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.

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!

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.

The Super NES Addams Family game is kind of tough, but there are extra lives pretty much everywhere to help you brute-force your way through it. Even on the Game Over screen.

Once you lose all of you lives, you have the choice of continuing or not.

But, instead of going through the 'Continue' door, you could just keep walking to the left and off the screen to find:

One of the many hidden rooms crammed into this game. This one gives you four extra lives that you can take with you to try and complete the game with.

And the best part?

If you lose all of your lives again the ones in the hidden room here will come back. So make sure you collect them every time... you'll need them.

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is one of my favorite baseball games of all time. It's just Plain Good(tm). But have you ever wondered to yourself who was responsible for bringing this game to life? I sure have.

An easy way to find out is to go to the title screen.

Then (kind of quickly) press: B, A, Down, B, Up, B, B, A. (You can remember this code easily if you remember BAD BUBBA)

The result?

The credit sequence, without having to do any more work than that.

In the street fighter games, the Russian guy Zangief has one of the most powerful moves in the game, the Spinning Piledriver.

You perform this maneuver by doing a 360 on the controller and then pressing punch

But, that is kind of tough to get right, since when you press any of the 'Up' directions, your guy jumps, usually out of range of the move.

It turns out that you don't really need to go the full 360 degrees, just 270 will do

In fact, any 270 will do, so go nuts.

Also, this works with any move requiring 360s, including T. Hawk's crazy face-smashing move

And this applies to games in the whole series, including sequels and crossovers. Pretty much anything with the words 'Street Fighter' in the name.

Mega Man 7 is made by Capcom, who likes to have some fun with their games sometimes. Take Mega Man 7, for example. It's pretty standard as far as Mega Man games go. But for a little treat, move your cursor over Shade Man's stage

hold down the B button and press Start.

You'll probably notice something different right away (though the difference doesn't show up in screen shots)

The tune for the stage intro and the stage itself change to something a bit different than the norm.

And if you don't recognize the music, I'd suggest you go back and play this game for a few minutes.

SimCity can be a tough game if you're not that great at managing the budget, which is why I usually don't bother worrying about it.

First, spend all your money. Make sure you spend it on stuff like roads and police/fire departments, stuff that will want tax money to keep operating. Then, wait until the end of the year.

Then, just wait until the year ends and the budgeting screen comes up.

Start holding down the L button (and don't let it go until I tell you), and hit 'Go With Figures'

Then, go back into your Budget screen and raise all of the Funding Levels to 100%, which will result in negative Current Funds.

Then hit 'Go With Figures' again. Close all of your menus, and then release the L button.

The result?

$999,999 in the city's treasury. With that kind of cash you can do pretty much anything you want any time you want.

Go nuts.

Make it far enough in Super Castlevania IV and you'll see this stage, affectionately known as 'the treasury' by some... well, by me anyway.

Along the way through the stage, you see these treasure chests pretty much everywhere.

What might not be immediately obvious is that each one contains a hidden porkchop, you just have to work real hard for it.

Pick any chest you like, and then jump on it 255 times. Yes, two hundred fifty five times. Then, a large pork chop will appear right over your head!

The problem is that it takes so much time to pull this off that you eat up a lot of time on the old clock, so you probably don't want to do it unless you're in the direst of straits. You also might consider not doing it on the chest that I did, you're probably going to want your food to appear in a place where you can actually collect it.

Mario Paint is chock full of stuff to play around with. Even the title screen can keep you occupied for a while.

Just click on all the letters for different effects:

Click on the "P", though, and you get this tranquil scene.

Each thing wandering around on the screen has a different sound associated with them, none of them too exciting, but all of them kind of silly. Occasionally, though, you see a star fly by.

It's real hard to click on, because it moves so fast. I have the best luck if I position the pointer on its path ahead of time (it goes the same way every time), and then click as the star passes underneath. What happens if you do?

Stuff starts raining down from the sky and some kind of harp-like music starts to play.

And now you know what the star does, lucky you.