Doubtlessly, "Balloon Invasion" is the hardest badge game to hack on Kongregate to date, however its content is far less excellent when comparing with the paranoiac anti-hacking mechanism.
Thumb Tack Badge (easy – 5 points)
Complete any map on any difficulty.
There is no technique for this game - just click-click-click like an idiot till the end and you win.
It was very simple to do this with Cheat Engine when the game was first out:
But last I checked it, the author has made it into a root variable, probably since version 1.2 - the guy definitely checks around some major hacking communities.
Huge Manatee Badge (medium – 15 points)
Defeat the first boss on any difficulty.
If you are still wondering what the hell Greggy's been shitting about:
You can unlock the first secret level if your first five missions are all 5 stars, and completing that secret level gives you the badge as well. It's easier than the boss level.
Army of Lots Badge (hard – 30 points)
A commander is only as good as his units! Make heavy use of support reinforcements.
Not very hard either; you should be able to fulfill at least one of the three requirements for each boss level.
► Cheat
But if you want to save some fucking time, you can do this inside the Fuel of War mode and modify their costs to something like 10, spamming the sky with lots of these sperm-like reinforcements all you like.
Thunderous OPEC Guardian Badge (impossible – 60 points)
Completely rock.
Okay, so here finally comes the main point.
Some real asshole thought up a great idea of creating a badge that is worth of a precious amount of 200+ hours. 200+ precious hours of click-click-click and sperm-sperm-sperm. If you seriously enjoy doing this, I advice you to seek out a psychiatrist now immediately before it's too fucking late.
"Balloon Invasion", in spite of its boring gameplay, utilizes heavy countermeasures against hacking and cheating; there is first the root variable method against Cheat Engine, then the checksum method against .sol Editor, with commercial-level encryption that is yet decompilable. The encrypted ActionScript makes the usage of Katana or Niflheim difficult, and reverse engineering of the checksum calculation near impossible.
Fortunately, NightEternal - the creator of Muspell and Niflheim - eventually found us a method that defeats the evil checksum trick. The basic concept is, when the game is loading up a save, it uses various data inside the save to produce a "correct" checksum, to be compared with the checksum inside the save. Hence if we exchange the data inside the .sol file with any value we like, and have it load up by the game, for a single moment, the "correct" checksum that will make our hacked save works should exist inside somewhere of our RAM, only to be washed away a few instants later. With proper assembly language knowledge, however, it is possible to break the process and retrieve this "correct" checksum for our use.
If you are seasoned with assembly language, you may want to download this fine instruction written by NightEternal:
Otherwise, you can download an already tampered .sol file directly, also made by NightEternal:
Although you will find yourself still having to waste somewhat 150+ minutes to complete the two last levels, it's certainly far better than 200+ hours.
Rating
Conclusively, "Balloon Invasion" is purely a shitty horrible nightmare. You give nothing other than 200+ hours of sperms fighting balloons, and you even don't let people play shit in their own way. The entertainment value is no wonder a plain and simple zero.
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