In the watery part of Super Metroid, you eventually come across a giant sea creature called 'Draygon' that you have to defeat to proceed. He's usually pretty tough to take down... unless...

All over his room are these turrets that shoot at you during the battle.

Which you can (and should) shoot with a couple of missiles to break them, which turns them into little electrical hazards.

Then, let ol' Dray pick you up and start swimming around the room (you'll get hit a couple of times, but it's worth it)

He's start swimming in wider and wider circles (as long as you don't break free) and will eventually take you within grappling range of those busted turrets. Which you should totally do.

Which will hurt a little bit, but the current mostly gets passed on to Draygon and kills him in pretty short order.

And you hardly had to do anything. It's win-win!

When you're playing World 7 of Super Mario Bros. 3, you might come across a Tanooki Suit in the Fortress, mostly because you kind of need it to complete the stage. So by the time you reach Stage 7-8 there's a good chance you still have the suit on... if you haven't managed to get hit and lose it.

And in 7-8 there's a pipe that leads to a room with a Hammer Suit in it, which you obviously want because Hammer Suits are awesome.

And if you're feeling a little silly, you might turn into Statue Mario (by holding Down and pressing B) while you wait for the suit to bounce onto you.

And if you do, you'll grab the suit, turn into Hammer Mario, and be Gray!

But!

You also won't be able to enter the pipe at the other end of the room. You'll be stuck in there forever!

Or at least until time runs out, costing you a life and the powerup, so I don't recommend it.

Play E.V.O. long enough and you'll find this hidden grove of dinosaurs that talk about these weird creatures with the head of a cat and the body of a rabbit.

If you decide to take that fairly obvious clue, you end up with your cat-rabbit thing

From there, choose 'Body' → 'Ramothecus Body' to spend 5000 of your EVO points and become a monkey.

From there, keep going back to 'Body' → 'Evolve Further', and you'll evolve further (duh)

And again

For Human Form!

The human is kind of quick, and has a decent attack with that club. But this is definitely a one-way path. Once you hit this, there's no turning back and no more experimenting with combinations of body parts.

You also might be wondering how the same creature can evolve both into a female mermaid and a male caveman. And to that I'd just like to remind you to repeat to yourself that it's just a game and you should really just relax.

It's really easy in competitive Tetris, especially if you're matched up against someone who's at about the same skill level that you are, to feel like the game comes down to the selection of pieces you get. But, in most games of Tetris, both players get the same pieces. It really comes down to who can put them in place the fastest.

Which is kind of hard to wrap your head around, I know, so I prepared the video below where I use the same controller input for both controllers and play a short round of competitive Tetris.

It's actually pretty illuminating. Everything's the same: pieces dropped, garbage sent, all of it.

Of course there are probably variants of Tetris that don't make everything equal like this, but you probably don't want to play those.

The first Actraiser was a unique game, it had side-scrolling action stages interspersed with Sim-City-esque building stages. Which mostly means that if you want to get to the Big Bad at the end of the game, you've got a lot of work to do.

Or do you?

You could fire up the sequel, Actraiser 2, go to the Password screen, and enter this password

If you do, you'll be whisked away to the final battleground of the first game!

Where you can fight the final boss from that game while in the second one. Why would you do that? To see if you still have the chops to defeat it. What happens if you do?

Uhm... I don't know. I wasn't actually able to do that...

But!

If you can, let me know!

Super Tennis is a surprisingly decent Tennis game. But I can tell, sometimes you want to mess with it. Change it around somehow.

And you can!

First, start a match

Then hit Select on Controller 1 to pause the action

Grab Controller 2 and hit

R, R, Left, Down, B, A, L, L

Then grab Controller 1 and hit B. Done right, you'll see a screen full of gobbledygook come up.

Which is actually a whole bunch of statistics, which you can change to whatever you want. And since they're in Base 16, the highest thing you can adjust them to is 'F'.

And there are four pages of them to change, so you might be there for a second or two.

Then you go back to the game an notice... well... not much, really. But at least I know that my Tennis Star's stats are maxed out, even though they don't seem to do much.

The Bubsy games are a little on the tough side, so you're probably going to want to have all the help you can get going through the levels, right?

Like the second one, for instance. If you go to the title screen

And take Controller One and press:

B, Up, B, Select, y

(which conveniently can be acronymed as 'BUBSY')

And start the game up.

Done right, you should have 50 Bubsys to play with!

Making it way easier to make it through the first few stages, at least.

If you've played the Punch-Out!! games enough, you've probably gotten the basic strategy down of Dodge Punch, Throw Punch. Which is great for most situations, but when you're ready to step up your game you need to master the art of counterpunching.

Throwing a counter-punch is easy... in concept. All you have to do is wait for your opponent to throw a punch

Then counter with the same punch on the same side (i.e. if he throws a Left Jab (your right) you counter with a Right Jab)

Done right he'll be stunned and ripe for a few more punches

So you can unload a little more.

Master this technique and you can shave precious seconds off your KO time in Time Trial mode, which is great, but you can also completely destroy the computer opponents and show off to your friends, which is really what Super Punch-Out!! is all about.

Let's say that you're playing Donkey Kong Country. You've put in the code for 50 lives, but you've burned through most of them on a particularly difficult spot.

What do you do?

Well, you could go back to the very first level of the game, where Donkey Kong bursts out of his treehouse.

Then turn right around and go back in for a free 1up!

Once you've collected it, just pause the game and hit Select to exit the stage, and you can go back in to collect it again. Do this as many times as you need for more 1ups!

Just don't go in the bottom entrance, there's nothing there but an empty Banana Horde, which will make Donkey Kong sad, and we don't want that.

Sorry it took me so long to get to Shaq-Fu. I didn't realize how popular this game was with you guys. If you've never played it, it involves everyone's favorite basketball star, Shaquille O'Neal, in a martial-arts tournament where he has to keep the Earth safe from being invaded by otherworldly forces.

Which sounds great, right? But let's say that you've played it for a bit and want to spice up the action. You could go to the Options Screen

Grab Controller One and (kind of quickly) press

Y, X, B, A, L, R

Done right, you should see the screen momentarily flash red. And that means that when you get into the game, the little white indicators that you've been hit

Will turn red

Which I have been told is supposed to be blood. It's not Mortal Kombat levels or anything, but there you go.