Years ago, I was playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a lot. As the game was quite hard, I died often and every death resulted in huge loading times. After hours of game play I found out that every load was showing the exact same animation and took about the same time to load.
I browsed the game folder and found a video file with the exact same animation. Replaced it with a 1 second video file and guess what, it worked. Never felt more like a hacker again.
Heh, nice. Reminds me of 13 y/o me and hacking a copy of a shareware CGA strip poker on a 5.25" floppy disk. What'd I do? The revealing images of the digital strippers were numbered 0.bmp up to 5.bmp. This was in DOS before we had windows. I renamed the files so their numbers were backwards 5 to 0 4 to 1 and so on. Instant reverse-strip poker and a viscerally satisfied teen :)
I try to do that as much as I can with every game I can get away with it on. Nothing worse than 2 minutes of animated logos every time you start the game, so sometimes you can delete them and sometimes you can replace them with shorter clips and really speed up the game's load time.
