An unlikely trio, eh? Thumbnail credit goes to me
Who doesn’t love cheats? What started out as means to sell magazines and strategy guides (as well as means of retrieving lost progress) evolved into its own sub-culture of video games. It can’t be understated how much of an industry-wide impact cheat codes had on gaming from the NES even all the way to the PS2 with classics like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you can’t deny the mark it left on gaming as we know it.
We got a healthy selection today. From your GTAs to your BKs, here’s some of the zaniest, goofiest and funkiest cheat codes of the past gens.
Banjo Kazooie is fun to start out with, as it might be one of the rare games where Cheat Codes are internalized within the world itself. For the record, this isn’t about the codes that the game verbally tells you about (even has a dedicated character for it named “Cheat”, a floating book, of course). Those codes the game actively warns you about and will even delete your save for abusing them. No, the codes we’re discussing require a little more digging. First off, you gotta head back all the way to the starting area, specifically your house, and then enter it and interact with the image of Bottles to start this surprisingly challenging jigsaw-type mini-game.
Don’t be fooled, this is the definition of nightmare!
It starts off deceptively simple with little challenge, but it slowly amps up the difficulty by having images that are harder to distinguish, having the background image move and so on. But your reward for completing them is that you unlock the ability to activate more cheat codes.
Yes, you read that correctly. Banjo’s codes are so well-hidden, you have to unlock the mere ability to activate them. Once all said and done, you head back to the temple with all the letters, since that’s where you activate all cheat codes within Banjo. You do so by hitting the letters with a bounce in a specific order, forming the word that corresponds with the code. We run into another issue here as unlike the codes given to you by Cheato, which are accompanied by a sound cue, the ones Bottles gives you have no audio cues whatsoever, and they’re quite long, so they’re easy to mess up.
Image Credit goes to Cybershell
But once you’re there, and input everything accordingly, you have a wide selection of humorous body modifications to activate to your liking. Big head, big feet, even a hotdog Banjo. But the zaniest one by far is this Washing Machine transformation which, despite hindering your movement, making you unable to break certain objects, doesn’t actually stop you from acquiring enough jiggies to complete the game, which is hilarious enough on its own.
Moving on from Banjo and almost from Nintendo entirely, we have the allusive GTA franchise. It was actually really tricky picking a single cheat given the plethora of games to pick from. Not to mention how redundant it’d be to bring up some of them today. I’m sure everyone is already aware of the jetpack cheat, so it’d be more interesting to highlight lesser talked about cheat codes.
One that sprung was the “Drive on Water” from GTA: Liberty City Stories. Now, original cheat codes in GTA are a dime a dozen. Moon jumping? Infinite money? Flying cars? Amateur stuff. So perhaps the context and what you can do matters more than the actual cheat itself, and LCS is a great exhibit here.
Image credit goes to Badinfos
All the ps2 GTA games have their own island-skip exploits. In GTA 3, you gotta clip over a bridge. In Vice City Stories, you need to get creative to bypass the invisible swimming walls. LCS? It’s so much simpler than that. At first, you might think, why not just spawn a heli? Wouldn’t that make more sense than driving on water?
Oh, you sweet summer child, that’s the neat part, you don’t.
I’m not sure which brainiac dev at Rockstar made the call to make LCS the only sixth-gen GTA to not feature any drivable aircraft, but it’s what we have. Even the exploits you find online have limited value ‘cause either you won’t be able to take the helicopter back to your garage or, worse, it clips out of the garage and into the game-void. In both instances, it is often less cumbersome to use the Drive-on-Water cheat. Not only will you have immediate access to the entire map, but you can get collectibles much earlier, bypassing story-related blocks and manage to have incredibly strong weapons spawn at your hideout much earlier than intended. Isn’t it fun not to play the dev intended way?
Doesn’t this image simply fill you with a sense of power?
So yeah, it is one thing to have a cheat with larger implications, but what about cheats that aren’t traditionally cheats but still grant you some significant advantages over the game’s expected design? Here we arrive at none other than God of War’s own infinite magic glitch.
While not a “cheat” in the traditional sense, it very much is in the spirit of one, allowing you to bypass the dev-designed route of the game.
This one isn’t as hard as it looks! Footage credit goes to Shahid Gamer
This one’s more complicated, so it’s better to let a basic video tutorial do the explaining, but it’s a wall-clip that lets you hop over a gate that’s meant to keep you in the tutorial room until you’ve learned how to cast magic. Kratos is in a unique state here, as he’s granted infinite magic that he loses access to once he performs the given tutorial tasks. But if you do a simple series of tricks, you get to maintain this unique state while progressing through the rest of the game as if nothing happened. Magic! (Pun intended)
Do you have any cheats or tricks you’d like to share? Cheat your way through the comment section and, preferably with big-head mode turned on, leave any memorable codes you have in mind!
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this means a lot to read! I appreciate this feedback. And yeah, I would like to cover a lot more gta in the future when I can. It’s not my favorite series for no reason.
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