10 Jul 2011
Editor’s Review of Cheat engine 5.5
Cheat Engine, game cheating at its best - rated out of 5
Cheat Engine is an open source program (written mostly in Delphi) intended to be used for modifying games that run under Windows. As its name suggest, it is mainly used to cheat on games and this lead to it becoming the most popular tool for game modifications/hacking/cheating.Cheat Engine can be used in theory for single player installable Windows games, but its popularity grew based on the fact that it also works in cheating at online flash games. This happened because browser-based flash games such as Farmville, Restaurant City, Cityville (and many others from developers such as Zynga) are immensely popular, so tools like Cheat Engine that help cheat on these games became popular too.
Even if it is used mainly for the purpose of cheating, there are cases where it can be used to increase the difficulty of a particular game. For instance, you can use it to reduce the amount of health a character in the game has (or any other type of resource that is important), thus making it more difficult to complete tasks. Cheat Engine uses a memory scanner to detect which variables can be changed in a game in order to create advantages for the user such as infinite resources (money, gold, ...), increased time or weaponry. Because of the fact that it monitors memory assemblies of a process and that it is able to inject code, it might be detected by some antiviruses as a threat - there are some versions that eliminate the code injection feature thus no virus alert is shown.
The program comes with other features too, such as tools for game debugging, disassembler, assembler, speedhacks, trainer generation, Direct 3D manipulation, system inspection, etc. The Direct 3D manipulation tool is particularly interesting, given the fact that applying it to a game you can see through walls, zoom in or out at astonishing levels or other visual hacks (such as object placements). Cheat engine is used by game hackers too that create and release game trainers (independent of the program itself) and aimbots (game bots that allow a character to auto-aim in first-person shooter games).
The official Cheat Engine website has a forum and a wiki, which has among others information related to cheating on particular games (i.e. 3D Pinball: Space Cadet, Ashes 2 Ashes: Zombie Cricket, Club Penguin, Commando 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Doom 1, F.E.A.R. 2, Farm Ville, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, Learn to Fly, Mafia Wars, Painkiller:Resurrection, Robotrage, Sim Tower, Starcraft 2 ). The irony is that the author posted a notice regarding the fact that the tool might not be useful for online games and not to contact him about this, however gamecheats posted on the wiki also refer to online flash games.
Cheat Engine is the best tool in its class for the main purpose, that of altering games.
The main advantages are:
- It is open source (this way you are sure that you are not installing any malware, as the code was looked through by many now)
- Spares you time (if you don't have a lot of time allotted for games, cheating will allow you to finish them faster)
- Allows you to hack many games (including the most popular ones)
