Windows 7 has some great games (by Microsoft’s standards, anyway), with a lot of interesting options. But the standard programs display only a fraction of what’s available, and enabling a hidden “Debug” menu can give you access to a variety of new cheats, interface tweaks and other settings.

If you’re a chess novice, for instance, you can set Chess Titans to play itself while you watch and try to anticipate each move. Interface options allow you to rotate the board, display different views, and more. Hearts also has a built-in “autoplay” option, and the new settings mean you can play the game yourself but use the “Show Hands” option to cheat by peeking at your opponents cards.

Setting this up manually can be a little complicated, unfortunately (it’s far more than just a Registry tweak – you have to edit the program MUI file in Resource Hacker). But if you prefer an easy life then you could always download Windows Game Tweaker, a new release from door2windows, which will enable the debug menus for you with a click.

All the Windows games have a hidden "Debug" menu, but Game Tweaker can reveal this in a click

The program is portable, so there’s no installation required, no adware to avoid, or other hassles. Just download, unzip and launch it.

And operation isn’t exactly difficult, either. All you have to do is select the games where you’d like to see the Debug menu, click Enable, then restart your PC to see the changes.

There is one potential problem, in that this setting doesn’t appear to be localised. And so turning on Debug for a particular game will cause all of its text to be displayed in English, regardless of the language used in your Windows installation.

If this is a major issue you can always disable the menu later to restore the original language, though. And so, on balance, if you regularly play the Windows 7 games then it’s worth using the Windows Game Tweaker to see exactly what other hidden options might be available.