So far, there's only one game on my Samsung Moment that I considered worth paying for. I paid $2.99 to get the full version of Lupis Labs' Robo Defense.

It's a tower defense game with lots of degrees of difficulty, different maps, and you can spend points earned in the games to buy upgrades like increasing the speed of fire of your rocket launchers or increasing the strength of your guns. You play again and again, gradually beefing up your strength so you can complete more and more difficult levels.

But what if you want to get your fire rates or bullet strength up to massive levels without having to spend all that time accumulating the necessary points? I Googled for cheat codes, but all I found were game sites saying they didn't have any yet.

I'm not an Android developer, but I had seen a file on my microSD card with the filename "robo_defense_full.bak". I decided to look at the guts to see if it could be used. Loading it up in a plain text editor showed some odd characters. I wasn't sure what it all meant. So I opened it up in a hex editor (using HexFiend for Mac).

Of course, the "Edit this file at your own risk!" at the beginning was fun, but I decided to poke around. as I did, I noticed that all of the upgrades were listed (as Rewards). On the line marked 456 on the screenshot above, you'll see an entry start: ADReward:Faster Antiair Reloadw.........t. But if you look at the hexadecimal information to the left, those dots are represented as 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 16. The number 16 in hexadecimal is 22 in decimal, which is the level my Faster Antiair Reload was at. As I went through the file, the pattern was the name of the reward, then the 8 dots represented by 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00, then a hex code with the level I was at.

I made a backup copy of the file, just in case I screwed things up, then I changed a number of my levels, randomly picking levels between 55 and 99. I saved the file and then uploaded it to my microSD card, replacing the original. I unmounted the card and ran the game. No dice.

I deleted the game and its internal data files, then downloaded it again from the Android store (using the "my downloads" option on the menu). No dice.

So I tried wiping the file from my SD card and deleting the game, then redownloading the game and seeing if I could get it to start from zero. That worked and it created a new robo_defense_full.bak file. I erased that and replaced it with my hacked version.

When I started the game again, I had bullets at level 154, explosives at 104, antiair reload at 119, etc. I could basically play level 80 with a couple of rocket launchers and a couple of antiair guns because I pretty much killed everything the moment it came on screen. Sadly, now that there was no challenge, the ability to win the game with a handful of towers got old fast. The game I'd spent hours and hours playing was now a bore.

So, if you're bound and determined to cheat, I've just told you how. But hopefully, you'll view this account as a cautionary tale and choose not to do it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.