In Bejeweled Blitz, if you manage to get five gems in a row, you get what's called a Hypercube, which is kind of like a Wild Card. You match it with a gem of any color and it clears all gems of that color from the board.

But what if you're skilled (or lucky) enough to get two of them next to each other?

It turns out that if you clear a Hypercube with a Hypercube that it clears every gem on the board!

And at 250 points a pop, that's an easy 16,000 points!

Today is Christmas, so I decided to fire up my GameCube and throw in a copy of The Simpsons: Hit & Run, and I was greeted with this:

The halls are decked, and Homer is passed out on the couch in a Santa outfit. Sounds like something to aspire to on a day like today.

Also, I understand that this works on the PS2 and Xbox versions as well, as long as the clock is set to the correct date.

If you go to Bomberman's continue screen and put in 'BA' over and over again until you run out of room

You will be whisked away to Stage 0!

Which you might logically assume is going to be easier than the already pretty easy Stage 1. But you'd be way wrong.

It's actually significantly tougher.

Good luck!

Donkey Kong Country really isn't that hard of a game, but some of the maneuvers you have to pull off are a little frustrating, so it would be nice to have a few extra chances.

If you go to the File Select screen

And press

B, A, R, R, A, L

on your controller (which kind of spells 'Barrel') you'll hear a confirmation noise. Start your file and blam!

50 Donkey Kongs (or Diddy Kongs, whichever way you want to look at it)!

Now you have plenty of opportunities to try and discover the hidden goodies littered throughout the game.

In T&C 2, you have to take a gorilla that's riding on a skateboard or surfboard across a bunch of levels. Problem is that he's unusually fragile, so you're going to see this a lot.

But don't despair!

You can simply go to the title screen and press this sequence of buttons:

Left, Up, Right, Up, Right, Down, A

Which will put unlimited lives at your disposal.

So now you can wipe out as often as you like!

And, trust me, you're going to be wiping out a lot.

You might remember a while back that we talked about getting a Ha-Do-Ken for Mega Man in the first Mega Man X game. So, it might not come as a huge surprise that there's a similar secret in the second Mega Man X game.

The conditions you have to meet are similar. You have to have found all of the E-Tanks, heart tanks, Zero parts, and sub-weapons. Basically, every collectible in the game. Then make your way to the third Fortress stage. You'll eventually find a ladder up high enough that you'll have to lure some enemies over and hit them with the Crystal Hunter to make platforms.

You'll have to then traverse a kind of treacherous path, with some pretty tough spots.

Once you get to the vertical shaft, hug the left wall to enter a hidden passageway to find a weapons capsule!

Inside is Dr. Light, who is apparently a big fan of Wayne's World.

Hop in and you get Street Fighter's Ryu's signature move, the Sho-Ryu-Ken!

Which you execute by pressing Forward, Down, and Down-Forward + Shot. It looks kind of cool, but you get it at nearly the end of the game, so you don't get to school very many bosses with it, and its range is so short that you'll probably get hit before you get a chance to actually hit something with it.

But, hey, don't worry about that!

The Super Game Boy was great, it let me, for the first time, play Game Boy games on my television via my Super NES. It also, with certain games, allowed for way more colors than the 4 that most Game Boy games supported. I mean, take a look at this Donkey Kong screenshot.

Isn't that great? Extended color palette, custom screen border, and when Pauline gets yoinked away at the end of the stages, she actually calls for help.

Now, if we take a look at the same game in the new-fangled Game Boy Player for the Game Cube

The enhanced palette is gone, the custom border is gone, and Pauline's cries are reduced to a sad little squeak (sounds kind of like a goose blowing a kazoo).

So you might want to keep your Super NES and Super Game Boy around if losing access to those things means anything to you.

Kickle Cubicle is kind of a weird game, there's really no getting around that. You kick cubes of ice around a playfield to gather powerups and defeat enemies (hence the name).

But let's say for a moment, that you held down the Down arrow on Controller 1 before you turned the game on. You'd be greeted with a solid-colored screen.

From there, if you press either Left, Up, or Right on Controller 2, a battle with the first boss of the game starts!

Which is actually pretty easy to overcome.

Once you've beaten it, the game starts, at stage 1.

So why would you want to do that? To test your mettle against the first boss? To practice the boss battles?

I dunno, but I'm sure you can find a reason.

In Super Mario Bros. 3, you come across tons of shelled enemies, which you can pick up and carry around. Throw them at question blocks, and they reveal their contents for you.

But, if you take your favorite shell up to a block, and get real close to it (without touching it)

And then let go of your shell, it'll hit the block, and then bounce back toward you

but it'll sail right through you without causing any damage!

And you might be saying "So what? I could just throw the shell at the block from further away and achieve basically the same thing." And you'd be right, you could do that. But this way, you don't have to dodge anything when it ricochets off your target.

Let's say you're playing the first Wario Land game and you decide to pause the action for a second to check out your stats.

Then, instead of hitting Start to get back to the action, you instead decided to hit Select 16 times. Then you might notice a little reticle appear around some of the digits.

If you hold down the B button, you can move that reticle around and change any of the numbers in the top row, altering how many coins, hearts, lives, and seconds you have on the timer.

And you can do this as often as you like to give yourself an advantage. So go nuts!