Shadow of the Beast: Is There A Cheat Mode Or What?

Let's be clear on this: Shadow of the Beast is a pretty darn hard game. We
here at the AGG finished it, but that's only because we had lots of time to
spare! But a lot of people haven't. And when the going gets tough, the tough
look for cheat modes!

At one point, we actually called Psygnosis in Britain, begging and pleading
for a cheat mode. "There isn't one," the secretary replied in an accent so
thick she was speaking Swahili for all we know. But then we saw messages on
the various telecommunications networks (GEnie, CompuServe, and the like)
proclaiming "There's a cheat for Beast! And here's how you do it:"

"Wait for the last intro screen to appear, and then hold down the left mouse
button and the joystick fire button. Change disks when prompted, let go of
the buttons, and you'll be invulnerable!"

Gushing with hope, we tried this method. It failed. Miserably. But then we
saw another message along the same lines:

"I got the Beast cheat to work by holding down the buttons from the second
the game starts to boot until the game starts, stopping only to swap disks."

So we tried this. And it failed too. Very miserably.

By this time, we'd beaten the game and we weren't too keen on needing a
cheat. But then we saw a message that REALLY peaked our interest:

"The Beast cheat is a pirate hoax! Apparently, this cheat works only on a
certain cracked version of the game going around! So anyone who's gotten the
cheat to work is a pirate!"

Funnily enough, the people who said they got the cheat to work weren't seen
posting any more messages.

Finally, a few months ago, I received a disk full of hacks and demos from one
of our subscribers (Jim Woolsey; thanks Jim!!!). One of the cheats was a
(gasp) hack for Beast!

The file was titled "INFINITE-LIVES" and was really an IconX file that ran
VirusX, then printed a brief text message, then ran a program called
BEAST-HACK (the real hack program). This hack worked, and it's PD, so I went
to work getting it onto the disk.

The first thing I had to change was the icon; when you clicked on it, the
Beast logo exploded. That looked pretty tacky! So I went into IconMaster to
change it. Surprise! When I tried to load the icon, IconMaster would bomb the
whole Amiga.

So I rebooted, copied the icon to RAM, renamed it, and copied it onto the AGG
Disk. Now I could access it from IconMaster (apparently the header info on
the original icon was messed up big-time, and renaming the icon created new,
non-corrupt header info). I changed it and exited to the Shell.

Now, since I didn't want the text message or VirusX to come up, and since I
thought the only thing vital to the cheat was the cheat itself, I renamed the
file BEAST-HACK to Beast_Cheat.

Now, the original text file said: "When the disk stops accessing, put Beast
disk one into df0:, and click on all the requesters to get rid of them, and
then hit the fire button to start the program." So I did. And it worked
great! Rocks, bats, monsters (except for one; read on) flew right through me!

But then I tried running my modified file from the AGG Disk. Double-clicked,
took out AGG, put in Beast, closed requesters, hit fire button. But this time
the hack wouldn't start loading Beast.

Well, after a while I figured out that it wouldn't work unless VirusX was
previously installed. Without VirusX installed, inserting Beast will bring up
two error requesters. With VirusX, you'll get five. Apparently, those extra
three requesters do something that normally won't happen.

Weird? You bet. But it works, and here's how to do it:

Double-click VirusX and get it installed. This is version 3.2, by the way.
Double-click Beast_Cheat. The drive will spin for a sec to run the hack, and
then it will stop. Now take out all your disks, and plop Beast Disk One into
df0:. Click on Cancel for the first two requesters. Then the VirusX requester
comes up; click on Ignore It. Then two non-DOS requesters come up. Click on
Cancel twice. Now press the fire button. Place your ear against the drive. If
you hear soft gronking, the hack is working. If not, then I totally give
up!!!

I got this hack to work on a 1.2 Amiga 500 and 1.3 Amiga 2000; setups other
than that, and you may or may not get lucky.

Now, there's one more important detail. There's one guardian in the game
that's a huge, sliding thing with skulls atop it (it's in the tree Home). You
aren't invulnerable to this creature! Everything else is cool, but you'll
have to knock this sucker off with skill.

That's the whole story! If anyone knows who made this hack, or if anyone's
got the programming wizardry to explain to our readers why you need VirusX
going, please write and let us know! Enjoy the game!

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