In Super Mario Bros. 2, you get these potions. Which you can toss down to make doors. Go through the doors and you find all kinds of stuff, but probably one of the more important changes is that the plants that hold vegetables now hold coins. Coins that you use at the end of the stages to gamble for extra lives.

Now, if you try to get coins more than twice in a level, you start picking up vegetables instead of coins, probably to prevent you from abusing the system.

But, what happens if you go to, say, 5-1?

You notice how the potion is near some plants and a pit?

Grab the potion, toss it down, and go into Subspace. Grab the coins and while you're in subspace, jump down the hole.

It'll cost you a life, but you gain five coins (six if you're quick). Then, do it all again, grab the coins and jump down the hole. As long as you don't actually exit to the 'real world', then it doesn't count toward your two-trip limit.

Once you have all the coins you want, go on to the end of the stage. Then check out your coin total.

Depending on how many lives you sacrificed for the coins, you might be here for a while using the slot machine.

Enjoy!

I mentioned Bad Dudes the other day when I was talking about finding our friend Karnov in more games than just his own. The game was brought to the NES, but since putting quarters in your NES doesn't actually get you any continues, the game's actually pretty tough.

So, you do what I do to make it easier on yourself. Go to the title screen.

Then pick up controller 2 and (quickly) press "B, A, Down, Up, Down, Up", then Start on controller one. Done right, you'll see this:

Which probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you, so when you get into the game proper, it displays correctly

Now, with that many chances, you'd practically have to try to fail to rescue the president from the ninjas.

Ikari Warriors is a pretty tough game. You take your shirtless hero up against a heavily armed army in an attempt to kill them all for one reason or another.

It's just about as hard as it sounds.

But if you just can't seem to make good progress in the game, you can put in the longest level-select code that I know about.

First, go to the title screen

wait for the guys to get done with their little dance (or just press Start). Then put in the following on Controller 1:

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

You have to get all that in before the demo starts.

Then you see the familiar plane-landing sequence

Here, press A or B and you'll see the familiar 'Area 1' display come up. Press either A or B to change it and press Start to begin on the area of your choice.

They get harder as the game goes on, so, good luck!

Karnov is a character that starred in his own, very surreal, game. He's a 'circus strongman' who could breathe fire. His game was pretty unremarkable, but it was really tough.

Mostly it was tough because big, 'muscular' Karnov could only take one hit before he'd die (occasionally, he could take two, the first one would turn him blue, the second would turn him dead).

Fast forward a little bit to another video game called Bad Dudes, a game where you have to rescue President Ronnie who had been kidnapped by ninjas.

Make your way to the end of the first stage to find:

Karnov has managed to make his way to New York and has joined a clan of ninjas for no readily discernible reason, and he's also managed to grow the ability to take more than one hit before he dies.

He also turns up later as a sub-boss, only he's blue... clever.

Take a look at the first screen in Crystal Castles.

You see how the top of the castle seems to spell out FXL? Now check out the high score table.

That's right, whoever has the high score for this game will have their initials (or their favorite 3-letter word) emblazoned on the first board for all to see.

Until someone comes along and beats it or the power's shut off.

Asteroids is one of the granddaddies of the arcade games. You take your ship and have to shoot down endless fields of the titular space rocks.

You have at your disposal the following controls: fire weapon, rotate left, rotate right, thrust, and hyperspace.The functions of all of those should be pretty obvious (except maybe 'hyperspace', that sends you to a random spot on the playfield). But you'll notice that you have no brakes.

So keep it in mind that: 1. You better be happy with the direction you decide to move in because 2. there's no friction in space, so you're never going to slow down... unless you collide with an asteroid.

Or if you can artfully thrust in the exact opposite direction you originally did.

The Who Framed Roger Rabbit game can be kind of tough because the locations of the items you need to solve the game change every time you play it. You get passwords to save your progress, so it's not all bad.

However, keeping track of passwords is kind of tedious if you don't have a super-memory. So here's one that's kind of easy to remember:

Just put that code in and you'll have everything you need to complete the game... except for the dynamite. The dynamite isn't too tough to find, though, (though, that's another pro tip).

Is there a code that will give you everything and the dynamite?

Sure, but it's not so easy to remember.

Spy hunter is a neat game about a spy car (and sometimes boats) that goes real fast and has to destroy other, evil, cars (or boats) on the road for points, all while looking out for the civilian vehicles.

Occasionally a weaponry truck will come around and give you something awesome to enhance your destructive abilities, like this one carrying the Oil Slick attachment.

But, the trucks come pretty infrequently, wouldn't it be awesome if you could just start with all the weapons from the get-go?

Well, hold on to your hats.

At the title screen, hold down A + B + Select and hit start and bam!

Access to all the weapons that the game has for you, even the anti-aircraft missiles!

Just be warned that you lose them all if you crash, so try to not do that.

Ninja Gaiden is a pretty good game that tells the story of ninja-guy Ryu through several cinematic cutscenes with the occasional gameplay section thrown in.

And you'll probably also notice that there are some pretty good sounds/music in the game. But, who wants to actually play the game to hear them all?

Not me.

So I use the game's built-in sound test when I want to hear the songs.

First, go to the title screen

Then while holding hold Down, Left, A, B, and Select, press Start.

Now you can check out all the sounds the game has to offer without actually getting good at it and progressing the storyline.

Though getting good at the game would be OK.

Taboo isn't so much a game as it's a Tarot card reader. And it's not even a real good one of those, either.

But you have it there, and it's doing its thing, which is fine. You'll notice that after you ask it your question that it will start shuffling the cards before dealing them, natch.

Now I had read in just about every magazine that I could get my hands on when this game was newish (that also bothered to cover this game) that you could influence the direction that the cards were cut and shuffled by pressing the different directions on the control pad of your controller.

It turns out that that's not exactly the case.

I pressed the buttons on my controller's cross pad in random directions, and could only get the cards to go in the direction I wanted less than half the time. So, the next time I tried to get the cards to go the same direction every time... and it only went the direction that I was pressing about a quarter of the time... which is pretty much what you'd expect if it was random.

So, yeah, this 'trick' doesn't exactly work. Don't fool yourself into believing it.