Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor

Cheat!

This is a vast game, with loads of exploring to do, many quests to complete and oodles of puzzles to solve - and the first time you play it you will no doubt find your way impeded at every turn. Your characters are so weak you will get killed time and again before you can have a good look around. Very slow. Most frustrating.

If you are as impatient as I am, you'll want to whisk through the game at first, then play it again more slowly (as it should be), taking your time over it - perhaps discovering all manner of things you missed the first time around.

Well, why not cheat? It's not all that difficult, really. When you begin to get fed up of dying every five minutes, pause. Look at your characters' stats. Make a note of their names followed by their stats. Say Zoltan has 30 points of Might, 9 of the next statistic, etc. Write it all down. Note also the skills. If you have any points to spend, use them all on the very first one, for each character, making a note of it. For instance, you may have at the top an Axe skill of 3 for Zoltan, as an example. Now save your game. Make a copy of it somewhere safe in case you mess up.

You need only convert the first stat figure of each character to hexadecimal with a calculator: for instance, in the case of Zoltan, 30 will be 1E. Naturally, there is no need to convert, say, a 3, since it will be 03 in hexadecimal.

Use an editor on your saved game and search for the name of each character. Say your first one is Zoltan: find his name and then look carefully through each following sector till you see 00 1E 00. Change the 1E to 63, or whatever you want; then there will be a few 00s and then the next statistic. Change them all.

Then change the skills. If the first one is 3, look for 03. Change it to 63. This will be followed by 00, which you leave alone, then you can change the next 00 or 01, or whatever it is: you should end up with a row of 63 00 63 00 63 00... until you have about 33 63s.

Changing the statistics will give you a lot more hit and mana points, and you can then get on with the game and concentrate on solving problems without worrying too much about your health. Or finding those pesky people who improve your skills and whom you can't ever remember, nor where they live. Of course, you'll still have to become Grand Masters of certain things to really be able to get on.

As to how to play the game, now that you can, the pattern in all M&M RPGs is always the same: in each section of the map, you visit the town, get info and quests, stay above ground to clear the sector of nasties (getting advancement and items for your trouble, for which you have to get back to the town), then you enter the various suspicious buildings or go underground to fulfill your quests. There is no need to follow a particular order to complete them. Sometimes, you even have to leave one sector unfinished and go to another one to find the necessaries to do what you have to do.

Play it by ear. That's the whole point of the exercise.