If you're like most everyone on the planet you hold your controller like this.

Which is fine, until you get to a point where you need to press one or both of the buttons quickly and repeatedly. Like in the Wii Punch-Out!! game, where you have to rapidly press the 1 and 2 buttons to regain health. And unless you have some kind of SuperThumb(tm) you're just not going to be able to press those buttons as quickly as you'd like, at least not for very long.

That's why, when the situation arises, I quickly flip my grip around so that my index and middle fingers are on the button (or buttons) that I need

That way I can tap my fingers back and forth to press the buttons far faster than I can with just my thumb

With the added benefit that my thumb doesn't start to cramp after a few minutes of button-mashing, which is always a plus.

In the first castle you come across in Super Mario World, you have to deal with this fence that you can climb on. Trouble is, that it's swarming with Koopas.

But, you can totally use it to your advantage.

You have two main ways to dispatch Koopas on the fence: you can punch them if they're on the opposite side, or you can descend on them from above and stomp on them... sort-of

Now, like other Mario games, if you continue to stomp on them without hitting the ground, your point values for each successive stomp increase.

And, since we're climbing around on a fence, we're staying well above the ground. And that means that you can take your time methodically stomping on Koopas to eventually get

a 1UP! There are enough Koopas crawling around on the fence that you can get several 1UPs before you have to get back on the ground.

And, if you're hard up for extra lives at that point, just swan dive into the lava, restart the stage, and do it again. As long as you're gaining more lives than you're losing, you'll come out ahead.

In the original Super Mario Kart, it might not be immediately obvious, but the computer-controlled drivers follow a pretty clearly defined path around the courses. And if you can figure out where they go, you can use it to your advantage.

My favorite spot to do so is on Mario Circuit 2.

You'll notice that down toward the end of the lap (in the shot above), that there's a place where you have to jump over the track to keep going. That's where you'll strike.

Place your banana peel or green shell between the 2nd and 3rd sets of arrows, that's where the computer drivers want to take the jump. Then, the next driver that comes along will crash into your trap, lose all of their speed, and miss the jump, making them repeat a good portion of the track.

It's kind of hard to tell from the shots here, but Yoshi's fallen for it.

This is really handy if you're playing the harder difficulty levels and the battle is really close for first place is tight. Once you lay this trap, the battle for first won't even be close.

The arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games (and their home-system ports) are all about sending swarms of enemies at you that you have to defeat with your Ninja Cunning(tm), along with whatever pointy weapons you can find.

In the fourth home-system Turtles game (which is the second arcade game, try not to think about that too much) you get a couple of new moves to help you squash the hundreds of robots that stand between you and the end of the game, one of which is the 'Grab the arm of an enemy and slam it on the ground repeatedly' maneuver.

To do it, you first hit the Foot Soldier with your weapon to double it over, and then hold Down and press the attack button.

Done right, you'll grab the unsuspecting Soldier's arm and start slamming away, back and forth, until it runs out of health.

But! This maneuver has two properties that make it extra useful:

1. Any enemies that you hit with your new club are instantly dispatched, regardless of the amount of health they have and

2. While you're doing it, you're completely invulnerable to attacks

Combine those two things and you have a seriously effective method of clearing out a group of enemies

Which, as you progress through the game, you're going to need.

You might remember that Contra was one of the myriad games that the famous Konami Code works on.

So you might logically deduce that the code works on its sequel, Super C as well.

So you go to the title screen

and put in the code

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start

And nothing happens. It turns out that the famous code doesn't actually do anything in this game.

But!

While you're at the title screen you could press instead

Right, Left, Down, Up, A, B, Start

Then you'd have 10 lives to work with instead of 3

Which isn't as helpful as 30, but I'll take what I can get.

Also, if you have two players, you might want to hit Select before you hit Start. That way you both can benefit.

In the NES Duck Tales game you have to go around and make Scrooge collect lots of money, and the most money (other than the treasures that you have to find all over the world) is to be found in the bonus stages. But how do you get there? Are they random?

Good news for you, they're not.

First, find Launchpad in a stage, and he'll offer to take you home. If your 10,000s digit is a 7, he'll take a detour to a tract of sky where Gyro flies along spewing big diamonds for your taking.

And, thanks to reader seamartin00, we have a video to help illustrate

It seems so much easier when you know how to trigger it.

A while back, I stumbled across a site with a review, of sorts, of A Boy and his Blob. (warning, some NSFW language).

In it, he talks about one of the two flavors of jellybeans that a lot of people don't really know much about, Lime.

You get the Lime jellybeans (along with the Orange beans) in a bag that you find after escaping the deadly caverns

You get exactly two Lime jellybeans, which Syd says are exactly how many you need to finish the game: one to open the final boss room

And one to open the Vitamin Store, where you spend your Treasures to get vitamins, vitamins to shoot out of your Vitablaster (the Vitablaster is the gun that the Blob turns into if you feed him the other jellybeans in the bag, Orange). And, if you use one just to see what it does, you've screwed yourself out of the ability to finish the game.

But wait!

It turns out that while the Vitamin store is indeed locked when you start the game, once you get out of the sewers, it's totally unlocked. Check it out:

There I am, in the store, with both Lime jellybeans.

Not only that, but you don't even have to go into the Vitamin, sorry, Health Foods store to finish the game. The shots from the Vitablaster can't even be used against the final boss (and they're not even that useful against the enemies of Blobolonia, either.

Sorry, Syd.

I've never actually seen any of the Rambo movies or read the book, but I did see UHF, which had this clip in it:

That clearly shows that Rambo is pretty hardcore and invulnerable. But how?

I bet went to the 'Continue' option

Then put in this mission code

Which resulted in him being able to walk around with no health

Which I'd certainly call hardcore.

Snake Rattle n Roll is kind of tough, but it's made by Rare, so that's not too unexpected. I have a hard time getting too far in the game, mostly because I never really played it all that much.

So I like to skip ahead a few levels to make it look like I'm better at the game.

What you have to do is to immediately start going to to the right as fast as you can when the game starts.

Go fast enough (i.e. don't hit anything) and you'll see a rocket.

Jump up and hit the rocket to take a shortcut to Level 8!

Where the game ramps up in difficulty significantly, so good luck!

You'll need it!

In Mega Man 2 you go around destroying Robot Masters and collecting their special weapons to use against them, pretty standard Mega Man stuff.

Now, each weapon takes a certain amount of weapon energy, represented by the meter to the left of your health

Several of the weapons take significant chunks out of your energy meter, but some, like the Metal Blade, give you several shots per bar of energy. You can use this to your advantage.

First, equip something that drains less than one bar of Weapon Energy per shot, like the Metal Blades or the Quick Boomerangs, then start firing. Before you consume the first bar of weapon energy, bring up the weapon selection screen by hitting Start.

Then immediately close it. That fraction of Weapon Energy you used? It gets reset! Meaning that if you keep bringing up the selection screen after every few shots, you'll never run out of Weapon Energy for those weapons.

Of course you have to constantly count how many shots you've gotten off, and pause the game every few seconds, which makes this really tedious to do.

But it's totally worth it, right?