I love adventure games (or simply quests as they’re known where I came from) but sometimes the best way to pass some moment there is to cheat.
One of such instances is The Legend of Kyrandia – Book One which is a nice game I play again sometime but there’s the infamous maze there that it not fun. And in the old times I could work around it by hex-editing a savegame to give me the ever-glowing fireberry, stones and some other quest items so I did not have to explore the full maze.
And I thought this was a thing of the past until I tried to play Galador also known as The Prince and the Coward as it’s been supported by ScummVM (or should it be called CabalVM now?) since couple of years ago and I haven’t played it yet. Mostly it’s fine but there are three moments which I could not pass at all: in two instances you must quickly pick up an object and in the third one you need to throw a stone at a certain place three times while the cursor jitters (and repeat that three times).
My reflexes never were that great to begin with but playing the game with a touchpad instead of mouse made it impossible: when a menu with actions appears after the game reacts on your click it’s already too late to select an action and click it. So one solution would be to connect mouse and try until you pass. But I got lazy during those years (back in the day I could do all those timed sequences in Space Quest II and IV while SQ3 required an utility to slow down computer for the escape from pirates sequence). So I did something different: hacked the source code to show what action happens when I actually select that “pick up” object action and added a handler so when I press 'p' key it’d do the action without bothering with menus (or crash if you don’t move cursor to the proper object). And similarly for the stone-throwing scene I removed jitter and mapped 'p' to pick up a new stone.
It’s not something I’m proud of but it should be a good demonstration how you can work around certain game limitations if you have an access to its engine source code—even if it’s not something trivial like maximum ammo/thousands of resources/infinite health.