Originally Posted by HybridSoldier23
The studio system today is vastly different than it was in the PS1 n64 days, the amount of people working on a single game can be 10x what it was in lets say 1998. There's many different ways various flags are accessed in the game. A lot of them are leftover from debugging. What you would do back in the day is basically leave the debug code accessible and have player input (a cheat code) turn the flags on and off. Sometimes the debug interface was left in the game because someone decided to leave it in or was too lazy to clean it up before the title shipped. A shark would basically force an interrupt subroutine to stop the written code and inject it's own modifications using the systems RAM. Now many developers began to get pissed off at sharks or pro action replays messing with their code. I mean do you want someone making it plain and simple to %++% with your work and make you look like a fool?
So what comes next in the timeline is online gaming. You have a PSN ID a 360 gamertag. All linked to your specific Xbox/PS3 with a specific serial and MAC address. Instead of letting shark and action replay do their thing, M$ and Sony basically banned all 3'd party applications to be running when you hop on the PSN or live. Thus banning people who are hardware and software modding their consoles. Thus ending the economic commercial viability of the Gameshark or Action Replay.
So that's the jist of where gameshark and action replay went. To answer your question about cheat codes. There's still codes for games but with the invention of achievements, you have to turn them off to give access to most cheats. Writing code to turn off achievements is a pain in the !@%. This is because the process of implementing achievements isn't governed by specific studios it's governed by M$ and Sony themselves. There's a whole slew of checklists and requirements and mandates about how that stuff has to work for any game. When you start messing with that and then it has to trickle down to testers and new builds and new checklists to make sure that achievements don't get screwed up. That last thing you would ever ever want to do is %++% up and have a game ship with the ability to get achievements without actually completing them (what would be the point of achievements then?).
So the bottom line is it's just way more difficult to implement cheats without screwing up the template the studios been working on. I'm not saying it's not done or can't be done but after hot coffee, leaving any kind of unapproved non necessary code such as debug, extra scenarios, easter eggs, modifier flags, etc. is grounds for getting fired. So everyone now just really chooses not to mess with that sort of thing until you've got the game polished and good to go. But you know, there's always more work to be done up until the game goes gold. I'm going to use that time to squeeze a few more FPS out of the engine or better memory mapping for faster loading so you guys get the best game possible rather than unlimited health
Originally Posted by DJMano34
Originally Posted by Simply Certified
i used to charge dudes a dollar for 10 rare candies and 50 cents for 10 master balls
pokemon was SERIOUS business back in 99'
I like your Hustle!
but i never had one. only played gameboy for Pokemon
and I just used the missingno cheat...
