«That’s cheating.»
«Cheating is often more efficient.»
Star Trek Voyager
Recently I tried out a couple of games. And actually, “Crossroads Inn” was good enough to be banished from my hard drive after a few days. Given I did little else during these days than to play the game. And yeah, it’s buggy, it’s … actually like “Papers” (the Mac Reference Manager App) — nicely looking, but the bugs kinda spoil it.
But still, it was captivating. Story got me. Was interesting in how it develops. And I really liked taking over an Inn and modifying it to suit my tastes.
Which made the whole “your Inn burns down and you have to start anew” after the prologue rather annoying. I get the idea — you manage an Inn, and after learning the ropes, why not start anew and design your own? Makes total sense. Only, it wouldn’t be my inn. The one I inherited. The one I felt a connection to.
So, instead of starting anew with a limited budget, I cheated. After all, they did cheat too. They destroyed my creation. Instead of having that limited budget, I did edit the save game file. 20k? Nah, let’s make that 999999.
Let’s call it compensation for fucking me over. And you can build a pretty nice inn with it:
Not nearly done building, BTW.
Just by using a hex editor (e.g. iHex on the Mac) to edit a save game. Searching for the amount of money you have (14900 in my case) in hex (3A34) which is written as 34 3A and change it to 999999 (F423F in hex, written as 3F 42 0F). Yep, just reverse the blocks of two.
Worked out very well.
Too well.
And it’s actually something I miss in today’s computer scientists (well, I mostly know media and computer scientists). You can have a lot of fun by editing save games (esp. in RPGs when you go for those stats).
After all, if they burn down my inn, hell yeah I get revenge.
