I Dream Of Berries

Update: Well, as you may have noticed, this cheat/glitch/whatever you want to call it doesn’t actually work anymore. EA released a forced update, meaning an update you HAVE to install in order to log in to your game, which sadly fixes the glitch.  So the information below is presented only for posterity’s sake.

My wife has been playing The Simpsons Tapped Out on her iPhone obsessively since … well, a bloody long time.  We’re guessing four months, but the mere fact that we can’t pinpoint the time frame exactly tells me it’s been far too goddamn long.

Case in point: She’s just discovered a game-breaking glitch in the game.  But don’t worry, it’s to the player’s advantage.  It enables you to exchange an unlimited amount of donuts into cash that enables you to purchase all the buildings and exclusive shit you’d normally have to shell out hard-earned real world moneys to get.

Basically, she’s hacked the Matrix on this one.

Now, okay, maybe we’re not the first one to figure this out.  Granted, I haven’t even googled to check if we are.  But fuck it, the thrill of discovering a glitch on your own deserves a gleeful blog post.  Even if it’s by proxy.  (Again, I’m not actually playing this game.  My wife is.  Obsessively, I might add.)

Okay, here’s how you do it.

Make sure you have 1 donut or 0.  Apparently this doesn’t work if you have more than one donut.

Also make sure you’ve got Kwik-E-Mart and Springfield Downs.

Also, also, make sure there’s a Scratch-Off available at the Kwik-E-Mart.

Go to Springfield Downs and start a dog race.  Quickly, while the dog race is on, go to Kwik-E-Mart and scratch the card.  Don’t cash it in, but just keep going.

Your donut score should go into minus.

Once it does that, you can go in and exchange donuts for cash and start purchasing exclusive items to your heart’s content.

This will last until you exit your town or kill the app.

You’ll have to wait six hours before Scratch-Off’s appear, so if you botch it, you’ll have to be patient.  But there you go.  Pimp your Springfields, you lazy bums.

And remember, this is not a hack.  This is not a cheat.  No one is jailbreaking anything.  This is a proper glitch in the game that someone should have caught in quality assurance but didn’t.  And now you stonefaced Springfield zombies can abuse it until you’re blue in the face, or at least until EA realize their horrible mistake and issue an emergency app update.

Counting down, 10 … 9 … 8 …

When I was a kid, I used to get bored and sit around hacking game files.  Now, before you get any ideas, I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the definition, so when I say “hacking,” it mostly amounted to opening game files in hex editors to see if I could replace the in-game text with my own perversions.  Usually, it just made the game corrupt and refuse to start.

But occasionally, I’d get lucky.  And I don’t know if it was me trying to express myself creatively or destructively, but few times have I experienced more personal glee than the times when I could bend a game to my will and make it behave the way I wanted it to.  Even if it just meant forcing the game to play the wrong opening movie or replacing the protagonist’s name with something sophomoric, often of a phallic nature.

And then, every once in a while, you’d get a surprise of your own as you were trawling around garbage characters looking for something resembling English language text.

One such surprise was the little-known British adventure game Universe, which my brother had picked up on a whim, played the first couple of screens of, and quickly resigned to the shelf in his room where mistaken purchases went to collect dust.

Seriously. What is that?

Universe was one of those spectacularly flawed games where the controls were so broken you’d often get stuck on a clipping sprite and the puzzles were so fantastically obtuse that getting anywhere quickly became a frustrating exercise in trial and error.

The spinning asteroid in the first part of the game comes hauntingly to mind.  The game had no opening cinematic or anything; it just spat you onto an asteroid in outer space and sat back, waiting for you to collect a dizzying array of meaningless objects that had been left on the surface and somehow figure out that you were supposed to jump onto a passing asteroid — using inhuman timing, thanks to the bewilderingly complicated interface — and jump off onto a bridge suspended in space leading to some sort of space city.

Once you got that far, everything started running on a timer punishable by insta-death and I quickly gave up in exasperation, never getting any further than the next couple of screens.

So, naturally, a gaming experience of that caliber deserves some tinkering with.  Imagine my surprise when I opened up the game’s .exe file and found this little gem hiding in the code:

Click to read full size

Seems I wasn’t the only one disgruntled by working with Universe.

I have no idea who wrote the above message, but he deserves my everlasting thanks for leaving that piece of commiseration behind for future generations to find.

I’ve been thinking.  (That sound you just heard was everyone else in the world closing their browser window.)  Correct me if I’m wrong on this (read: please don’t). But I’m going to postulate that humans are fundamentally lazy.

Now, when I say “fundamental,” I mean fundamental as in oxygen is fundamental to breathing and water is fundamental to hydrating.  And when I say “lazy,” I don’t mean just lying about, doing nothing: I mean doing something on a whim, whatever you feel like, spur of the moment type thing — ranging from composing a symphony to riding a skateboard to, yes, lying about the couch, picking at your genitals.  ”Responsible-free” is perhaps a better word, but people who have no responsibilities appear lazy to the casual eye, anyway, and it’s a much shorter word … oh, and there probably are no truly “responsible-free” people … so I’m going with “lazy.”

Anyway, my point being: Reset a human — that is, strip it of all environmental influences; like a child, basically — and what you have left is someone who is not required to do anything beyond the basic necessities.

So, what basic necessities?  Why wouldn’t a “responsible-free” person just lie about all day, doing nothing?  Well, there are basic requirements for just maintaining “being alive.”  There’s air, which nature provides, so that doesn’t involve getting up.  There’s water, which nature provides, but you do have to get up to find it.  And then there’s food, which nature provides, but will quickly turn out to be a much more cumbersome task (figuring out what’s “edible” and “fatally poisonous” in the woods is kind of a guessing game, and that’s just the flora we’re talking about).  Finally, there’s procreation — which involves both getting up and then lying down — and your success with that is, arguably, based on how good you are at providing the other three necessities.

To our unevolved ancestors, accessibility to and the proclivity of acquiring food and drink were defining factors in weeding out those unfit for survival. Hey, I’m not being Nietzschian here; we were some right bastards back in the stone age and being “unfit” back then just meant you had smaller muscles than the competition.  It’s a different ball-game today, obviously.  (Well, in most adult worlds … that’s another tirade.)

But, really, the desire to eat and fuck was basically our entire motivation for getting up and actually doing something — beyond just laying about or frolicking.  That’s my theory, anyway.

Nowadays, “lazy” means “not taking care of business.”  Business, in this case, usually means getting up, going to a job of some description, performing said job, and then going back home to restart the cycle.

That’s not necessarily a problem; don’t get me wrong.  It’s just the natural progression of supply and demand — all the way from initial, intrinsic cravings and desires, which paved the way for the invention of currency (i.e. “I’ve got this; you want it; you give me something we’ll pretend has value; then I can go spend that value on something I want”) — and that’s the rut we’re currently buried in.

See, it’s not that I’m advocating being lazy — at least not by the current interpretation.  Being lazy means doing what you want to do, when you want to do it — and, by virtue of our need to remain alive, being free to do so.  The opposite of being lazy, in my view, is being “forced” to do something that enables you to be lazy.  Whether that’s scouring the jungle for edible grubs or putting on a tie and trying not to forget your briefcase in the morning.

My point of all this?  We’ve forgotten how to be lazy.  We’re so caught up in what’s expected of us — you need a job and money, otherwise you don’t eat — that we’ve forgotten to take time out to do what we really want to do.  Or, at least, we’re not doing it enough.  We’re getting stressed and caught up in what’s expected of us, to the point where we’re not free to do what we really want.  That’s not to say your job is preventing you from doing what you want — maybe you, like me, really like your job.  Just like there are things beyond your job, like doing dishes and cleaning the floor after you chuck up that last tequila, that you don’t really want to do, but impede your ability to.

Now, if you’re saying, at this point: “I’m not lazy.  I love my job.  I can’t sit still; I have to be out there, doing stuff, or I lose my shit,” then … cool.  Thanks for missing my point.

I just think we’d all be a bit happier and a bit less stressed if we worked out what’s really necessary to us being happy and discard what the rest of the world has been telling us is necessary.  And — in the case of those things that we can’t change, like the fact that we’re all hopelessly dependent on these ridiculous monetary constructions we’ve established — breaking down and rebuilding what isn’t working.

Hell, that, too, involves getting up — but it also means that lying back down and being lazy will be all the sweeter.