In the Super Mario Bros. series, Mario is known for his jumping ability, he can easily jump twice his own body height if he gets a running start.

But, interestingly, he can jump even higher given the right circumstances.

First, find a Super Mushroom. A fire flower would work, but they don't move, so the effect isn't as obvious. Starmen won't work at all.

Then jump so that you're coming down as you collect the power up.

While the powering up animation is playing continue to hold the jump button. Once the animation stops animating, you'll jump again!

I haven't really found very many uses for this tip, other than showing off, but maybe you can.

I mentioned the other day that Double Dragon had its fair share of glitches and oddities, I wasn't kidding, the game's chock full of them. Here's another one.

Toward the end of Mission 1 you see this screen.

You see those vertical... things on the right-hand side? Position yourself between them and press Up on the control pad. Then, behold!

You start moving up the wall!

To get down, you can climb back down by pressing Down (duh), you can press Left or Right to magically reappear back at the bottom, or you can press an attack button to fall down in a comically tragic fashion.

The third choice is my preference.

There's really no other way to say it, Adventure Island is tough. Due in no small part to the enemies that are placed in the most inconvenient spots imaginable. Though, you do get a skateboard (with helmet!)

Even worse is that you get a really small amount of lives to work your way through eight islands, each tougher than the last. Use them all up and...

It'd be pretty sweet, then, if you could continue somehow.

And you can! But not without some effort.

First, make your way to the end of Stage One. Specifically here.

Then walk over to the edge of the cliff and jump. Done right, you'll make an egg appear.

Crack open the egg (being careful to not knock it off into the abyss) and you'll find the Hudson Bee.

Collect the bee and when you get to the Game Over screen and are booted back to the title screen hold Right and press Start.

Boom! Continue!

And this works until you forget to do it and accidentally start the game over or you turn the game off.

Mega Man's jump in Mega Man 3 is pretty much the same as it is in all of the Mega Man games, pretty pathetic:

This is pretty inconvenient since the boss robots, and most of the other robots in the game for that matter, are far more maneuverable than you are and can jump to nearly the top of the screen. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could do the same?

Well, hang on to your headwear.

If you plug in a second controller and have someone hold down Right on the control pad, suddenly Mega Man can jump much higher. How high? This high!

Even better is that if you fall into a pit, as long as the Right arrow is being held you can just jump back out.

Just a note, I couldn't get this to work in the Mega Man Anniversary Collection version of the game. It's old-school NES version only, I'm afraid.

A Boy and His Blob consists of two parts: wandering around caves collecting treasure, and wandering around an alien planet trying to avoid killer candy and treats. You can go to the planet pretty well any time you want to, but if you haven't gotten the bonus bag of jellybeans from the cave network you don't have the necessary items to finish the game. Tricky.

The problem with the Blob's home planet, though, is that everything's super-deadly and real tough to avoid, mainly because of the boy's particularly loose controls.

But he has a secret weapon.

On the first screen when you land on Blobolonia, start chucking jellybeans toward the left side of the screen.

It's kind of hard to get the timing right, but you kind of want to throw the bean right when you touch the edge of the screen. If you do it right, you'll briefly catch a glimpse off the last boss room. Once that happens, all of the enemies on the entire planet (except for the boss himself) will vanish.

Which makes that part pretty much as easy as it can be.

I'm not very good at Captain Skyhawk. I'd like to say that it's because I could never find it at my local video game store, and thus wasn't able to spend much time with it... So I will.

But, assuming you do find it and decide to play it, you have to take the good Captain through a series of missions, each more impossible than the last.

But if you get bored doing the same mission over and over again because you're too poor of a pilot for this game, you do have one recourse... other than turning off the game.

Just plug in a second controller and press Up + B. Once that happens, you win the mission!

You don't get any points or money to purchase armaments, but if you planned on skipping the next stage anyway, who cares?

Since it's not the 90s any more, I don't know if it's still time for Klax, but I still enjoy it on occasion. You have a bin and have to sort colored tiles into it in such a way that three or more of the same color line up horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. You get bonuses for chain reactions and such, and for clearing more than three tiles at once.

The biggest clear, it would stand to reason, would be one that was diagonal from each corner and meeting in the middle, hence the 'Big X'.

It's actually kind of tough to set up one of these things, since you pretty much have to work on it from the beginning of a wave, and then not mess things up by getting a clear that collapses one side of the X, but it's worth lots of points if you can pull it off.

And once you get so far in the game, you'll have to create one to proceed anyway, so might as well get some practice in early.

The Simpsons arcade game is just weird, and not really related to the show very well. Of all things, you have to rescue Maggie from Mr. Smithers, who had just robbed a jewelry store.

But, that's what we have to work with, so we'll deal with it.

You play the game as your Simpson of choice and anyone else around the machine does the same.

You run along, beating the armies of identical twins, until you get to the end of the stage, then you fight the boss character, and then go on to the next stage. No surprises there.

However, the stages get pretty tough after a while, mostly because the amount of enemies you have to deal with at once gets pretty ridiculous.

But you have a secret weapon in your arsenal.

If you have a friend, or some random guy decided to play this game with you, you can make your characters do super-powered double-team moves. The trick is that you have to get them standing next to (almost on top of) each other to pull them off.

Once you get them standing close, just let go of the joysticks and all the buttons for a couple of seconds. Then someone will say a catchphrase and begin the attack.

It doesn't last too long, probably because it's a bit more useful than your regular punches, kicks, and vacuum cleaner shots, but you can do it any time you want... assuming you can get to a safe spot for a couple of seconds.

And this works with any combination of two characters you happen to have, so go nuts.

For such a small, short game, Double Dragon sure has its share of glitches and oddities.

Like this drum in Mission 1.

If you pick it up

Walk over to the nearest building (before it's been scrolled off the screen) and walk diagonally-up-right at the corner, you kind of go 'inside' it.

Once there, toss your drum and behold!

It glitches out and flies up and off the screen, possibly into space.

Too bad that's the only drum in the whole game.

All week we've been talking about how to squeeze some extra playing time out of your portable gaming systems. And one thing that modern portable systems have in common is their rechargeable batteries. Rechargeable batteries are great in most cases... except when you don't have any convenient way to plug them to recharge.

That's why I keep handy my old Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, and my original taco-shaped Game Boy Advance. They run on easily-replaceable batteries.

In a power-outage situation, you're likely going to have access to batteries of some sort, and popping out two AA's and then popping in two more will get you back up and gaming at full power in less than a minute, whereas if you have to recharge your batteries, it can take as long as 4 hours to get them back up to speed.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.