In the original Super Mario Bros. (and its huge number of remakes) you get to slide down a flagpole at the end of each level.

Once you slide down and go into the mini-fort, you might see some fireworks, which give you 500 points each. There might be one, three, six, or zero.

But what triggers it?

Great question!

The amount of fireworks you get is dependent on the last digit of the timer when you hit the flagpole. If the digit it 1, 3, or 6, then that's how many fireworks you get. Anything else nets zero.

I find that the best way to guarantee a 6 is to stand on the top step as far left as you can. Then, when the timer's last digit hits 9, hold B, run and jump onto the flagpole. Then you get the 5,000 points and six fireworks for 3,000 more, which nets you a total of 8,000 points (plus the bonus for whatever's left on the timer).

Not too bad!

Oh, and this tip only works on levels that actually have a flagpole. So it's a no-go in the big castle levels.

In Nightshade you need to go around doing Good Deeds (tm) to gain popularity. The game's crammed full of them, and some are hidden better than others.

Take this dinosaur skeleton in the museum for example.

If you examine it, you find a loose bone, which you can TAKE, but it causes the skeleton to collapse, which causes you to lose popularity, which is a bad thing.

But, you can then OPERATE the pile of bones left on the floor to create:

The correct dino! Which nets you more popularity than you lost.

The bone you removed was extra, so you get to keep it to use later on in your quest.

Good luck!

I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, Battletoads is a tough game. And you can take certain measures to pad your lives a bit, but you'll find out pretty quickly that you need more.

So, make your way to Level 2, the big tree-thing. And find these weird silver bugs with stingers.

They only take one hit to defeat, but they kind of bounce up when you hit them. Hit them again when they bounce off the wall. Then hit them again and again until.

1up!

Once they give up the 1up, they fall down off the bottom of the screen. And you can do this once for each of the bugs that you find in the tree.

Just be warned that the other bugs can sting the one that you're bouncing off the wall and if they get the last hit in, you get nothing.

Have you ever wondered who made RBI Baseball for the NES? Well, then I have a treat for you!

At the title screen

Hold down A and B, and press Start. Then the credits sequence will start

Which actually only consists of the one screen.

But hey, now you know who to blame for this game.

Spy Hunter is a tough game, one of the reasons is that you don't get to pause the game if you need to do something in real live not related to driving a spymobile.

Or do you?

At any point in the game, grab Controller 2 and press the A button.

Blam! Game paused.

Press it again to unpause the game.

Neat, eh?

In Mega Man X, in the Armored Armadillo stage, if you leap up over the door to the boss's room, you find this little slice of heaven.

Pretty worthless, right?

But, if you collect every item in the game, including all weapons, sub-tanks, heart tanks, and body upgrades

Then visit this area several times (the easiest way to do this is to get up here, then leap off to the left into the pit so you start at the halfway point, stock up on lives using this tip)

After visiting this ledge about four or five times a weapon upgrade capsule will appear, and the good doctor will be wearing Ryu's (from Street Fighter) clothes.

Jump in, and you get the ability to throw Ryu's (and Ken's) signature fireball by pressing Down, Down-Forward, Forward, and then the shot button, but only if you have full health.

This thing is able to kill pretty much anything in the whole game in one hit, but you have to be on the ground to use it.

Have fun!

The arcade Mega Man games are just like the console versions, just distilled down to the boss fights.

And, also like the console games, each of the Robot Masters has a weakness to one of the weapons of the other Robot Masters. It's kind of like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, only with six choices.

But how do you know who's weak to what?

Easy! Just try everything you have in your arsenal, and if you hit on the weak spot, the screen will flash white.

Which is kind of hard to show here, since this site has a white background, but trust me, you'll notice it.

And it's way easier to see than trying to check out the power meter at the bottom of the screen during a heated battle.

Aiming your bubbles in the Puzzle Bobble games can be a little tough, you have to occasionally bounce your bubbles off the sides of the playfield to get them into the positions you want, which can be kind of tough without your guide there to help you.

But, if you think back to your high school physics class, specifically the principles of reflection, you won't need that guide.

Basically, the principles of reflection state that the angle that something hits a flat surface is the same angle that it's going to leave that surface.

So if you check out the geometric pattern in the background, you can use that to gauge where your shot's going to go by following an imaginary line that cuts the squares where you're aiming. This works really well if you aim so that you're going from corner-to-corner, making really easy to follow 45° angles.

Or you could just lose and continue and get your guide back for one round. Your call.

The Puzzle Fighter games are a bit... different. You have to take characters from the Darkstalkers and Street Fighter series up against each other in a battle of wits by sorting colored blocks.

But say, for example, that when you select your character that you highlight Morrigan (Felicia if you're player 2)

Then you hold down the Start button and hit Down on the joystick 13 times, and then press any button to select your character?

Why, your character turns into comic-relief character Dan, who's typically a little on the weak side in all the games he appears in (but can be unstoppable in the hands of a skilled player).

Can you finish the game with underpowered Dan?

Good luck!

Occasionally you'll run into instructions for a few glitches for your favorite games (typically NES games) that require you to do something that your operations manual (you totally read that, right?) expressly told you not to do: to partially remove the cartridge from the system while it's powered on. I don't like these glitches for a number of reasons.

First, removing (or inserting, for that matter) a cartridge while your system is on has the potential to damage your system, your cartridge, or both (admittedly kind of rare, but still possible). Consoles typically aren't designed for hot-swapping.

Secondly, the results are completely unpredictable. Most of the time you're just going to freeze the game and that'll be the end of it, but occasionally something will happen. Your character will gain superpowers or (more likely) your inventory of special items will be completely scrambled. And, if you can continue, you're going to have lots of in-game stuff to play around with... maybe. Which will be great, until you try to do the trick again which brings me to:

Thirdly, the trick is nigh unrepeatable. Since you're working with trying to get a moderately complex program to glitch out by partially removing it from its system while it's running, there's almost no chance that you can repeat the glitch with any kind of regularity. I'm sure that minutes after this goes live I'm going to get inundated with emails telling me how wrong I am, but the point stands. The effects are essentially random.

So, potential hardware damage combined with unreliable and unrepeatable results? Yeah, I'll stick to programming errors and easter eggs, thanks.