Today's pro tip is an oldie but a goodie (ha!).

A few days ago I made reference to a fairly well known trick that you just can't do in the arcade: how to get all the 1ups you want in the original Super Mario Bros. But, the game came out in 1985, which means that if you're younger than 23, this game came out before you were born. Add to that the Wii's Virtual Console service which lets you download and play these relics (*cough*), we've got a lot of new gamers who probably haven't wasted their childhoods spent lots of quality time practicing this game and might not know about it.

Okay, first make your way to 3-1. Specifically, the end where you see some koopas coming down the staircase. You'll need to make sure that you're either Super or Fiery.

Get rid of the first koopa, he just gets in the way.

Then try to time it so that you hit the second one so that it's just about halfway down the step above you.

Done right, and you'll know when you've done it right, you'll just keep bouncing off the shell, and eventually start racking up 1ups.

You can keep on going on for as long as you want this way, and your lives remaining display will get a little wonky.

A word of caution, though. If you manage to get over 127 lives and then lose one, it's game over. It's a glitch, so there's really not much you can do about that.

Play Super Mario Bros. 3 enough and you'll eventually come across ships loaded with coins. They take the place of Hammer Bros. on some of the overworld maps. But where do they come from? What triggers them? Good news for you, it's not random.

Let's take a look at the typical end of stage area.

Looks pretty normal, right? But there are five things to take note of here

• Item 1: You have to be at the end of the stage, and get a card. The card you get doesn't matter
• Item 2: You have to be in World 1, 3, 5, or 6. You can't do this in World 7 because there aren't any Hammer Bros. there
• Item 3: Your tens digit of your score, note this
• Item 4: Your coin count has to be a multiple of 11, but can't be zeros, and the digits have to match the tens digit of your score
• Item 5: Your time when you get the card has to be an even number. Okay, that's not strictly true, but without going into details that involve math, just make it even

Once you have all these criteria met, the next time you go to the map screen one of the Hammer Bros. (if there are any left) will turn into a ship loaded with coins.

Hop on in and go to town. It's totally possible to get all the coins on the ship, and the hidden 1-up at the end.

It's a method nearly as old as the NES itself. A game doesn't work, so you blow into the cartridge connector and, blam! The game works again! For a while. Then you don't play the game for a while, and then it doesn't work again. So you blow into it again, and it still doesn't work again, so you go through a dance of insertion, removal, blowing on the contacts, and reinsertion.

The underlying problem is likely that good contact isn't getting made between the pins in the cartridge and the connector in the NES itself. When you blow on the cartridge with your breath, you're getting water vapor from your breath on your cartridge, which briefly increases the conductivity of your cartridge. Which is great, right?

Well, no, not exactly. That increased connectivity makes your game work for a time, but at the cost of the lifespan of your cartridge. The water on the cartridges combined with the slight electrical current leads to increased corrosion on your cartridges. And, while it can be cleaned, it's best to not have the corrosion in the first place.

So what do you do? If you really think that your cartridges are dusty, invest in a can of compressed air to remove it, and it probably won't do a whole lot. No, your best bet is to remove and reinsert the cartridge and give it another shot. And if you have lots of problems with lots of games, you might consider doing repair on your console, which isn't very tough, really, but it's beyond the scope of this tip.

In the NES version of Super Mario Bros. you can take advantage of a quirk and bounce off the back of a turtle to get lots of extra lives.

So, in an effort to to get the most out of your quarter, and possibly impress the other arcade-goers with your prowess, you work your way to the end of world 3-1 only to discover:

Your Koopas have been replaced with Goombas. And what that means is that you can't do your super-snazzy trick any more... which means that I hope that you brought lots of quarters.

Generally, Castlevania games are hard. Your Belmont is just about the most unwieldy thing on the planet. He's about as nimble as a cinder block. The enemies, on the other hand, are extremely agile, powerful, and sitting in really unfair positions. And what all that means in games like Castlevania 3 is that you're going to see this a lot.

Kind of disheartening to see, really. Especially since some of the later levels are absolutely brutal and will suck up all your lives even before you get to the boss of the stage.

So, you do what anyone would do in that position, you call out for help.

Which never works, but it makes you feel better, right? Except... What's this?

Yep, you now have ten Belmonts in reserve instead of the paltry 2 that you normally get.

Awesome.

Just remember to put the name back in when you go to enter in the passwords that you're given to continue your progress.

The Goombas in the original Super Mario Bros. games have kind of a rough existence. All they can do is walk slowly toward Mario in a not very menacing way. Even rougher is that there's a glitch (or maybe it's a feature?) that lets you kill them twice. This is actually kind of tough to pull off.

First, find a place where there's a koopa in a shell, something for it to ricochet off of, and some Goombas. Like in World 3-2, for example.

What you have to do is kick the shell away from you, then quickly start stomping Goombas.

On its way back stomp some Goombas, and if the shell collides with one of the flattened Goombas, it'll get killed again. Brutal!

To explain it a little better, I've created a short animated .gif here to show it in action.

Man, sucks to be those guys.

The original Bionic Commando game is kind of tough, especially when you start out. For a while it takes little more than a stiff breeze to kill your hardened combat veteran. Shoot a few enemies, though, and you notice they drop these bullet-shaped things. Collect enough of them and you get these green dots up on the top-left corner of the screen that let you take some more hits.

Now, kind of early in the game you go down this kind of long vertical shaft (*snicker*) with enemies parachuting down all around you. They come down in a pretty predictable pattern of 'just in front of you', and when shot once, they yield the precious, life-giving bullets.

If you work your way down so that you're in one of the little offshoot rooms that has an immovable barrel in it and keep running into said barrel, you'll notice that troops parachute in directly in front of you. Shoot 'em, collect the powerup with the ol' grapple arm, and repeat ad nauseum.

We're running into the barrel, by the way, so that we grapple out to the side to grab the goodie rather than diagonally up to grab the ceiling for no real reason.

Getting two or three lifepoints is probably about all you're going to want to spend time getting, since it takes progressively more bullets to get each additional point. But, hey, go all out and get all 9 if you want to. It'll make the game way easier.

The story mode in Skate or Die 2 is nigh impossible. But there's another mode you can play to pass some time. It's you with three minutes and three boards (a.k.a. lives) to score as many points as you can.

But, pulling off tricks is pretty tough, and if you fail, you'll probably break your board... or worse, usually in a comically tragic fashion.

And, since it's so easy to fail, you're probably going to have a real hard time making it for the full three minutes the first couple of hundred times you play it.

So, what do you do?

Start a new game, move your guy to the top of the ramp, wait until he scratches his head, press Start, Start, Select. Done right you'll hear this sound.

Once you hear that, you'll have unlimited boards and be able to crash all you want. Though you'll still have that pesky 3 minute timer to deal with. Not a whole lot we can do about that.

In A Boy and his Blob you take control of a guy with a pet blob.

Obviously.

He has to use the blob to do pretty much anything, and he does that by giving the blob (Blobert) jellybeans. Each flavor jellybean will make the blob turn into something different and occasionally useful. Except the ketchup flavor. I'm not even sure where you'd get ketchup flavor jellybeans, Jelly Belly doesn't make them. Though I can't imagine they'd be any worse than those Buttered Popcorn beans.

But, I've gone off on a secant.

Anyway, the ketchup bean is used if you lose your blob somehow and he can't get back to you. Throw the bean and he'll 'catch up' to where you are.

Very clever.

But, if you throw a honey flavor bean at your blob and before he finishes transforming throw a ketchup bean at him, he'll turn into a brick wall.

What does the wall do? Does it block enemy projectile chocolate kisses? Does it hold up a slowly closing door while you race to the other side to hit some control switch? Does it just look cool?

Unfortunately, the answer to all those questions is 'no'. The wall doesn't do anything other than waste a couple of jellybeans. But the masonry looks kind of nice, so it's got that going for it.

Just about everyone knows about the ol' 'Konami Code'. It's even got its own Wikipedia entry. But for those that are too lazy to click the link, the gist is this: Starting with Gradius, a sequence of button presses (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) gave (in that game) lots of armaments. Since then it's found its way (sometimes with slight variations) into lots more games, most by Konami, with varying effects.

Somewhere along the line, though, the ubiquity of the code became something of a legend and it started popping up in other games. Wikipedia has a long list of such games, one of which caught my eye.

* 3-D World Runner (DOG, NES) - Pausing the game and entering Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A will cause a message to come up saying "I AM NOT KONANI".

I have the game, so I decided to give it a shot. I started a new game, paused it, entered the code and was greeted with this:

I thought that I might be having some problems with entering the code properly. Even though the NES Advantage is the best controller ever made, I sometimes have trouble hitting left or right without also hitting up or down, so I swapped out the Advantage for a smaller standard NES controller.

Started a new game, paused, entered the code and got this:

I was starting to feel a little frustrated, so I searched the Internet, looking for a picture that would corroborate this story and I found... Absolutely nothing! In fact, the only references I found to the code working in this game either just referenced the Wikipedia article or copied the info from it verbatim.

So, the lesson is: if something doesn't sound right, go out and test it! It may not be.