Okay, so maybe cruising through Abadox while completely invincible is a bit on the easy side. Maybe you want a little bit more of a challenge... but not a whole lot. Okay, we can do that.

First, go to the "PRESS START" screen

Then grab Controller 1 and press Up, Down, Right, Right, Up, Left, Right, Down, Left, Up

Then start your game. Everything will look pretty much normal... until you pause the game and then unpause again.

If you did the code right, when the action starts again, you'll be loaded to the teeth!

And you can do this as many times as you want, which is especially helpful if you accidentally pick up a gun that you don't want.

But you're still very destructible, which adds just enough challenge to keep the game interesting for a while.

I've been wracking my brain to try and figure out why you'd want to do this, and I can't really come up with anything... but I'm going to show it to you anyway because, hey, I have space to fill here.

So if you pop in your Super Bomberman cartridge and go to the Password Screen, you can put in the password "5656"

Which will take you back to the title screen (a little anticlimactic), but then!

Start a game to find

That Bomberman has been shrunk down to pint-size!

I haven't actually figured out how this is useful yet. But once I do, I'll let you know.

So, what, four extra Gomezes isn't enough for you? Okay, fine.

Go to the password screen and enter the password "11111"

When you go into the game, you'll see that you have zero lives!

Er, wait, that's not that many.

But!

Once you lose one of those lives, your meter goes to 99, which is way more. But be aware, it can't actually go back up to 100, so any lives you collect while at the maximum will be lost.

But I don't think you really need to worry about that too much.

It might be hard to believe now, but there was a time that if a game took longer than a few hours or so to complete, that your progress would be saved via a password, and depending on the game, these could range from just a few letters, to pictograms, to full on extended alphabets.

Take a look at this password screen from Willow, for example

Look at that mess! Upper case and lower case letters, gigantic serifs, numbers, symbols. It's like a typewriter threw up on that screen. And if you mis-transcribe one character? Yep, your password and your hours of progress are lost. Forever.

That sucks.

The solution?

One would be to adjust your penmanship so that each character you write looks unambiguously different from the rest, but that's a whole lot of work. I like to take the slightly lazier approach.

Digital photography has progressed to the point where you'd be hard pressed to find a device that doesn't have a camera in it, so I like to grab whatever digital imaging device I have handy, snap a picture, and then use it for reference.

Of course, if I suck at photography and manage to take a blurry, unreadable picture it's just as useless as one that I wrote down poorly, so it's definitely not infallible, but it's a step in the right direction.

So let's say that you're playing a round of Metroid and you have to abruptly end your session for some reason. Maybe it's time to eat dinner, maybe your appendix ruptured, whatever.

But instead of finding an enemy to clumsily bump into repeatedly or taking an excruciatingly slow bath in a Lava Pit(tm), you could just pause the game (trust me, it's paused in this picture)

Then grab Controller 2 and press Up on the Control Pad + A

Done right, your game will end suddenly and you'll be taken to the password screen

Where you can jot down your password to continue on another day.

Kid Icarus is one of those games that I've somehow never managed to finish, but when I do play, I like to take every advantage I can get. Mostly because I think to myself, "This time's going to be the time I finish it!"

So when I go into shops

I like to grab Controller 2 and press A + B at the same time. That way I get cheaper prices

Even if I can afford the stuff, because I'm cheap.

It's been a rather interesting week around here, and I appreciate you sticking it out with me. I've got lots more stuff to share, but that'll have to wait until we need more filler.

But for today, we have this:

And I'm just sad that I don't fit into it any more.

Regularly scheduled updates to resume next week.

One of the great things about moving is that you stumble across lots of things that got filed away and forgotten about, like these magnets that I haven't seen in years.

And they still work! Bonus!

Nothing quite like a three day weekend followed by a four-day workweek to just annihilate any sense of progress.

But I did hit a box and find a 1UP

Which helps quite a bit.

Still sitting on the beach and sipping m... er, I mean slogging along trying to figure out what box has my shoes in it.

But, I did find some of my old reference materials

So there is that.