Pro Tip of the Day

I'm pretty sure you all know about the 'All Your Base' thing. It's old and played out at this point, so I'm really not going to get too far into it here.

So I'd like to draw your attention to another game that I might not have the chops to become the next 'All Your Base', but is still loaded with weird typos and mistranslations:

Beast Wrestler is a game about big ol' monsters that you have to make wrestle each other in some kind of bizarro wrestling match. The hook, I guess, is that at certain points you can take monsters that you've defeated and combine them with your current monster to make one that is possibly stronger than before. In fact, the game can explain it better than I can:

Which seems pretty straightforward... until your monster sustains heavy damage, that is

Then you're taken to my favorite typo in the whole game

A screen where they have misspelled the word 'two'.

I still crack a grin every time.

Toward the beginning of James Pond 2, you'll find a group of collectibles laid out as such:

Not too exciting, right?

But!

If you collect them in this order:

Cake
Hammer
Earth
Apple
Tap (at least, I'm pretty sure it's a Tap... like a spigot)

(the first letters of which conveniently spells out the word 'CHEAT'), you become invincible... for several minutes, in fact. I was able to clear out two whole areas and part of a third before it wore off. Just don't get too complacent, it will wear off without much of a warning.

Make no mistake, Kid Chameleon is long, difficult, and hates you. But if you've played enough of it and you want to check out what the last boss is like, then I have some good news.

First, make your way to the end of Blue Lake Woods 2 (the second stage of the game) and you'll see these P blocks over the flag.

Hop on top of them and make your way to the last one just over the flag. While there, press Down + Right + Jump + 'Special' all at the same time. Done right the stage will end and you'll have an express ticket to Plethora, the final boss

He's pretty tough to defeat, but if you run out of continues, it's pretty easy to get back and try it again.

Good luck!

This one's kind of fun.

In Golden Axe 2, if you go to the Options screen and set the type of magic to Special

Then play the game normally until you come to a boss. When the music changes, hold in the A button (or whatever button you have designated for Magic

Don't let it go until the battle's over and the screen transitions to black. Then, when you go to the bonus stage, don't press any buttons at all.

It'll kind of look like the bonus stage will go on forever until you thwack the enemies walking around, but it will eventually end.

When you start the next stage, your character will immediately unleash a magical attack

After which, you'll see that your stockpile of magic books has suddenly grown enormous!

If you use more than your character's normal maximum, you can occasionally use other characters' spells

But, if you use too many, the game will freeze, so staying within your characters' limits is probably for the best.

Despite playing a lot of Toejam & Earl, I was never actually able to finish off the game. Heck, I was never even close. That's why, when I want to see the ending, I pause the game (usually at the beginning to make things way easier)

Then I press

Up + A + B + C, Right + A, Down + B, Left + C

which makes a 'ding' sound, and doesn't appear to do much until you go to the next stage. The next stage will have a ship part on it, collect it and...

Bam! It's the last piece!

Collect it and it's Ending Sequence for you!

Comix Zone is tough, partially because you have one chance to get through the whole game, which means that you're going to be seeing this a lot:

So you might be tempted to go to the Jukebox

And you might be tempted to play the songs (by pressing the C button) in the following order:

3, 12, 17, 2 , 2, 10, 2, 7, 7, 11

And then you'll hear your character yell "Oh yeah!".

Start the game and you'll discover that you now have infinite health!

Which knocks out some of the challenge, true, but you can still die from falling in a pit or any of the other Instadeath(tm) methods in the game.

So it's not a total cakewalk.

The Sonic games always start out easy enough, but they ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly, and I usually peter out after about four or five Zones.

But what if you want to see the rest of the game without working for it? Easy!

First, go to the Options screen.

Then play the sounds in the Sound Test in this order: 19, 65, 09, 17.

Then hold C and press Start to go back to the title screen, and once there hold A and press Start. The result?

A menu that lets you decide where you want to start the game!

Which is very handy if you're lazy (like me).

Occasionally you'll run into instructions for a few glitches for your favorite games (typically NES games) that require you to do something that your operations manual (you totally read that, right?) expressly told you not to do: to partially remove the cartridge from the system while it's powered on. I don't like these glitches for a number of reasons.

First, removing (or inserting, for that matter) a cartridge while your system is on has the potential to damage your system, your cartridge, or both (admittedly kind of rare, but still possible). Consoles typically aren't designed for hot-swapping.

Secondly, the results are completely unpredictable. Most of the time you're just going to freeze the game and that'll be the end of it, but occasionally something will happen. Your character will gain superpowers or (more likely) your inventory of special items will be completely scrambled. And, if you can continue, you're going to have lots of in-game stuff to play around with... maybe. Which will be great, until you try to do the trick again which brings me to:

Thirdly, the trick is nigh unrepeatable. Since you're working with trying to get a moderately complex program to glitch out by partially removing it from its system while it's running, there's almost no chance that you can repeat the glitch with any kind of regularity. I'm sure that minutes after this goes live I'm going to get inundated with emails telling me how wrong I am, but the point stands. The effects are essentially random.

So, potential hardware damage combined with unreliable and unrepeatable results? Yeah, I'll stick to programming errors and easter eggs, thanks.