If you're playing any one of the remakes of Super Mario Bros. 2, then you know that occasionally a powerup, like a heart or a Starman, will appear, completely at random.

But, did you know that it's not completely random? Heck, it's not even partially random. Those powerups appear based on your actions.

Like if you kill five enemies, you'll make a heart appear to replenish one dot on your life meter.

Likewise, if you collect five cherries, a Starman will appear, which will make you temporarily invincible when you collect it.

And pulling five fully-grown vegetables out of the ground (the ones with the face on them) will get you a stopwatch.

Which will freeze everything in place for a few seconds.

And since everything resets when you go in the nearest door, you can totally manipulate the game to your advantage, so go to it!

Remember a while back that I told you how to get lots of 1ups in the original Super Mario Bros.? Turns out that you can pull off a similar feat in its super-hard sequel, too.

At the very beginning of the game you see this thing.

Which houses a hidden mushroom. Hit it from underneath to pop it out of there.

Then get the koopa over on the right-most block and strategically break the rest like so:

Then, wait until the koopa is about halfway off its platform and jump straight down on it. Done right, you'll start bouncing.

And just like before, you'll eventually start racking up the 1ups!

And the best part is that on the Super NES version, the counter actually stops correctly at 127 lives, so there's no danger of going over and losing them all.

And you're going to need every one of those lives, trust me.

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!