Changing forms instant?

[auros]

I used to have one of those memory-edit toys, which was my last resort when games were completely frustrating me.  (I believe the name of the app was "Cheat ][".  I also had Cheat-o-Matic on a Windows box.)

Unfortunately, the more recent MacOS's don't allow that kind of cross-process memory access.  AFAIK, you can't even do it under sudo. 

[Alphasoldier]

Games are supposed to frustrate people, that's the challenging part they added.

[auros]

Well, there's a point at which you have to decide whether you're going to spend all day trying to deal with a single minor challenge, or jump over it.

The kind of frustration that I probably most often used that thing on, was when I'd be stuck gold farming, in RPGs where there were highly-useful (or even story-critical) items that were available at shops for ridiculous amounts of money.  You could spend six hours running around fighting to collect gold to get the item, without advancing the story at all, or you could just tweak up your gold by enough to move on.  This strikes me as a way of... fixing... poor game design.  (Possibly the worst offenders in that department that I've encountered, though, were on the PS platform -- Legend of Dragoon and Summoner both had items that you really, really wanted to get, but that cost the equivalent of, say, 10-20 hours worth of gold collecting, even in the highest-yield fights that were available at the stage of the game where the items became available.)

[See.Blue]

No! Don't give Alec any ideas!    He already did away with the esc food cheat because one too many people mentioned it on the forums. 

The esc food cheat though had some other much glitchier effects too though like making the game ignore triggers...

[Alphasoldier]

Yeah, Auros, and before you know it you'll use an infinite cheat health "Because you would need to do it again anyway if you died." might as well go through it in one run, oh and while I'm at it "Let's just put infinite ammo there too, it only makes the game that much easier.", cheat if you wish, I still think it ruins the gameplay.

If the gameplay needs cheating in the first run it means the gameplay is a failure. Or the player is anyway.

[auros]

Whatever, AS.  I don't know if you particularly play RPGs (like the Final Fantasy series -- though those, other than the very first one, have tended to be well enough designed that you don't generally need to grind for levels or gold for more than short periods of time), but some of them have pretty good stories, but poor balancing of the game mechanics, so that, like I said, you end up in a situation where you can't get more than, say, 1000 gold per fight, each fight takes five minutes or so, and you need a million gold to satisfy some key quest requirement.  When you run into that, maybe you look around a while to see if there's secretly some source of larger quantities, eventually you ask around online, and if the answer is, "No, you just have to run through a thousand fights," which at five min apiece means 83 hours...

I'm exaggerating the numbers slightly, but you get the point.  Again, I'd call this poor work on the part of the designers. *shrug*

Oh, and as far as "before you know it..."  I believe you said on some other forum that you're, what, 19?  I've been playing games, on both computers and consoles, since before you were born.  I've completed plenty of very difficult games (e.g. the entire Ecco series) with no use of cheats.  I just have a low tolerance for being forced into hours of rote repetition of some minor task that doesn't advance the plot.  Especially since I got out of college and had to also, you know, work, maintain relationships (heck, I'm getting married next year), and so on.  I only have so many hours for games; I'm not going to let a week's worth of gaming time get devoured by a poor decision by some programmer about how to set a number.

[Alphasoldier]

I know what you mean, there's no need to explain that 4 times, I already said what I think about cheating and what I think of people who are cheating and about games who are so lame cheating needs to be done.
I'm also amused that you can compare your age with mine and say that you've been playing games before I was born. But just so you know, all those games you have played? I have surely played games alike if not the same ones, seeing I've been playing computer games since my... what, 4th? I don't think you can say the same.
Now please stop comparing me with yourself and stop dragging out things I've already explained. A game is a game, whatever is included and cheats are still cheats.
Either way, I'm done discussing, I feel like I'm talking to a broken record.

[auros]

My family got an Apple IIe around the time I turned four, along with a variety of games on 5.25" floppies.  (Probably the only one you would've heard of is the original Lode Runner, which has inspired several remakes.)  I learned LOGO in 1st grade, BASIC in 3rd, and wrote an Infocom style text adventure when I was in 5th grade.

In any case, I was mentioning this not to say I'm "better" than you -- just to make the point that I don't think I'm on some "slippery slope" where I'll cheat more and more.  I've been playing the way I've been playing for twenty-eight years, with, as far as I can tell, very little change, other than the fact that I don't have as much time as I used to.

In any case, you seem to be ambiguous on your opinion about hacks: "If the gameplay needs cheating in the first run it means the gameplay is a failure. Or the player is anyway."  Well, which is it?  A failure on the part of the designer, or a failure on the part of the player?  I say  the former.  I suppose one could say the player should've picked a better game -- that the purchase was a waste of money -- but once you've sunk the $20 or $40 or $60 into it, what are you going to do?  I don't feel like I need to sit in moral judgement if somebody decides to use a workaround.  Heck, even if they want to do the infinite-ammo, no-death sort of thing, in order to see the game, whatever.  I think blazing through too quickly and easily is a waste of money, since that's cutting down on the amount of actual fun you can extract from the game, and my goal is, at the most abstract level, to get the best possible ratio of hours-of-fun to dollars-spent.  But everyone has a right to judge for themselves what parts they think are fun.  I find mastering a really difficult section of a game (like the Ecco: DotF Hanging Waters level) rather rewarding, so I'm not going to cheat myself out of that -- I'll spend the time to get it right.  Other folks, maybe not so much.  And I don't find it entertaining to do the same thing over and over once I already know the optimal way to do it. *shrug*

[El Bastarde]

On the hot-keys for changing forms I made a personal rule that I would never use them when in the heat of battle or a boss-fight. I figured they're a little TOO cheap and that I should have to find open space so I could sing the right song...that's part of the strategy, I feel. But if there were no enemies around and I wanted to just speed things up then, yeah, I used the hotkeys.

[NeatNit]

Ignoring this more or less useless bump I'd like to say - the only right way to play Aquaria lets you answer the phone if it rings.
If you don't get it, I mean with only one hand. Mouse only.



Having read the thread though I must ask - what was the esc food glitch?

[El Bastarde]

Eh, don't complain about bumps when there's little activity to begin with. Besides, it was just on the 2nd page...

[Alphasoldier]

The food glitch was putting 2 ingredients into their slots, cooking it and immediately pressing escape so you would keep the ingredients and the new item.

[Glamador]

I didn't use any glitches, not because I felt some high and mighty I'm-Against-Saving-Time-and-Alleviating-Frustrations mindset, but simply because I never needed to.  Cheats are nice to have, and this being a single player game the only thing you're cheating is yourself.  So long as nobody is unfairly wronged or disadvantaged I won't argue against cheats.  To each his own I say.

[Alphasoldier]

I didn't know about that glitch until it was too late and I had patched my game.

Though cheats can be fun once you finished a game.