PC Cheats

Providing the alternative to consoles, the PC is revered for its high resolution graphics, fine controls (I'll take a mouse over a controller joystick any day), and skill with presenting complicated game schematics and interfaces. The latter makes it a more natural home for many role-playing and real-time strategy games.

It's also usually hooked up to the Internet and provides the normal pathway for most gamers to get their cheats - even console gamers.

PC gamers can get plenty of cheats too, as you'll soon see.

Ordinary PC Cheats

As mentioned in our Game Cheats article, it's easy to find cheats. There are cheat articles in all major gaming magazines (although they do tend to focus on console cheats these days). And you can quickly find uncountable cheats for thousands of games at sites like www.gamefaqs.com and www.gamespot.com.

There's an delicious variety of cheats out there, from hidden characters to unlockable costumes to mystery weapons to invulnerability to instant access to all areas of the game.

Many PC cheats are fairly easy to turn on. However, as with gaming on the PC, it's not always just a series of simple button presses. It can be fairly complicated, because the PC can be fairly complicated. (Just ask anyone who's ever had to troubleshoot a nasty crash!)

A great number of PC cheats involve the downloading of a special accessory program, built by gamers, that alters the characteristics of the game files, or of your savegames, that are stored on your PC's hard drive.

Gamers should exercise extreme caution with these cheats - it's well-known that such cheats can install viruses or spyware. Always virus-scan your software with a good utility such as Norton Anti-Virus or the free AVG, and scan for spyware often.

Other cheats are more mundane, require in-game activities like visiting hidden areas to reveal secret items or characters, repeating tasks, winning a challenge repeatedly, or performing certain tasks in a special sequence or repeatedly.

Enabling a cheat can be very simple or nearly impossible. In fact, this writer is sure there are cheats that have never been unlocked due to their obscurity or difficulty.

Hardware Hackery?

Are there hardware methods of cheating at PC games? Not really - mostly because they're not necessary. Consoles require special additional products because it's hard for gamers to get at the guts of the game environment without special modifications. On the PC, all the game data is right there on your hard drive, ripe for the modifying.

In fact, there's a whole world of making officially-sanctioned changes to PC games - reclothing them and revamping them to fit your own personal gaming vision. It's called modding, and it's a fun way for those technically-inclined to make significant changes to their favorite game. But that's a topic for another article.

In Conclusion

So that's PC cheating in a nutshell. A little different than cheats on a console, but still, it's the same old story. Gamers are a lazy bunch, and they like to win!