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| Cheat Engine: When playing it straight ain't enough by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/21/2012, 3:07am PDT | ||||
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| Sometimes you're playing a game application on your computer (as opposed to running a web application) and you'd like it to be just a bit easier. Maybe give you more shots, more lives, more money, or whatever. Or maybe you want to make the game harder by reducing something. If the game does not have a cheat mode to do that, you might still be in luck.
Enter Cheat Engine, a freeware application that allows you to search and change memory of a running process under Windows. Now, it might also be usable as an external debugger for testing a program, but what fun is that? What Cheat Engine allows you to do is to find a known value in memory and monitor it for changes, and then change the value if you wish. You select a running program or process and then you can tell Cheat Engine to find every word that has a specific value. This might range from a few entries to hundreds. You can then filter this for the value(s) that have changed to a new value. Often this will find the particular value that can be changed to give you the powerup you want. (Or powerdown if you want to make the game harder). So let's say you're playing Peggle, and you'd like more balls. So you have 10 balls for this screen. Select first scan, and all the addresses of locations of value 10 show up. Shoot one ball, then switch back to Cheat Engine, and select next scan of 9. Chances are there's only 1 or 2 locations that were 10 and are now 9. Double-Click to mark those for change in the address selector, then change them from 9 to 261, and voila! You now have a tiny increase in capability, because now you only have 261 balls for this screen to clear all of the orange pegs. Just a little help when you need it. Sim City 4, which is another sandbox game, gives you a measly $100,000 to construct a city. If you just want to play around and build a large city, not sit around waiting or having to do the equivalent of grinding with a cheat code to add more money, you can simply initialize a city, put an item down like some power lines, and now you have perhaps 99,430 remaining. Switch to Cheat Engine, put 99430 in the first search, and you find two fields with that value. Save them in the address box, and double click on the value for each, say, adding 999 or 7677 or 8388 or some interesting number in front of the values, and switch back; you now have 99,999,430, 767,799,430, or 838,899,430 dollars to build your city. Now you can just build, zone and play without having to worry about the finance limits. Save your city either separately or as part of the entire map, and come back later. Even if Cheat Engine is not running - or not installed, if you moved to a different computer - you still have the huge amount of money you awarded yourself. Cheat Engine doesn't always work in some cases, especially if they are games running on a service platform like Steam; sometimes you might pick the wrong process name, the one with the obvious name as the game might not be the process you need to monitor. Or sometimes you just can't find the value that you want to change. Or sometimes it disappears and you can no longer find it. You also can't use it on a game that runs on a server since you can only access memory on your own machine. You might be able to access the memory of a flash game running in your browser but don't necessarily count on it. But, if you want to try, you really don't have a whole lot to lose. For single-user games I think Cheat Engine is a great way to change the dynamics of a game that might be a bit hard or that you're not having fun because you're frustrated. I would not recommend it when playing with other users, because, first, if you're playing deathmatch it's an unfair advantage (unless the others know that you're using it and agree it's okay. That's not that farfetched, if you're a horrible player and they're really good, you might be too easy to beat and they might allow you a handicap. It might even be more fun for them, you're playing against a guy allowed to cheat, while you're not, that means when you beat him it's even sweeter because despite his extra advantages he still lost.) I see nothing wrong with using this program openly if the other people involved are okay with it. But a big reason not to use it is that most on-line games have anti-cheating technology built in to them. Cheat Engine is a gross, huge and easily spotted target for an anti-cheat and thus is likely to get you noticed and banned. (There are much more subtle and actually better cheating systems including programs that run as the equivalent of rootkits or device drivers and can't be detected at the application level, but that's a whole different matter.) And seriously, if you're playing against other people and they discover you were using a cheat (without getting their okay), either expect to find they won't play against you any more, or they will start using cheating tools. It's one thing to give yourself an "up" (or make the game harder if you want) when it's just you against the computer. It's another to be a dick and trick other people by using things like this and not letting them know. The use of cheat tools has gotten so bad at least one company running a multi-player system has announced that instead of banning people who cheat, they will be locked to servers that only allow other people caught cheating. This, I think, is an excellent idea; the cheaters can all go after each other in Kilkenny cats-style. May the most dishonest win! As a way of making a single-user game application a more fun experience I think Cheat Engine is a reasonable idea. To avoid being hit by malware I recommend downloading it from the developer's website at http://www.cheatengine.org. |
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Cheat Engine: When playing it straight ain't enough by 06/21/2012, 3:07am PDT  Fair's fair... this is a good post. Interesting new utility and Kilkenny cats NT by 06/21/2012, 2:16pm PDT I used to use something similar in the Win 98 days called...Gamehack? by 06/22/2012, 6:34am PDT hacking tools and copying software by 06/23/2012, 6:51pm PDT Re: Cheat Engine: When playing it straight ain't enough by 06/24/2012, 6:32pm PDT "deathmatch" = "competitive multiplayer combat mode" by 06/24/2012, 7:48pm PDT |
