Cheeky Cheater

How many games have you played that had cheats? Until recent year, almost every game had some secret way you could gain instant money, skip levels and so forth. Super Mario Bros had a secret passageway on course 1-2; the original Legend of Zelda allowed you to skip half the game if you named your character "Zelda".

My games are no exception. Cheats are helpful in aiding testing, like adding a secret button for skipping levels or unlocking every item to see if they work like they're supposed to. However, I have never revealed any of these secrets... until now.

Super Invader - starting with purple super boxes

Although Super Invader is a simple game, it still has a secret cheat mode. To activate it, shoot the little alien on the main menu screen and then quickly click the appearing boxes first in the upper-left corner then the one in the lower-right before they disappear. Once activated, every game starts with a purple box spawning for both players. Enjoy.

Counter Invader - Instant millionaire

Money cheats are one of the simplest and most common cheats available in video games since they're both fun for the player and useful for testing. I added one into CI in order to test the store menu. To activate your own mysterious deposit, play until you get into a shop screen and simply type "change" into the game. Ka-$hing! Instant 100,000. As an afterthought this is kind of silly, because Counter-Invader is supposed to be taking place in a quasi-utopian communist state.

WW2 - Bush Battle

In the original release of Bush Battle there's more cheats than simply moving in a straight line where there's no shooting going on until you win. If you shoot a secret tree in the far right corner on level 6, you can return to any previous level. This is the only way you can beat the top score of the game. Not worth the effort, though.

The rest - Macintosh games

Before I made Bush Battle for Windows with Game Maker 5, I was using HyperCard on the Macintosh to make a variety of games. These games are not available for download as they require HyperCard and MacOS Classic to run. Also, they're stuck on the old Performa. However, when the day comes that I manage to finally port them to Windows you'll be able to skip through chapters by using the following cheats. For what it's worth.

Edit: Actually, I've been able to extract the files from the Macintosh since I wrote this. There isn't much stopping me from uploading an archive with the files to anyone with the means and the will to play them.

Dark Shade

Once you've played through Dark Shade the first time there's also Dark Shade extreme. In this mode you can find various easter eggs and there's a couple of twists.

Moon Light

Moon Light is full of weird easter eggs and secrets. To access most of them you just have to click around while holding shift, control or command. Just playing around with it I discovered I could find cheat notes under sand spills. There was this weird random room with a picture of a man in a hat and a boom box (in 1926?) and all kinds of pointless things.

Moon Light's actually fairly fun to play despite being a 7 years old game. Dark Shade in comparision is rather crude.

Spit Game

Final game! I was kind of expecting a cheat in this game but all I could find was some clue at the final screen about setting my screen resolution to "12-inch screen". I don't know what's there, but I suspect that there's some secret hiding off screen that's only accessable by changing the window size in the settings.

Anyway, that's it for all the full games I've released in 2010. As a bonus there's a not-very-secret cheat in Slime Slayer X. Press H at the first screen. This will unleash the devastating powers of Ha-do-ken and evaporate the poor slime into nothing. Poor, poor slimee, what did it ever do to you? Think about it.

Posted on: 2010-10-15

Edited on: 2018-06-16