Mario Kart 64 debuted one of the more useful items in the Mario Kart universe, the Blue Shell. The Blue Shell seeks out and blows up the person who's in first place. So, if you're in first place they're not too helpful, I guess.

But, they're kind of powerful, so to offset that, they're kind of rare. But, wouldn't it be nice if you could get them any time you wanted?

Well, then good news for you!

Certain tracks have mystery blocks that contain these missiles pretty well all the time, but the thing is you have to work a little harder to get at them.

Take Luigi's Raceway, for example. There's this block hanging from a giant balloon (not so giant in this picture, but it's hard to get a decent picture of it)

Your timing has to be pretty good, but if you can hit it...

Blue shell for you!

Just don't shoot it if you're already in first place... that's not recommended.

Unless you're so far in the lead that you can afford to take a hit like that and still win the race. Of course, then you're being a jerk... which is kind of fun sometimes.

Diablo II is kind of a fun game and everything, but a little on the long side. But what if, after playing through the game a time or two that you just wanted to experience a certain part of the game, or wanted to try out one of the other classes without actually building it up from the ground?

Good news for you, then, there is!

First, update your copy of Diablo II to at least version 1.10. Just connect to Battle.Net and and you'll be in great shape. Then get out of you game and find your Diablo II shortcut. Right-click on it and select 'Properties'. Now modify the contents to the right of the Target field (after the quotes) so that there's a dash, the word 'act' and a number, all run together. So, if you want to start in Act 5, you'd append '-act5' after the quotes, and without the quotes.

Then start up the game and create a new character.

Enter the game and behold!

You're now at the beginning of the act you chose, your character's an an appropriate level, and you have all the skill points you need to spec your character any way you want.

What else could you ask for?

The New Tetris is pretty much your run of the mill Tetris with some neat additions, which we'll get into another day. Today, we'll talk about an interesting little Easter Egg.

First, go to the Audio screen and change the Music Mode to Choose, and the Song to Haluci.

Then go to single player and pick 'New Name', and make your name 'HALUCI' (without quotes, of course)..

Press OK, and... The colors!

It'll swirl and pulsate to the music until you decide to reset the machine.

In Super Mario 64, Mario has a new power meter with eight wedges. On land, when he gets damaged, wedges are removed, and when he collects coins, the wedges are restored. Underwater works mostly the same way, except health is removed as Mario is holding his breath, and is restored when he takes a breath. It just so happens that you can use this mechanic to your advantage. First, injure Mario as much as you want.

Then, find some water. Hop in and get Mario positioned so that he's treading water with his head just above the surface and blam!

Full health!

Today's pro tip is an oldie but a goodie (ha!).

A few days ago I made reference to a fairly well known trick that you just can't do in the arcade: how to get all the 1ups you want in the original Super Mario Bros. But, the game came out in 1985, which means that if you're younger than 23, this game came out before you were born. Add to that the Wii's Virtual Console service which lets you download and play these relics (*cough*), we've got a lot of new gamers who probably haven't wasted their childhoods spent lots of quality time practicing this game and might not know about it.

Okay, first make your way to 3-1. Specifically, the end where you see some koopas coming down the staircase. You'll need to make sure that you're either Super or Fiery.

Get rid of the first koopa, he just gets in the way.

Then try to time it so that you hit the second one so that it's just about halfway down the step above you.

Done right, and you'll know when you've done it right, you'll just keep bouncing off the shell, and eventually start racking up 1ups.

You can keep on going on for as long as you want this way, and your lives remaining display will get a little wonky.

A word of caution, though. If you manage to get over 127 lives and then lose one, it's game over. It's a glitch, so there's really not much you can do about that.

Play Super Mario Bros. 3 enough and you'll eventually come across ships loaded with coins. They take the place of Hammer Bros. on some of the overworld maps. But where do they come from? What triggers them? Good news for you, it's not random.

Let's take a look at the typical end of stage area.

Looks pretty normal, right? But there are five things to take note of here

• Item 1: You have to be at the end of the stage, and get a card. The card you get doesn't matter
• Item 2: You have to be in World 1, 3, 5, or 6. You can't do this in World 7 because there aren't any Hammer Bros. there
• Item 3: Your tens digit of your score, note this
• Item 4: Your coin count has to be a multiple of 11, but can't be zeros, and the digits have to match the tens digit of your score
• Item 5: Your time when you get the card has to be an even number. Okay, that's not strictly true, but without going into details that involve math, just make it even

Once you have all these criteria met, the next time you go to the map screen one of the Hammer Bros. (if there are any left) will turn into a ship loaded with coins.

Hop on in and go to town. It's totally possible to get all the coins on the ship, and the hidden 1-up at the end.

Bookworm Adventures is a game where you spell words to defeat enemies. It's a perfect game for sesquipedalian linguiphiles to strut their stuff.

But suppose you don't feel much like thinking on a particular day. Or that you don't know how to spell very many big words. Well... then you've got a problem.

Now, you could just think about what to spell, since there's no time limit or anything, or you could visit Anagrammer.

Anagrammer is a site that lets you put in up to 16 letters (convenient) and it spits out all the words it can find that can be made with the junk you put in.

Yeah, that one was kind of easy, but there are lots of combinations that yield words that I didn't even know existed... like 'antiphonary'.

Now, using that site to progress through the game is definitely cheating, and not nearly as satisfying as staring at the screen for 15 minutes and breaking out with some gigantic polysyllabic onslaught, but as a relief to use after staring at the screen for 30 minutes or more with your brain almost completely locked up... well, then it's kind of nice.

Killer Instinct has a kind of convoluted combo system, which we'll talk about in depth another day. You can, with skill, string together lots of moves to just pummel your opponent senseless for several seconds.

Good thing, then, that there's a method to break the combos in mid-stream. A move that everyone has called, oddly enough, a 'combo breaker'. The breaker is different for each character, but it's normally just one of their regular moves done at the right time, and with the right button.

Okay, at its basic form, a combo consists of an opening move (the Opener), an autodouble (for a couple more hits), and then a finisher for a few more hits and the icing on the cake.

Problem is, though, that to break the combo you have to have timing and a pretty deep understanding of each character's moves.

Timing. You have to do your breaker during the autodouble portion of the combo (or the linker stage, but that's another pro tip). Not too tough, right? Just have to learn to recognize where the opening move ends and the next couple of hits start. Now, the 'intimate knowledge' part comes in. You have to recognize whether the autodouble was initiated with a weak, medium, or strong button, and press the corresponding button to break the combo. Weak breaks medium, medium breaks strong, and strong breaks weak.

But that's a whole lot of memorization, attentiveness, and, *gasp*, work!

Turns out that there's a slightly easier way.

On the 'Vs.' screen (that shows the matchup) press Down + Start and you'll hear this sound.

Then, the combo breakers get way easier. Now you can do them with any strength button you want. Though you still have to get the timing down.

But once you get that down, you're in great shape.

Oh, and it works in the arcade version, too.

There was a time where arcades were just lousy with fighting games. Killer this, Street that, and Mortal something else. All different, yet all sharing traits. One that was shared by a lot of games is the six-button control layout. Three punches of varying strengths and three kicks of varying strengths. All laid out in a 3x2 block.

But it's tough to keep things straight, especially when you're trying to tell someone how to do a special move or other.

"Okay, jump in and hit Roundhouse, then hold Back, press Jab a couple of times, then press Forward and Fierce"

People who play fighting games just don't have the kind of time to waste with all those words. So, since several games had the same control layout anyway, some folks used numbers instead.

Using this, we can modify our previous stratagem into this much quicker missive

"Okay, jump in and hit 6, then hold Back, press 1 a couple of times, then press Forward and 3"

Much more concise, especially in the heat of a tournament or training session.

I mentioned before, I'm pretty bad at Minesweeper.

But, I'm a sucker, so I play it occasionally anyway, and like to win sometimes. So I cheat. And here's how.

Start up a new game of Minesweeper and type the non-word 'xyzzy' (without the quotes) and hit shift+enter. Now, when your mouse is hovering over a square that's OK to click, the pixel in the top left corner of your monitor will turn white. It'll turn black if there's a mine under there. And by 'monitor' I really do mean the far upper-left corner of your actual screen, not the Minesweeper window.

Now, armed with this knowledge, I'd like to see you fail, no matter how ludicrous the challenge.