If you've played much pinball, you're familiar with the concept of TILT. If by some chance you don't know what that is, it's bump and shake the pinball machine too much and the playfield goes dead, costing you your ball.

But Pinball Quest seems to have forgotten to add this little mechanic.

You can use the Right arrow and the B button to shake the machine all you want, and the game won't care in the slightest.

Which is kind of tough to show in picture form, but trust me. I couldn't get any of the tables to tilt. So go nuts.

In the NES Teenaga Mutant Ninja Turtles game, you occasionally come across some sub-weapons. Most of them aren't really that useful, except for the Boomerang. The Boomerang is useful because if you manage to catch them after they're thrown, then you can use them again.

You can also use this property to your advantage.

First, have a Turtle with Boomerangs throw a few.

Then, before they come back, switch Turtles and have someone else catch them.

You could even transfer all of them to another Turtle with this method if you wanted to.

Pretty early in A Boy And His Blob you come across a couple of screens where Death in the form of these brown things rain down from the top of the screen. Most guides will tell you to use the Vanilla jellybean and use the Umbrella to protect yourself. But the Boy slips and slides around so much when you let off the cross-pad that I usually end up getting hit anyway.

So what I like to do is to use the Cola Jellybean instead to turn the Blob into a bubble.

That way it's impossible for me to get hit, since I'm protected on all sides.

And, yeah, you move a little slower, but I'd say that's a fair trade.

Spy vs Spy is kind of an underrated game (if you're playing against another person, that is). You have to take your spy of choice around a building, setting booby traps and searching around to find some spy-related stuff, put the stuff in a briefcase, and then hightail it out of the building.

One of the items you collect is a briefcase to stash your stuff in.

But it has an interesting secondary property. When you pick up the case, you get your health restored. So, after you've been in a fight with the other Spy, you can take the case and hide it inside something

And then get it back out for a quick health refill

Just be careful that you don't stick it behind something that's been booby trapped.

A couple of times in Nightshade you encounter these mummies

Which are fairly annoying since they have zero health. Why is that annoying? Mostly because you can punch and kick the things all day long and you can't get rid of 'em.

So what do you do?

Well, it turns out that there are two ways to deal with them.

1. You could use the Staff of Ra to fire a fireball at it. But you won't get that until late in the game. Or

2. You can jump behind it and get really close, then punch it three times to do the ol' uppercut. Turns out that the mummies are weak to an uppercut to the back of the head

In fact, it just takes one.

In several of the castles in Zelda II, you run across these things that look like skulls in bubbles, which are called, shockingly, Bubbles.

They're particularly nasty because they bounce around all over the place, and when they hit you they drain your life and your magic. You can hit them, and they stop moving long enough for you to run past.

But what happens if you keep on hitting them. A lot? A whole lot?

They're defeated for 50 experience points! Which at the beginning of the game is a whole lot.

But when your attack is at level one, it takes lots of hits to kill the things. I stopped counting at 200 swings. So you'll have to determine whether the tradeoff is worth it to you.

When you finally get to Dr. Wily's castle in Mega Man 2, you get stymied by these floors that look solid, but you fall right through them. They're kind of tough to deal with until you remember that you have a (not so) secret weapon: the Bubble Lead.

The Bubble Lead follows the ground's contours (but never goes up, always down), so all you have to do is to fire one

and watch where it falls through the floor

Which makes it much easier to tell where the intangible blocks are, instead of trying to rely on your memory.

Uniracers is kind of odd. You have to take your living unicycle through a series of races and stunt tracks because that's apparently what living unicycles do.

During the stunt tracks, you get points for doing a variety of tricks, but there are a couple that aren't listed in the manual anywhere, the so-called 'Mega' tricks.

The first one is the Head Bounce. While standing still, jump up, press and hold the X button so that you bounce a couple of times

Then let go. Boom! Head Bounce

The second one is a little tougher to do. You have to get some significant air, then press the X button, but release it when you're halfway turned

Then press X again to turn back, which will give you a Tabletop.

Now, you might notice that on your scoring screen, there's a spot for four Mega tricks, even though I've only shown you two.

And I can't find the article to source this, but the reason is that there's four spots for tricks, and only two tricks is because otherwise the scoring screen would have looked funny, like there was something missing.

So don't go trying to find tricks that don't exist, mmkay?

A while back I showed you a method that you could use to get all the 1UPs you wanted in Super Mario Bros. 3 that used a bouncing shell. Fast forward a few years and the same method makes a comeback in one of the sequels.

First, make your way to Stage 4-1 called "GO! GO! MARIO!!". It's one of the few stages that actually has Koopas in it.

Then, grab a Koopa shell (they're all over the place) and make your way to this pipe formation.

Spit the shell to the left, so it bounces between the pipes. Shy Guys will keep coming out of the leftmost pipe and jumping down to meet their doom. And eventually:

1UP! Just remember: If you've got the maximum amount of Eggs, nothing will come out of the pipe, so you have to throw one (or more) away.

And, since there's no time limit, you can stay here as long as you want, racking up lives.

It is kind of annoying that you don't get to do this until about halfway through the game, but it does get pretty tough from here on in. So you're going to need all the help you can get.

Dr. Mario, for the two or three of you that haven't played it, is a game about matching multicolored capsules to eliminate viruses. Basically, the gist is that you line up four segments of one color and they disappear.

Now when I see most people playing this game they only seem to get half of it. They do pretty well making vertical clears.

But for some reason it doesn't seem to 'click' with them that clears can also be made horizontally

But they totally can!

And I know some of you Dr. Mario vets are going 'Well, duh!', but hey, beginners need some love, too.