One of the neat things about Uniracers is that you can rename any of the racers to pretty much anything you want to.

But occasionally you'll put in a perfectly fine name only to have it rejected as being 'not cool enough'

Through some testing, I was able to determine that the game uses a rudimentary check for... we'll call them 'off-color' words, and if it finds them anywhere in the name you've typed in, either for the individual unis or for teams, then it gets rejected.

I can't provide a list of all the words it rejects, though. You're on your own for that.

Play enough Super Mario World and you'll eventually make your way to the Special area where eight fairly tough levels with kind of silly names await you.

But if you sit at the map screen long enough, for several minutes, you might notice the music changes to something that sounds oddly familiar, the theme from the first game!

Don't have access to a save file close enough to the Special area? Or don't have a Super NES within arm's length? That's OK, I've prepared a sample for you right here in mp3 form.

Seicross is one of those games that tests your ability to play by being endless and going until you can't go any more.

But that doesn't mean that your game ever has to end.

If you go to the title screen

And on Controller 2 hold Left + A + B

while simultaneously pressing Up, Up, Down, Down, Start on Controller 1 (this part may require more hands than you have, you might consider asking for help)

When you start the game, your bike will be uncrashable!

Which means you could just go to bed and wake up the next morning to a high score and some ridiculous amount of progress

But there's no way I know of to actually end the game, short of pressing the Power or Reset buttons.

Once you finally make it to the end of Nightshade, you have to deal with the evil mastermind who's responsible for starting the mess, Waldo P. Schmeer, a.k.a. Sutekh. He really likes to hear himself talk.

You can use this to your advantage. Before you engage him, TALK to him

to ask him the question you're probably asking yourself in real life.

Which he'll actually answer

Though, to be honest, I found the Staff of Ra to be all but useless when I was fighting him. A better technique was to duck in the center of the room and punch him when he teleports in close.

I never was really very good that the Adventure Island games, but I had some tools to help me see some of the later parts of the games anyway.

Like in the third one. I'd go to the title screen

Then press Down, Up, Left, Right, B, A, B, A on Controller 1, which would take me to the Stage Select screen

And, as an added bonus, I'd get some powerups to help.

Which is good, because those later levels are pretty tough.

The NES version of Rampage is a little more limiting than the arcade version. You still have a ton of cities to level, but you only have two continues (e.g. three lives) to go through them all, where in the arcade you could just keep feeding the machine quarters until you made as much progress as you wanted.

So what do you do?

Any time you run out of life, your character will shrink back down to human form and slowly work their way off screen.

Before they get there, if you hit the B button on your controller, they get their life bar back, and regain their former stature.

And you can do this as often as you need to, as long as your character didn't shuffle off the screen it still counts as the same life. So you can make it through all 128 days pretty easily.

But it will still take a while to do that.

I admit, I've never actually made it all the way through Crystalis, it just kind of fell off my radar when the NES was the Big Thing(tm). But that doesn't mean I didn't get to see some of the sights the game has to offer.

When I finally did get my hands on it, I held down the A + B buttons on controller 1, and then started tapping A on controller 2 because every time I did, the screen would fade

and I would warp to another section of the game.

The only problem was that I typically wasn't prepared for the part of the game I happened into, so more often than not, I'd end up seeing this soon after

But it was an interesting way to get a preview of what lied ahead.

I like puzzle games, but there are a few that I'm just no good at, like Palamedes. My brain just doesn't work in a way that this game wants it to.

But that's OK. If I want to see the ending of it (yeah, it has an ending), all I need to do is to go to the title screen and hold Right + A on Controller 2 and press Start on Controller 1. Doing that brings up a menu

Where I get to pick which ending that I want to see (one for each game mode)

And I didn't even have to strain my brain to do it. Double Win(tm)!

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!

Like a lot of the SimWhatever games, part of the experience is constructing a budget and slowly making money, which means that for a good chunk of the game you're going to have to deal with some pretty low cash flow, and that means that you won't be able to buy much of the fun stuff.

So, what to do? Do you plan your budget carefully, expand your course slowly, make smart investments, and watch as your pile of cash slowly but surely rises?

Yeah, you could do that, or you could hold down the Left Shift button and press the =/+ button on your keyboard. Every time you press it, you get 10,000 Simoleans. Do it enough times (or hold it in, if you're into that kind of thing) and you can rocket your cash flow up to some pretty ridiculous levels

Which means that you can do pretty much anything you want, now that you've been freed from the restraints of a 'budget'.

So go nuts!