Video Game Cheaters (and the Web Sites that Love Them)

I love video games, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the best at them. I love No More Heroes to pieces, but the third boss Shinobu kept kicking my butt inside out. I enjoy The Conduit, but the aliens kept gunning me down at the Jefferson Memorial. I've also wanted to play through all of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, but I kept running out of the necessary ammo during the last boss fight at the end of the Resident Evil 0 section of the game.

The repeated losses at the Umbrella Chronicles game was particularly harsh for me; even though I'm not a big Resident Evil fan, I love rail shooters where I can mow down endless waves of zombies. I have other horror rail shooters for Wii and I've completed all of them--the awesome Dead Space: Extraction, the over-the-top and also awesome House of the Dead: Overkill, and the arcade ports of House of the Dead 2 and 3--so being unable to complete Umbrella Chronicles stood out like a sore thumb. Furthermore, Umbrella Chronicles lets you enjoy three of the Resident Evil games (0, 1, and 3) without having to experience the painfully clunky game play mechanics of each in their original versions--how could anyone not like this game?

I kept trying to find cheat codes which would allow me to complete Umbrella Chronicles, but to no avail. Little did I know that cheat codes are so 90s; it turned out what I really needed was to find a way to get a completed Umbrella Chronicles game save file onto my Wii system. But how?

Enter Wii Save. As far as I can tell, this is the only site of its kind, where avid Wii game players finish games and then post their completed game save files for others to download for free. Some games have more save files than others (for example, The Conduit only has one file and according to the comments posted for it, it's a bit wonky), and the files cover multiple regions. I uploaded a file for Umbrella Chronicles for the US, and I'm well on my way to finishing the game. One of the bonuses you get for completing the entire game is a full range of weapons and unlimited ammo for each; in short, having this completed game save file turned Umbrella Chronicles from an unbeatable game (at least at my skill level) to a virtual Disneyland for impatient, trigger-happy zombie killers like me. Granted, it's neither the head-popping bloodbath that is Overkill nor does it involve the strategic dismemberment of Extraction, but Umbrella Chronicles is still great to play.

So, if you want to cheat at your favorite-but-tough-as-nails Wii game just to get your money's worth out of it, Wii Save is the place for you.