How to hack games that rely on variable states?

[TheVine]

If I want to find a collision or clipping exploit I look for something like lives or any number that changes when you get hit, find what writes to it, break and trace to find all the calls, and look for the first spot is that causes a breakpoint when you get hit, then disable it.

But in some games once I do the break and trace, when I start looking for things that only trigger when hit, it's like everything in the stack trace is always running, so everything always causes breaks. The line that writes to the lives address is always running, but not always pointing to lives.

I can't break and trace now because instead of the call stack mattering, it's the state of the registers. Is my only option going through the going backwards very slowly and looking for commands that create the target address for lives?

[Starcraster]

Cheat engine has conditional breakpoints. You can trigger a break only when a particular register is equal to a certain value. So set the condition to break only when the register containing address is equal to a particular value.