Game Hacking Continued 3

Welcome back! I wanted to talk about some cool findings and post some more game hacks. We started with Shovel Knight, but the first real topic is one we've covered before, if you can remember a few posts back I talked about "hacking simulations", or games that teach programming / hacking. Recently, I've been playing one that is simply incredible, SHENZHEN I/O; this is an ASM and EE design simulator. This game is a ton of fun, especially to someone who isn't a wiz with assembly, although it does takes some existing programming skill. The game has a rich community and comes with an epic manual.

That previous one was messing with the rewind feature of GRID 2. it was fun to mess with a racing game for once. That game is a ton of fun to play locally with friends, so it helps to be able to customize your matches. Next is NecroDancer. This game is a ton of fun not only because of the unique game play, it is also designed to be hacked and customized. A lot of the game objects and save data sits in giant XML files that are well defined and allows you to tweak most things in the game. That makes this a great game to mess with because there are so many unique things you can do but the game also has a lot of cheat detection. Bottom line, Crypt of the Necrodancer is a lot of fun to hack on, which is evident in the rich modding community and custom level creations.

We've talked about anti-cheat mechanisms before, but I wanted to highlight one that I came across in NecroDancer, essentially they throw the game into a lock state if you gain gold without picking it up on the map. This is a great anti-cheat mechanism because they are able to detect the method, not the tools and effectively stem the effort. Despite the solid anti-cheat mechanism though, there are a bunch of static links to objects, meaning its easy to find those values reliably.