PS2 Cheats

What does that mean? It means more games, more players, and more crazed gamers spending their precious time finding cool and offbeat cheats for you to enjoy.

Ordinary PS2 Cheats

As mentioned in our Game Cheats article, it's easy to find cheats. There are cheat articles in all major gaming magazines. And you can quickly find uncountable cheats for thousands of PS2 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 cheats are fairly easy to turn on. Usually you must enter a sequence of button presses - often before starting a game session, after loading the game's interface.

Other cheats require 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.

Nefarious Means

As with other consoles, there are actual products that will make cheating even easier. The two major players are the GameCodes product from GameShark and the Action Replay from Datel.

Both of these products are fairly bewildering to decipher, and a little difficult to use.

(The GameCodes' full name is actually "GameShark2 Game Codes with Media Player For PlayStation2." Come on, guys. That's just ridiculous. How do you expect a parent to look at that and decide it's right for their child? How many numeral 2's do you need? Will it become "GameShark3 Game Codes with Media Player For PlayStation2" when you come out with the next version?)

Anyhow, the main question you get when you look at them is, "What the heck IS it?" Is it a peripheral that plugs into the PS2 somehow? An item you have to network to your PC? A special cable or memory card? How does it WORK?

Fortunately, although you'd be hard pressed to figure it out by looking at the packages, both work on the same basic principle. The heart of the product is a game disc that you pop into your PS2 when you're about to start a... er... uh... let's call it an "enhanced" game session. The disc has its own proprietary software that guides you (sometimes clumsily) through the process of picking the game you want to play and enabling the cheats you want. Once that's done, you put in the actual game disc and begin your cheaterly gaming. No messy button-pressing-combination mambo, no leafing through old magazines to find your favorite cheats, and no jumping through hoops or repeating dastardly chores. Your gaming session is cheat-enabled and ready to go.

There are some drawbacks, though. You have to repeat this double-disc startup process every time you want to play a different game. There's no way to load the cheats for two games, and then put those two game discs into your console one after the other.

And significantly, the Action Replay only works with the included memory card. You're forced to use that card every time you want to cheat. This can be annoying; memory cards are pretty easy to misplace.

Lastly, these two products also have a few nice media playback features. They can view images and turn your PS2 into a region-free DVD player. That's a nice bonus. If you have DVDs from other countries, your PS2 can now play them smoothly without any hassles. Chances are that your ordinary DVD player can't do that.

Get Out There And Cheat

Should you be guilty about cheating? The game makers intentionally put cheats in their games. The magazines publish them. Other companies make devices to enable easier cheating. Amazing! Where's the shame?

Well, the shame comes when your buddies ask you how long it took you to get through that hot new game, and you have to admit you pulled out the white flag and cheezed your way through. Smackdown!