Scarlet Stranger: a hacker’s goldmine

By SiamJai

Have you ever played games that look and feel great at first glance, but after five minutes or so you’ll come across glaring design mistakes and game-breaking technical bugs? These unpolished gems are a goldmine of secrets for the cheat-conscious gamer; a few simple hacks often reveal unused goodies the hasty developer carelessly left in the game.

Enter Scarlet Stranger, a Zelda-esque action RPG with charming graphics and all the shortcomings mentioned above. The folks at Jayisgames did a great job reviewing the game already, so I’ll only mention stuff relevant to this post.

1. Get secret items via inventory hack.
There are about half a dozen items that didn’t make it to the final game, but are still there, hidden. These include quest items such as a map and compass, along with interesting upgrades like the pouch that upgrades your carrying capacity.

To hack this, hook Cheat Engine (CE) to the Flash player, start a Flash*8 search and follow the steps below:

1. Visit the shop with some item in your inventory (a piece of rock or wood will do).
2. Drag that item into the first crafting slot.
3. In CE, search for the itemID (for values, refer to the table at the end of this post).
4. Remove the item from the crafting slot.
5. In CE, search for 0.
6. Add another or the same item back to that same crafting slot and do a search for its itemID.
7. Soon you’ll get only one address. Put something into the crafting slot again, change its ID to one of the rare item IDs, say, 9.
8. Remove the item from the crafting slot, and voila: in the inventory, the item morphs into your desired item!
9. Repeat for other items and values as desired.

Humbug Secret Ending

By SiamJai

Once in a while an intriguing game comes around with even more intriguing secret goodies. Humbug is one of those games, and its secret items unlock a second, slightly cooler ending, seen here:

Bunni Secret: Picky Workers!

By SiamJai

Today while messing around with Bunni, I’ve discovered something: some workers have their favorite food that they run for like crazy when they become hungry.

This is best demonstrated with pandas. Normally they’re very slow, but place a tulip garden next to them, and once they become hungry, they run towards the garden faster than a fox could say ‘wow’. Now replace the tulip garden with the more expensive roses, and watch what happens next time the panda becomes hungry: it will slouch towards the roses with the same slow speed it uses for working. Picky pandas!

Here are the ones I’ve figured out so far:

• Panda: tulips
• Fox: tulips
• Pirate: posies

But I really wanna be a miner!

They also seem to have favorite types of work that they perform faster than normal. Put foxes to Ironwood and they’ll chop them at double speed; pandas make short work of Maple forests, and monsters devour everything faster if it’s made of bronze, silver or gold.

Bunni is a goldmine of little secrets like this, which makes playing all the more rewarding.