise! I take no damage. He also had god mode enabled.
At that point I was pretty disgusted with him. The joke was on him however, as since he already HAD the snooper scope, he couldn't pick up the one laying on the ground, which was part of the mission, and so he couldn't end the level even though all the enemies were dead.
I encourage more game makers to make games that actually require some level of skill, so that even if you have all the cheat codes you can't be a lamer like this kid. The only part of the game that can't be won by simply being invincible and this kid was completely unable to do anything. And I know I sound like an old man saying this, but this is just another symptom of how lazy kids today are. Or maybe just him, who knows. He's getting xbox for xmas and I bet he'll waste several dead trees printing out cheat codes for halo.
How anyone can consider this fun, I don't know.
rooooar
One would assume those with "remarkable programming skills" would be making $50,000 and up while actually programming games, rather than trying to reverse engineer infinite health cheats in games other people created...