In Super Mario Kart, every time you win a race you have to start in the back of the pack for the next one, I guess to make it fair to the rest of the racers somehow. But with a little knowledge, this won't be much of a problem.

If you can get your kart's engine revved up to just the right point, you can take off like you used a mushroom for a speed boost, but it's kind of hard to do.

Or is it?

When the countdown for the race starts, right after the first light/buzzer goes 'beep', lay on the gas

If you've timed it just right, you'll rocket ahead like a shot!

You just have to remember to steer around the racers that are in front of you, otherwise you run the risk of slamming headlong into Donkey Kong Jr.'s backside going full speed, and nobody wants that.

Think you're good at U.N. Squadron? Think you're a real gamer? Well, you're about to get the opportunity to prove it.

Pop in your copy of U.N. Squadron, go to the Options screen.

With 'Game Level' highlighted hold down the X and A buttons on Controller 2 and start ratcheting up the difficulty. As long as you're holding down the buttons you can take it from Normal

All the way to 'Gamer'

Do you have what it takes to defeat 'Gamer Mode'?

(Thanks to user Dakota for today's tip!)

I never really spent as much time with Arcana as I'd have liked, mostly because every time I scraped together a couple of bucks it was already gone from the rental shop.

But if you did and you want to hear some of the music in the game without actually playing through it, you could go to the title screen

Then hold L + R and press B on Controller 1. Done right, you'll see one of the most boring Sound Test screens I've ever seen

How exciting!

One of the... sort of interesting things about Super Street Fighter II is that you can pick lots of different colors for your characters. What color you get depends on what button you use to select your fighter (your choice of A, B, X, Y, L, R, or Start).

But!

If you press and hold any of the buttons in (except for Start) when you pick your character, you'll notice that you get yet another color!

And most of them look pretty awful, but there are a few good ones in there. You just have to dig around to find them.

The Clayfighter games were just kind of OK, so I usually look for a way to minimize the amount of time that I have to spend with them, which is where this comes in.

If you go to this screen:

Press and hold the Y button on Controller 1 and then press L, L, R, Down, Left, R, you'll hear a strange sound. From there, you go the Options Screen and notice that you can take the speed from 3

All the way to 10!

Which is so fast that you're going to have a hard time doing anything because your guys move around so fast. But that means that the matches are going to end quicker, which is definitely not a bad thing.

Super Buster Bros. is a kind of tough game, and if you want to get to the end of it, you're going to have to invest a lot of time, effort, and energy.

Or you could take a shortcut.

You could to go the Game Select screen, grab Controller 1 and press

L, R, R, L, Up, Down

Done right, you'll see a number appear in the middle of the screen.

Which you can ratchet all the way up to 40, where the game gets kind of tough.

Or you could use it as a kind of continue feature to start the game where you left off the last time. It's up to you, really.

When you're playing through the Super NES Legend of Zelda game, you come across lots of walls that look like they can be destroyed to find some goodies behind them, but some of them are just old, crumbly, and not real breakable. Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to tell them apart?

And there totally is!

First, find a wall that you want to test. Then press and hold the Sword Button (commonly known as the 'B' Button) then walk into whatever wall you want to test. Keep trying to walk into the wall and Link will eventually start tapping on the wall with his sword.

If it's a normal, non-breaky wall, you'll hear this tapping sound.

But!

If it's a breakable wall, you'll hear this tapping sound instead.

Which will save you time, effort, and you won't waste time throwing bombs around walls that will never break.

So it's totally win-win... er... win.

Like pretty much every other game in the series, Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts is a kind of tough game. And that means that unless you spend a lot of time getting good at it, you're never going to see the advanced stages.

Unless...

You go to the Options screen

Highlight 'Exit' and press and hold L + Start on Controller 2 and press Start on Controller 1. Done right, you'll see a second Options screen

Letting you pick where you want to start along with letting you hear whatever music in the game you want!

Which means that you'll finally be able to see what the later stages look like!

It's no big secret that before there was an ESRB that Nintendo had certain hoops game developers had to jump through to publish games on their systems. Take Final Fight, for example, a game about going through the streets of Metro City and punching people to death.

In the arcade, the first boss you run across has a unique name.

So he gets a name change for the Super NES version

Which I guess shows that the kiddos who were going to play this game would have been more affected by some boss thug's name than bludgeoning people to death with steel pipes.

In the Underground portions of Super Mario Bros. it's real tempting to try and get up to the ceiling, that way you can just kind of run to the right as fast as you can without worrying about trying to avoid the obstacles in front of you. But usually it's kind of hard to get up there.

Unless...

I alluded to this earlier, but if you scroll the screen so that one column of bricks is halfway scrolled off the screen and then start breaking them

You'll notice that Mario (or Luigi) can fit in the gap, and he'll kinda get stuck

Keep on jumping until you're at the top of the screen!

Making it much easier to pass these stages.