Publisher: O'Reilly
Author: Simon Carless
Publication Date: August 2004
Buy 'GAMING HACKS': Paperback
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When it comes to deciding whether to purchase a book like Gaming Hacks: 100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools, the decision rests on how much you value your time. Little, if any, of the information contained herein isn't publicly available on the Internet; the big question is, do you feel like searching it out?
It's important to explain up front that Gaming Hacks isn't a cheat code book, but rather a book full of getting the most from your gaming experience, as well as introducing you to concepts you probably hadn't imagined. A frequent thought of mine while reading this was, "Whoever thought this up clearly had too much time on their hands."
There are eight sections to the book: Playing Classic Games; Playing Portably; Playing Well With Others (MMOs); Playing with Hardware; Playing with Console and Arcade Hardware; Playing Around the Game Engine; Playing Your Own Games; and Playing Everything Else.
Two of these sections — "Playing Classic Games" and "Playing Your Games" — are very old school. Playing Classic Games is an excellent series of tips on getting old arcade, Commodore 64, Atari, and ancient PC games working. If, like me, you grew up in the '80s you might welcome the chance to play some of these classics. If you look back on that era with a certain amount of disdain, well, you're not going to like it much. That said, there are great tips on getting MAME emulator disk images and OS emulators to work. They're going take some effort, as none of them come with wizards, and you might have a few head-scratching sessions as you plow through them.
The second old school section is the "Playing Your Own Games" section. Three-fourths of this section is solely dedicated to making Interactive Fiction games (think Zork and other classic Infocom games). It's an excellent resource if you're into that sort of thing — I am, so I loved it. The other quarter of the section details putting your face into DOOM and adding vehicles and modifying model behavior in Unreal Tournament 2004. As much as I enjoyed the Interactive Fiction hacks, I think this section would have been of more value to current gamers if it went through creating levels for DOOM, UT, Quake, etc., at the sacrifice of the IF section.
The "Playing Portably" section gives you hacks on playing games on your iPod and PDA, installing a PS2 in your car and composing music with a Game Boy. As with the previous sections I mentioned, these tips — while excellent — are very narrow in their focus. If you have an iPod and always wanted to play "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" on it, you're in luck.
The "Playing Well with Others" section is useless except to people very new to the genre. The glossary section gives a detailed accounting of popular MMO acronyms, but some of them are a little weird. Scott Jennings, who used to run the popular rant site "Lum the Mad" before going to work for Mythic Entertainment several years ago, is mentioned in there, for reasons that escape me. The rest of the tips go through "how to grind without going crazy," how to build and effective group and the like, but the tips are so broad they are more of general than the other tips you'll find in the book. There are some mentions of finding Half-Life cheaters here, but I was a little surprised to find no mention of the popular PunkBuster anti-cheat program
Likewise, I was unimpressed with the "Playing with Hardware" section. Again, the tips were too general, and a reader wanting to get the most out of their hardware is best served getting a copy of PC Modder magazine or one of the annual Maximum PC guide issues.
The "Playing with Console and Arcade Hardware" section is probably where readers will get the most value from the book. It goes through how to play LAN-only games online, playing import titles on American consoles, burning Dreamcast games on your PC, etc. Full disclosure: I'm not a console guy by any stretch of the imagination, so I'd suggest reading the section over in the bookstore before buying it.
There's an interesting section called "Playing Around the Game Engine." Half the section is dedicated to Machinima — the use of games like Quake to make movies. These aren't movies of in-game footage of you beating the boss monster, but rather acted out scenes using the in-game levels and models. A great example of this is the "Red vs. Blue" movies made by some diehard Halo fans. The section goes through how to get the video out, best way to set it up, how to plan it out, etc., and is a decent introduction to the concept.
In conclusion, I found Gaming Hacks to be an interesting assortment of tips and tricks. Easily half the book didn't interest me, but due to its varied nature, it is likely that the half that didn't interest me at all is another person's found treasure. While it didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked, it also does a good job at planting the seeds of knowledge and opening up your mind to areas you might not have considered. Once you've started using the tips, it's easy to research more on the Internet. Also, while most of the information is available for free on the Internet, the book does present it in an easy-to-read format. The real decision lies on whether these sections even interest you, or aren't areas you're already expert in. Personally, I would have liked to have seen the "Playing with Others" and "Playing with Hardware" sections stricken to allow more detail on the other sections. The book seems to pay token service to the area of modding games, and I think it would have been a better book if it also went into the challenges and tools of doing level and model editing.
Score: 7.5/10