Sometimes I take it for granted that some people will use all of the information available to them when they learn how to play a game, but they don't. Most people like to jump in and start going full-bore. Sometimes, that's fine, and you can learn all the gameplay you need to be moderately successful by ham-handedly jumping in and wailing on the buttons, hoping they do something useful.

But you can do it a little more quickly. Take Q*bert, for example. Let the game sit there with no money in it and you'll see some screens that teach you how to play the game.

That screen succinctly describes everything you need to know about how to play the game.

Now, I fully realize that most games nowadays are an eensy bit more complicated than Q*bert, so they come with manuals that are upwards of a dozen pages in some cases (a dozen pages smaller than a 3x5 index card, even). But you'd be amazed what the developers put in there. It's almost like they want you to know how to play their game and give you a handy pocket-sized reference.

Shocking!

You know Donkey Kong the game right? Rescue the girl from the gorilla at the top of a series of construction sites, yeah? The thing is, though, Jumpman (later known as Mario) is extremely fragile. If he falls more than a few inches, it's instadeath for him, so you probably don't just jump off of girders willy-nilly.

Even though you totally can.

The edges of the screen are distinct boundaries. If you hit one while on the ground, nothing especially exciting happens, but if you hit one while jumping, you kind of bounce off of it and fly back the other direction. I pretty much only use this tip to grab the hammer on the left side of the final board.

It's not really that useful of a tip, I know, but it is showy. And you can't be Pro without being a little bit of a showoff, it's just too much fun.

If you've ever played Marble Madness, then you've probably seen this screen.

You'll notice also that there are these numbers on the ground kind of outside the regular field of play.

If you use the conveniently-placed ramps to get your little marble over there, then you get a nice bonus.

1,000 points times the number you landed on. Pretty awesome for pretty much no effort.

Oh, and this works on the NES port, too.

Qix is kinda old, but there really hasn't been a game like it since.

You have a marker that you have to use to block off portions of the playfield. The portion you get is the smallest area that doesn't contain the Qix (which is the pulsating line-thing in the middle of the screen.

You can either draw fast or slow. Slow gives you more points, of course, but is way more dangerous. So, what you want to do is carve up little sections using your fast draw

And then make the last section with your slow draw

Bam! Huge points!

This is Proto Man.

There's a whole lot to his angsty story in the Mega Man universe, but I'm really not going to go into that here. In Mega Man 3 he just kind of appears every once in a while to fight you in a dead end for a few minutes and then he opens up a path for you to proceed. And his arrival is preceded by five very distinctive notes on a whistle.

But, if you've ever finished the game, you might know that there's more to the little ditty he plays. And, you can hear those extra notes pretty well any time you want, with a little timing.

So first, go to a stage where Proto Man appears, like Gemini Man's stage above. Then, once you get to the screen that Proto Man appears on, but before his song starts, hit the Pause button.

Done right (and you have an extremely small window of time to do it) the song will keep playing for a bit. Once it's done, unpause the game and then continue normally. And, this does work for both the original NES version and the Gamecube Mega Man Collection.

And, no, this isn't all that useful, really. But it is kind of neat, especially if you're a huge Proto Man fan... Those exist, right?

Today, we bring you another installment of the hidden characters in the Marvel vs. Capcom game. If you're tired of Roll, you might want to try your hand at another secret fighter.

Okay, so go to the select screen and highlight Morrigan.

Then, quickly, move the joystick Up, Right, Right, Down, Down, Down, Down, Left, Left, Up, Up, Up, Up, Right, Right, Left, Left, Down, Down, Right, Right, Down, Down, Left, Left, Up, Up, Right, Right, Up, Up, Left, Left, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down. Done right (and fast enough) and your reticle will go off the bottom of the screen and you'll select the mysterious Shadow Lady.

She looks and controls kind of like Chun-Li, but she's a little bit different.

And just to remind you, you have just about 10 seconds to put the code in right, so you better be fast and accurate... or good with whatever player you end up on if you run out of time.

Warcraft 3 is a pretty fun game, with lots of interesting cheaty things you can do with it. In a single-player game, hit 'enter' to bring up the chat window (yeah, I know there's nobody to chat with in a single-player game, don't worry about that).

Type in the phrase (sans quotes), "SomebodySetUpUsTheBomb", and hit 'enter' again.

Then you see this screen.

Then you go spend some time with actual people instead of messing around on a silly little game page like this one.

See you on Boxing Day.

Neverwinter Nights is a game where you get to act out Dungeon and Dragons, and even get to designate one player to be the all-mighty dungeon master to kind of guide the game and keep order.

But sometimes you just want to screw around.

Okay, so first enter 'Debug Mode' by pressing the ~ key and typing the command 'DebugMode 1'

Once that's successful, press the ~ key again and type in the phrase 'dm_mylittlepony'

Once that's successful, marvel at how your character is now riding one of those stick-horses and makes galloping noises.

You can also do the command again to disable it, you know, if you think that taking down an intellect devourer while holding on to a toy horse is just too silly.

Pokemon Snap is a game about taking pictures of pokemon, which should be fairly obvious from the title.

You just kind of go around taking photos, getting them graded, and getting points for them.

Eventually, you'll open up 'challenge scores', one for each level.

Now, what do you get for exceeding the challenge score for all of the levels?

Nothing! Absolutely nothing!

Other than the satisfaction of knowing that you've bested the last challenge the game could throw at you, which counts for something, right?

There's really no way around it, SimCity 4 can be a tough game if you're poor at managing fake people, fake money, and fake cities. But you have these guys to help you out. They're your advisors.

Their job is to tell you how terrible of a job you're doing, and that they need you to spend more money in their pet area to make the city really awesome.

But, what would happen if you, say, held down Ctrl + Alt + Shift +X? Then you might see this box pop up in the corner of your screen.

This is a pretty fun box, it lets you put in all kinds of stuff to really mess with the game. For instance, if you put in the phrase "DollyLlama" (without quotes, natch), and then reopen your advisors tab, you'll notice that they've gotten new heads.

Yep, all your advisors are now llama-headed, which kind of takes the edge off what they have to say, you know?

If, for some reason, you want to give them back their human visages, you just repeat the code. But, I'm really not sure why you'd want to.