old school cheat codes

[Mr Buckshot]

first of all, just to clarify I'm not talking about aimbots and wallhacks and the whatnots that ruin online games. I'm talking about classic single player cheat codes like godmode.

so in the past few years, I've noticed that with a few exceptions like GTA, the old days of pausing the game and entering a button combo to enable godmode or spawn all weapons or get infinite ammo have more or less disappeared. On PC versions, the ability to enable the console and enter commands lasted a bit longer, but even that ability's vanished from a lot of new releases. Trainers do exist online, but they often get flagged as false positives by anti-malware software which is annoying, or more often, they stop working whenever a new patch comes out for the game, which is typical for Steamworks versions.

To be clear, I never use cheat codes for my first playthrough, as I want to experience the challenge all the way to the end. But in all the years I've spent gaming, I've felt that cheat codes add a LOT to the replay value of even the most linear single player campaigns. Enable god mode and infinite rockets, and you can end up exploring areas that were previously off limits, and having fun with all the glitches in the process. Or maybe you can have a laugh using the weakest possible weapons against the boss enemies (i.e. playing Half-Life with nothing but the crowbar). Or maybe you can see the effect of using weapons you weren't supposed to have at the time. Or maybe you can just go on an unpunished rampage to relieve stress, which I'm sure anyone who's played GTA has done more than enough times with a lot of guilty pleasure.

I've got many great memories of the James Bond titles from the Xbox/PS2/GC era, where the cheat codes to enable golden guns made the extremely linear levels worth playing over and over again. Sometimes the cheat codes even activated hidden levels, like a Shelby Cobra racing minigame in Nightfire.

Nowadays it's hard to name many games outside of GTA that allow this kind of messing around (and thus replay value).

So what do you guys think? Does anyone else want back the old days of simple cheat codes activated by pausing the game and entering a button combo?

[Limited]

I made this very point recently. I get a lot of flak on my YouTube videos, from people that are like "omg u sux hackers suck get a life" etc etc.

For example:
8vZNNOLNLN4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vZNNOLNLN4

I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vZNNOLNLN4) replied with something on the lines of, did you ever use cheat codes back in the day? to get unlimited health,ammo,etc.

Thats why I like making hacks, for single player only. In my eyes, if its single player, do whatever the heck you want to do. I've had a ton of enjoyment in games where I've messed around with things that just add that extra spice to the game. Like unlimited 'bullet time' in Max Payne 3, ^^.

I remember buying gaming magazines for the N64, and they came with a cheat code book, A-Z all the buttons/names you had to input to get stuff.

Goldeneye was the best game, built in cheat menu that you have to unlock via doing stuff in game. DK head mode + paintball FTW.

[Patrickssj6]

Back then I always wondered how people discovered the cheat codes of a game. Then I started to realize that you actually have to hack the game in order to extract them all. Your YouTube kiddies arguments are thus invalid.

...or am I forgetting something? I am pretty sure after a game came out, some reverse engineers looked through the executable and extracted the cheat code list.

[Mr Buckshot]

I always thought the devs made the cheat codes public themselves a few months after launch since they intentionally programmed them in.

[DarkHalo003]

Calling out to those who remember Game Shark and Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow. That is all.

[Limited]

Back then I always wondered how people discovered the cheat codes of a game. Then I started to realize that you actually have to hack the game in order to extract them all. Your YouTube kiddies arguments are thus invalid.

...or am I forgetting something? I am pretty sure after a game came out, some reverse engineers looked through the executable and extracted the cheat code list.
No, the game devs either released them to the public, or sold them to the game cheat companies. Who then charged people for them.

[Mr Buckshot]

Ah yes, those days when you had to subscribe to monthly magazines to learn cheat codes at all.

[=sw=warlord]

Calling out to those who remember Game Shark and Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow. That is all.
Fuck your gameshark.
Gamegenie for Sega megadrive all the way.

[DarkHalo003]

Fuck your gameshark.
Gamegenie for Sega megadrive all the way.
LOL. I wasn't going to go that far back lol.

[=sw=warlord]

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/sega-tower-of-power.jpg

[PopeAK49]

Calling out to those who remember Game Shark and Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow. That is all.

Yo dawg. I would make a profit by letting people use my action replay/gameshark to get 99 rare candies for about 50 cents a pop. It was a great business back then.

[Ryx]

And this is what trainers are for. Before trainers became almost exclusively multiplayer. :P

[nuttyyayap]

Calling out to those who remember Game Shark and Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow. That is all.
http://glitchcity.info/metapod/metapod.png
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/f/f5/Glitchbattle.png
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/d/d1/Glitch_City_Map1.jpg
You never needed a gameshark to fuck those games up, the awful programming did it all.
But I do see you point, I cherish the days I spent as a child fighting "The hooked SABRINA attacked!" with level 255 mews :downs:

[DarkHalo003]

The worst part is that I could never get Mew because I lost the booklet on how to do it with Gameshark. Then over time my Red, Blue, and Yellow version all lost the ability to save. One day I tried playing Yellow version on my PC only to gain a tremendous headache from the 8-bit soundtrack and too-old visuals. It was a sad day indeed.

[nuttyyayap]

You could try playing Red or Blue, they don't have the terrible, sickly screen saturation and have clearer sound.
And it's 4-bit sound, btw.
(and you don't need gameshark to get mew)

[Donut]

just to throw this out there, i remember having a discussion with somebody about how the game boy physically stores stuff in memory. i dont remember specific technical bits, but the basic gist of it is to imagine a bar that represents total memory. there are two types of memory, but theyre both stored in the same physical spot (the bar), but on opposite sides of that bar. so like, as each get bigger, they both move toward the center. i guess eventually they get close enough that a certain... exploit can cause them to overlap a bit

the point im trying to make here is that a LOT of the glitches and exploits in the old pokemon games come from memory locations. the seemingly random series of events you trigger is actually like really fucked up hex editing. for example, getting mew involves the difference of ONE hexidecimal character that gets shifted around in that memory. the character there is supposed to correspond to a pidgy or something, but it gets replaced from the shifted memory address, and becomes a character that represents mew.

so yeah, thats a long version of why i think pokemon does not deserve to be called "shittily programmed", lol.

[DarkHalo003]

Yeah the programming wasn't shitty at all. It's just the technology two decades ago was considerably limited.

@Nutty: Unfortunately all of them have lost their abilities to save and I really don't feel like playing them again on a computer. It's just not the same.

[Ryx]

Yeah the programming wasn't shitty at all. It's just the technology two decades ago was considerably limited.

@Nutty: Unfortunately all of them have lost their abilities to save and I really don't feel like playing them again on a computer. It's just not the same.
You can replace the batteries in them. I did this with my yellow a while ago and started playing it again.

[nuttyyayap]

@Donut
Yeah, my childhood was dedicated to study of the insides of pokemon games, and I know how the GameBoy stores data. I suppose saying that it's "shitty programming" is harsh but compared to Gold and Silver, which you know, actually handle game mechanics properly, it seems mediocre.
But I still miss the exploits :saddowns:
@Dark
Yeah... my Silver and Gold have this very same problem, but HG/SS is good enough for me.

[JackalStomper]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b7/Missingno.png
ahh the memories

[Mr Buckshot]

ah you lucky guys, I never got to have a GBA back when it was the cool thing to have :( I did get a Nintendo DS around 06 though.

But you still needed to buy a Gameshark device to cheat eh? Were there any GBA games that allowed you to cheat by just pausing and then pressing a specific sequence of buttons?

It's a real shame that almost all devs nowadays don't bother with any sort of single player cheat code system on console games.

[DarkHalo003]

ah you lucky guys, I never got to have a GBA back when it was the cool thing to have :( I did get a Nintendo DS around 06 though.

But you still needed to buy a Gameshark device to cheat eh? Were there any GBA games that allowed you to cheat by just pausing and then pressing a specific sequence of buttons?

It's a real shame that almost all devs nowadays don't bother with any sort of single player cheat code system on console games.
Yeah there were. I can't remember the ones I played off the top of my head, but there were several that actually had a cheat menu screen where you punched in codes. I think I still have the book of codes lying around my house somewhere.

From when I was 3-5 years old I owned a GameBoy Pocket to play Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, and Pokemon Red. To put it plainly, I grew up on three of the best video games of all time and I'm positive that composition made me into the big gamer I am today. Anyways, in the sequence of their release (or when I bought them) I owned a GameBoy Color, N64, GameBoy Advanced, GBA SP, PS2, NDS, Xbox 360, and finally the PSP. It's kind of funny because I started the Final Fantasy series on the re-releases of 1&2 for the GBA and Final Fantasy Advanced Tactics (which fucking rocked). A lot of people have played them since the SNES days.

I completely missed the PS1 and Sega gaming except for a few times I would go to my cousin's house and we'd all play Crash Bandicoot or Spyro. How were the cheats for those two?

[Pooky]

19 65 9 17

[Mr Buckshot]

Yeah there were. I can't remember the ones I played off the top of my head, but there were several that actually had a cheat menu screen where you punched in codes. I think I still have the book of codes lying around my house somewhere.

From when I was 3-5 years old I owned a GameBoy Pocket to play Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, and Pokemon Red. To put it plainly, I grew up on three of the best video games of all time and I'm positive that composition made me into the big gamer I am today. Anyways, in the sequence of their release (or when I bought them) I owned a GameBoy Color, N64, GameBoy Advanced, GBA SP, PS2, NDS, Xbox 360, and finally the PSP. It's kind of funny because I started the Final Fantasy series on the re-releases of 1&2 for the GBA and Final Fantasy Advanced Tactics (which fucking rocked). A lot of people have played them since the SNES days.

I completely missed the PS1 and Sega gaming except for a few times I would go to my cousin's house and we'd all play Crash Bandicoot or Spyro. How were the cheats for those two?

I missed the PS1/N64 generation, was an Internet browser gamer till I got an Xbox 1, then now primarily a PC gamer with occasional use of consoles for exclusives.

I remember this cheat called WOMBAT in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (first "real" video game I ever owned). It unlocked all special abilities and levels at once, and was useful if the HDD ever FUBAR'ed your saves.

also, cookies for anyone who knows what "iddqd" and "idkfa" are.

[Mr Buckshot]

I made this very point recently. I get a lot of flak on my YouTube videos, from people that are like "omg u sux hackers suck get a life" etc etc.

For example:
8vZNNOLNLN4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vZNNOLNLN4

I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vZNNOLNLN4) replied with something on the lines of, did you ever use cheat codes back in the day? to get unlimited health,ammo,etc.

Thats why I like making hacks, for single player only. In my eyes, if its single player, do whatever the heck you want to do. I've had a ton of enjoyment in games where I've messed around with things that just add that extra spice to the game. Like unlimited 'bullet time' in Max Payne 3, ^^.

I remember buying gaming magazines for the N64, and they came with a cheat code book, A-Z all the buttons/names you had to input to get stuff.

Goldeneye was the best game, built in cheat menu that you have to unlock via doing stuff in game. DK head mode + paintball FTW.

hey Limited, care to share this gem sometime? It'd give me more incentive to replay the single player again. If this allows usage of "forbidden weapons" during the scripted sequences (i.e. Max sliding down the roof to save Fabiana before falling into the pool) then I could waste hours messing around with the cutscenes.

[Bodzilla]

The worst part is that I could never get Mew because I lost the booklet on how to do it with Gameshark. Then over time my Red, Blue, and Yellow version all lost the ability to save. One day I tried playing Yellow version on my PC only to gain a tremendous headache from the 8-bit soundtrack and too-old visuals. It was a sad day indeed.
i actually have a legitimate mew.

apparently they had them at a convention once as a promotional thing, and a guy at my school got it and we duplicated them.

i actually have all 151 pokemon on red.

[dark navi]

I obtained Mew through a glitch in-game without using any memory editor. I proceeded to trade up to Crystal and use it as an HM whore.

[Pooky]

1 9 9 2 1 1 2 4

[Patrickssj6]

I just remember all those Age of Empires cheats..ranging from "pow" to "big mamma" to "furious the monkey boy"

[dark navi]

O CANADA

[Donut]

i know i have an assload of game genie codes i used to use. the only one i can actually find now though is i think a gameshark code for secret of mana on the snes. change the value at memory address C040BE to BD, and that makes it so nothing takes damage. as far as i can tell, that applies to enemies too, so its kind of useless. but hey, lol, its a cheat code :iamafag:

E: this one isnt really a cheat code as much as it is an exploit, but in final fantasy 6, the evade stat does nothing. physical and magic blocking are both based on a stat called mblock, and if you pad that stat up to at least 128%, you will block almost everything in the game.

another fun one in ff6 is the vanish-doom exploit. doom is an insta kill magic that normally has a really low hit rate, and vanish is a status altering magic that makes it so you cannot hit an enemy with physical attacks, but magic has 100% accuracy. so essentially, ANYTHING you could use vanish on you could insta-kill, including like, 70% of the bosses.

E2: also, there are several game genie codes for zelda 2 that will swap the "shield" magic out for any other spell, but still use the same amount of magic as shield. so you can replace shield with thunder and be able to use thunder a lot more. thunder causes a lot of damage to every enemy on the screen, usually one-shotting them, but it costs a lot of magic to use. there is a side effect to this. the replaced thunder damage effect persists until you leave the area, whereas the normal thunder magic only damages everything on screen the one time you cast it. because of this, when you use that thunder spell on the thunder bird, instead of just making him vulnerable to sword damage like normal, it basically insta-kills him, but does so in this glitchy way that stops you from progressing to the next area. so moral of the story? replacing shield with thunder is awesome until you hit the thunder bird, lol.

[Mr Buckshot]

I just remember all those Age of Empires cheats..ranging from "pow" to "big mamma" to "furious the monkey boy"

"how do you turn this on" in the 2nd game was awesome.

[DarkHalo003]

"Black Plague"

"Robin Hood"

"Cheese Steak Jimmies" (or something like that)

That was the only way I could legitimately play AoE back then...when my computers could actually play it. :(

[Timo]

The only ones I can still remember were for doom: iddqd, idkfa and idspispopd.

[Pooky]

lamaxout