On the very last stage of Mega Man 2, after you've fought Wily for the first time, you come across his last line of defense: some brown dripping fluid in a narrow corridor. Doesn't sound too scary, I know, but they're kind of tough to avoid.

Or are they?

When you first start the stage, you fall down a pretty long shaft.

If you hold down the Right arrow immediately, you'll work your way over to the right side

And once you land, you can start going to the right. You'll be so far over to the side of the screen that the drips won't have time to fall on your head.

Unless of course you double-back and go to the left for some reason. So I wouldn't recommend that.

In Mega Man 2 when you select your favorite Robot Master, they stand in the middle of the screen and do an Action Pose(tm) in the middle of a field of stars.

But!

If you hold down A + B + Select, then hold Start, you get a surprise

The stars have been replaced by the little bird-things that plague you throughout a couple of the stages.

What's the point?

Nothing, as far as I can tell.

When you finally get to Dr. Wily's castle in Mega Man 2, you get stymied by these floors that look solid, but you fall right through them. They're kind of tough to deal with until you remember that you have a (not so) secret weapon: the Bubble Lead.

The Bubble Lead follows the ground's contours (but never goes up, always down), so all you have to do is to fire one

and watch where it falls through the floor

Which makes it much easier to tell where the intangible blocks are, instead of trying to rely on your memory.

Part of the fun of the Mega Man games is getting the special weapons from the rogue robots and then finding out which weapon does the most damage to each one. Mega Man 2 takes that to the extreme.

Toward the end of the game you have to fight all of the Robot Masters again, even though you've already beaten them once. And that means that you could use their own weapons against them. This doesn't usually do a whole lot... until you get to Metal Man.

Once the battle starts, throw one of his own Metal Blades back at him.

If it connects, BOOM!

Easiest fight in the whole game! Heck, easiest fight in the whole series!

Which is a pretty big reprieve after you've battled your way this far into the game.

In Mega Man 2 you go around destroying Robot Masters and collecting their special weapons to use against them, pretty standard Mega Man stuff.

Now, each weapon takes a certain amount of weapon energy, represented by the meter to the left of your health

Several of the weapons take significant chunks out of your energy meter, but some, like the Metal Blade, give you several shots per bar of energy. You can use this to your advantage.

First, equip something that drains less than one bar of Weapon Energy per shot, like the Metal Blades or the Quick Boomerangs, then start firing. Before you consume the first bar of weapon energy, bring up the weapon selection screen by hitting Start.

Then immediately close it. That fraction of Weapon Energy you used? It gets reset! Meaning that if you keep bringing up the selection screen after every few shots, you'll never run out of Weapon Energy for those weapons.

Of course you have to constantly count how many shots you've gotten off, and pause the game every few seconds, which makes this really tedious to do.

But it's totally worth it, right?

The How To Win at Nintendo Games series was indispensable to me for a long time. Mostly because for $4 I could get a guide to a couple dozen video games, written out in fantastic detail. This saved me a few hundred dollars on cartridges and let me vicariously experience some games that I might not otherwise have gotten to. They're kind of like a dead-tree edition of GameFAQs before there was a GameFAQs.

This week, I'm going to take a look at the How To Win At Nintendo Games series and some of the other series of these hint books and pull out some of the tips, tricks, and strategies that just don't sound right for one reason or another and verify their accuracy.

On page 127 How To Win At Nintendo Games #3 you see this nugget in the Mega Man 2 chapter:

[Heat Man] is most susceptible to the Air Shooter (which you've already collected, right?).

So, I tested it by collecting the Air Shooter, going to Heat Man's stage and facing off with him.

Hitting him with the Air Shooter is kind of tough, but if you do, you damage him slightly. Here's his energy meter after one shot.

I tried out some of the other weapons on him and when I got to the Bubble Lead, one shot did this much damage to his energy meter

and three shots did him in.

So, I'd have to say that Heat Man is most susceptible to the Bubble Lead. Sorry, Jeff.