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If you're a writer for a leading game cartridge clip and your deadline to look back a 40-hour-crippled is a day away, how do you deal? The solution: Sometimes, you cheat.

Here at The Escapist, we consume our own ism and method keister courageous reviews, and it's something we're very proud of. But this process demands flexibility, something that other sites – and peculiarly print magazines – Don't have. Thus if reviewers have a 40-hour halting in their men to evaluate and only 10 hours in which to do it, how the underworl can buoy they experience the highlights? Equally John the Divin Szczepaniak writes in Issue 243 of The Escapist, sometimes they wealthy person to cheat.

So when the editor program of a single-format magazine in the stall next to mine asked if I wanted some freelance process, I wasn't going to say nary. He had Rainbow Six: Vegas on the Xbox 360 procurable, but it had to be four pages and the deadline was in less than 48 hours. I estimated that if I could hold ou along five hours kip a night and take meals while playing Rainbow Six, I'd have 12 hours across two days to play the game in my sovereign time, take screenshots and write the review. But I had one super in the hole: Along with the game and the debug console, the editor also two-handed me a torn quarrel of paper with a code to unlock debug menus allowing full customization of weapons, level select options and more.

This isn't an unusual occurrence. Pre-release copies sent in by publishers will occasionally hold debug options to make navigating the game easier. Need invincibility and infinite ammo? No job! Just get to certain the coverage is positive and the screenshots look good, the publishers always asked. Publishers encourage this typecast of cheating, because they assume't want reviews of their multi-million-dollar blockbuster to describe only the heavy areas and sport bland, uninteresting screenshots. For Rainbow Sextet: Vegas, Ubisoft flew journalists to Vegas for an every-expenses-paid holiday just to guarantee massive, positive previews. With so much already invested, Ubisoft certainly didn't want the follow-up reviews to look poor.

Cheating Crataegus oxycantha help you project more of a game than playing it usually, but take in you actually experienced it? To read Thomas More or so one of game reviewing's secrets, check come out "Unfair the System" in Issue 243 of The Escapist.