Game cheats Pump Up the action

Say you're up late at night at a friend's apartment playing Grand Theft Auto and you're feeling a little wacky. What better time to throw in a few cheat codes to up the wack factor? Turn the pedestrians against you and watch the bullets fly from every behind every parked car! The cheats for that game are especially cool, but almost every video game known to man has cheat codes installed in it. From back in the dawn of the gaming industry, in fact, developers imbedded cheat codes into games for their own use-they made testing the games faster-and just never removed them.

Computer geeks being what they are, they latched onto the codes, and in ,addition, learned how to use what were called "POKES" to modify certain memory addresses. The fun was just beginning. When developers learned that gamers expected the imbedded games Cheat and unlockables, they began regularly imbedding them in every game.

These days, you can change all sorts of game aspects using cheats. The ever-popular giant head feature, for example, is just one of many changes you can create, although unless you are just really punchy it's hard to imagine why anyone would get a big kick out of that particular one. Shape shifting is a cool cheat in some games, though, and so is invisibility or the ability to fly. You can also put in a "No clip" code and put the game into an ethereal sort of mode where you can float through solid objects.

Power hungry players have a field day with cheats. You can play in God Mode, which means you are pretty much invulnerable to anything and cannot be killed. You can also add to your cache of weapons, money, or other useful possessions; you can become gigantic; or you could use a code to achieve infinite resources like ammunition.

So really, with cheat codes, you can play a game over and over and make it interesting every time. Even games you have beaten can still be amusing. And no matter what hard core, die hard, live-in-their-parents' basement gamers may tell you, there is nothing wrong in cheat codes.