Pro Tip of the Day - cheating

When all else fails, consult a walkthrough. Featuring Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror

Will — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:06:02 +0000

In my formative gaming years, I used to spend a lot of time playing text-adventure games. You know, the kind with no real graphics that involve you typing commands to your avatar to make him do stuff? One of the ones I spent a huge amount of time with was Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror.

I spent hours and hours with the thing, but just didn't have the chops to finish the game... until I found the walkthrough many years later. (Keep in mind that this was before GameFAQs even existed, so there was no central location for help documents). Using that, I was able to get past the parts that plagued me and finally finish the game.

But, using walkthroughs is a slippery slope. If you're not careful, it's really easy to use them as a crutch and just check for the results of the puzzles presented to you instead of being thoughtful and at least trying to solve them on your own.

As an added bonus, I'm providing the game (as well as its walkthrough) here for you to download, including the walkthrough (not written by me) for your perusal. Just note that 1. this file is "as-is", I make no guarantee that it will even work for you, 2. I can't provide any tech support for it, 3. it won't work under Windows Vista or Windows 7 unless you use an emulator such as DOSBox or Windows XP Mode, and 4. I can't provide tech support for emulators either.

You can download the file here, and good luck! You'll need it!

Pro tip: Undying in Quake 4

Will — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:01:10 +0000

If you're like me (and, you probably wouldn't be reading this site if you weren't at least a little like me), then you probably will occasionally play a game part way through, forget about it, and then pick it up again months (or sometimes years) later. So what do you do when you go back to a game like, say, Quake 4, and just want to get through the rest of the story?

Well, you could press the Left CTRL + the Left ALT + the "~" keys all at the same time to bring down the Console. You could then type the word "Undying" (without quotes, natch).

Done right, you'll get a confirmation message, and the result?

Your health will take a beating (like normal), but can't ever dip down past 1 (not like normal). Which effectively makes you immortal. You should be able to finish the game now, no problem.

Pro tip: Cheating at Bookworm Adventures

Will — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Bookworm Adventures is a game where you spell words to defeat enemies. It's a perfect game for sesquipedalian linguiphiles to strut their stuff.

But suppose you don't feel much like thinking on a particular day. Or that you don't know how to spell very many big words. Well... then you've got a problem.

Now, you could just think about what to spell, since there's no time limit or anything, or you could visit Anagrammer.

Anagrammer is a site that lets you put in up to 16 letters (convenient) and it spits out all the words it can find that can be made with the junk you put in.

Yeah, that one was kind of easy, but there are lots of combinations that yield words that I didn't even know existed... like 'antiphonary'.

Now, using that site to progress through the game is definitely cheating, and not nearly as satisfying as staring at the screen for 15 minutes and breaking out with some gigantic polysyllabic onslaught, but as a relief to use after staring at the screen for 30 minutes or more with your brain almost completely locked up... well, then it's kind of nice.