The Super NES version of Lemmings is pretty much like every other version of Lemmings. You have to make your lemmings get to the exit of the stages instead of dying a grisly death.

But take a look at the title screen.

What if you hold down Select and then press Start instead of just pressing regular Start?

Why, you get options! You can change your controller configuration, and

You can listen to the various musical pieces from throughout the game. Which doesn't sound like much, but you get to listen to a silly version of a Cancan song, so that's something, right?

In Super Metroid, you slowly get all these abilities to trick out your bounty hunter's abilities as she hunts down and destroys space pirates and energy-sucking globs of goo.

One of the hallmarks of the series is that there are little prizes hidden in all kinds of nooks and crannies that are steadily more accessible as you find more and more goodies.

One of the things you find early on is the morph ball.

And bombs that you can use when rolled in a ball.

The bombs have the added effect that they bump you slightly up (or slightly to the side if you're not directly on top of them).

Now, it's tough to get the timing right, but if you set a bomb so that you bounce up a little, and then set another in such a way that it explodes right before you fall all the way back down, then you bounce a little bit higher.

Keep on placing bombs and bouncing up higher until you get to someplace that you maybe weren't supposed to be yet. Who knows what you might find.

Gradius 3 is a whole lot like the first Gradius game. So you might think that you can use the old Konami Code to get a munitions boost like you did in the earlier game. So you pause the game, put in the code

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

and notice how you get all the powerups, just like before, only when you unpause the game:

Your ship explodes!

Harsh.

I guess it's kind of an acknowledgment of the old code or something.

But, you can slightly modify the code. Instead of pressing Left and Right on the control pad, you can press the L and R shoulder buttons on the controller.

Up, Up, Down, Down, L, R, L, R, B, A

Which will have a similar effect as the original code did for the original game.

And, just like the original code, you can only do it once per credit, so choose wisely.

There's no way around it, Battletoads is a tough game. Those three lives you get at the beginning of the game start to look insufficient pretty early on.

But, you can give yourself a slight edge.

At the 'press start' screen you can hold Down on the control pad + A + B and press Start. Then you'll have five Toads at your disposal instead of three.

And, yeah, this works for the Super NES version also.

RPGs like Secret of Mana are big and complex enough that they seem to be just rife with little oddities and glitches that are waiting to be unearthed by the intrepid player.

Take, for example, the town at the beginning of the game, Potos. The boy character is tossed out of town fairly early on in his adventure and told never to return... at least not until he's done saving the world.

But, you can get around him. Or, rather, you can get through him. Just wait until you have multiple people in your party and come back to the village. Then press and hold Up while pressing Select. You'll cycle through control of all your characters and slowly inch your way through this gatekeeper.

Now why you'd want to do such a thing is beyond me, since the stuff in the shop is no better than you'd find anywhere in the world, and everyone still hates you anyway for dooming the village.

Oh, but make sure you have the Flammie Drum before you get in, or you don't mind resetting the game. That guy that's keeping you out? Turns out he's pretty bad at his job, but very good at keeping you in.

Killer Instinct has a kind of convoluted combo system, which we'll talk about in depth another day. You can, with skill, string together lots of moves to just pummel your opponent senseless for several seconds.

Good thing, then, that there's a method to break the combos in mid-stream. A move that everyone has called, oddly enough, a 'combo breaker'. The breaker is different for each character, but it's normally just one of their regular moves done at the right time, and with the right button.

Okay, at its basic form, a combo consists of an opening move (the Opener), an autodouble (for a couple more hits), and then a finisher for a few more hits and the icing on the cake.

Problem is, though, that to break the combo you have to have timing and a pretty deep understanding of each character's moves.

Timing. You have to do your breaker during the autodouble portion of the combo (or the linker stage, but that's another pro tip). Not too tough, right? Just have to learn to recognize where the opening move ends and the next couple of hits start. Now, the 'intimate knowledge' part comes in. You have to recognize whether the autodouble was initiated with a weak, medium, or strong button, and press the corresponding button to break the combo. Weak breaks medium, medium breaks strong, and strong breaks weak.

But that's a whole lot of memorization, attentiveness, and, *gasp*, work!

Turns out that there's a slightly easier way.

On the 'Vs.' screen (that shows the matchup) press Down + Start and you'll hear this sound.

Then, the combo breakers get way easier. Now you can do them with any strength button you want. Though you still have to get the timing down.

But once you get that down, you're in great shape.

Oh, and it works in the arcade version, too.

When you do time trials in the original Super Mario Kart and you do well, you get to race against your ghost, so long as you race again on the same track. If you got a particularly good time on a track, wouldn't it be awesome if you could save that ghost to challenge yourself or your friends later on?

Good news for you, there is!

First, go to Time Trials and pick any track, preferably one that you're good at, and not Vanilla Lake 1. Next you have to qualify to have the game remember your ghost data. In order for that to happen, you have to not hit any walls, not fall off the track, not go into the water, and get a reasonably good time. I can't really tell you what the time threshold is, since it's different per track, but an easy way to check if you've satisfied all the criteria is to watch your replay. If you can use L and R to rotate the camera, then you've qualified for a ghost.

Then, when your replay is over, and you're looking at your options on what to do next, hold L, R, Y, and then press X. You'll hear a 'ding'.

Now, if you exit back to the menu where you choose your track, you'll notice that the name of the track has turned yellow, which means that you've saved your ghost.

Now just highlight the yellow track, and when it's asking if you're sure you want to race on that track, and hold L, R, X, and hit B. You'll hear another 'ding' and load your ghost data that you've saved.

Beware, though, you can only save one ghost on the cartridge. If you save another one on the same or another track, it'll erase the older one.

Mega Man X is a tough game the first few times you play it. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to get lots of lives to kind of ease the learning curve?

Good news for you, then, there is!

First, you have to go to the Armored Armadillo stage. One of the first things you find is this weird cart thingy that shuttles you real fast through portions of the level.

Hop on, and then immediately hop off so that the cart gets out of your way. Then proceed normally until you find this Bubble Bat

Get close and he'll swoop to attack!

Shoot him, though (one shot from any weapon will do), and odds are very high that he'll drop a 1-Up.

Even better is that you can scroll his ledge off the screen and right back and he'll reappear and be ready to drop another 1-Up. You can repeat this as many times as you want (though you won't get much benefit after you get 9 of 'em).

The Super Game Boy let you play games that normally were about a quarter the size of an average postcard, and blow them up so that they were almost as big as a sheet of notebook paper. And, since they didn't take up all the room on your screen, you get these snazzy borders to take up the extra room. They don't really do much, though, other than just look kind of neat.

If you let them sit for long enough, though, stuff starts to happen. Little screen savery kinds of things. But, what if you want to see the screen savers without sitting there not touching the controller for several minutes at a time?

Easy. Just grab your controller, press L, L, R, R, L, L, L, L, R. You'll hear a 'ding' sound and the border's animation will start... assuming it has one.

A few of them, like the plain black border, don't do anything, though.

Dracula's a pretty rough customer, but for some reason, just before you guide your Belmont to fight him, he gives you a full arsenal of stuff to use to defeat him. It seems like a pretty large tactical error on his part, so I can't really understand why, but I'm not one to look gift-arsenals in the mouth.

Take a look at this screen. It's the last staircase before you face-off with Dracula. You waltz up the stairs, go into his chambers, and then he kills you.

But, what's not immediately obvious is that there is an invisible platform, an invisible staircase, and another invisible platform.

Hop on down and nose-up to the edge of the screen. You'll see a brief flash, and then stuff will start raining from the heavens. Food, whip upgrades, Hearts,

a Cross (Boomerang),

a double-shot powerup

a triple-shot powerup

Getting back up is a little bit of a challenge. Getting to the the second platform is pretty easy, just take the invisible staircase. But getting back on the visible platform is a little tougher... since it's kind of hard to tell where the invisible one ends and the Bottomless Pit of Death begins. But if you botch it, you'll end up on the same screen, primed to fill your inventory up again, so no big loss.