Blaster Master can be kind of a tough game. You have to take your little guy up against great big monsters that are way more nimble and way stronger than you are. But you have a secret weapon at your disposal: the Pause Button.

Make your way to the boss of area 2, 4, 6, or 7 (one of the frogs or one of the crabby things) and start chucking grenades at it. A successful hit will make it flash. Then, while it's taking damage, pause the game.

While the game's paused, the boss monster will continually take damage. Leave the game paused for about 30 seconds or so and you win! Pretty awesome!

Just be aware that this works both ways. If you're getting hurt when you pause the game, you'll keep taking damage until you unpause. And then you'll have to do the whole battle over again.

Kid Icarus holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts for some reason.

But it's a pretty unforgiving game, especially at the beginning. Take one wrong step and:

I've never actually managed to make it too far without resorting to putting in cheats. Like this one:

Once you put that one in, you're given all of the treasures that you normally spend the majority of the game getting

And you get transported to the final stage with unlimited life. You can't lose!

Unless you're playing this on the Wii Virtual Console. This secret password doesn't work on that version of the game. Just on the original NES, I'm afraid.

Mickey Mousecapade is a pretty short and relatively easy game, punctuated by unusually tough boss fights. The final one in particular is maddeningly tough.

Unless you know how to beat her with hardly any effort, which I do.

Okay, first, make your way to the last room of the last level (make sure you have the key first, otherwise that door won't open)

Next, shoot approximately the area that I've circled

There's a hidden thing there, it could be an enemy that steals Minnie away, but there's an equally good chance that it's an invincibility fairy.

Once you get it, just hold Right. Your fairy will start to leave as soon as you get into the boss room.

But as long as she's still on the screen, you're still invulnerable, so walk right into the boss before your fairy makes it off the screen.

And you win! Without shooting anything or taking any damage.

Pretty snazzy.

In the original Super Mario Bros, if you get to Bowser while you're Super or Fiery, and you time it so that you hit the axe and Bowser at the same time, you'll hear the noise like you've gotten hit and shrunk, but you stay Super Sized.

Then, the next powerup block you hit will contain a mushroom, even though you already are Super. Collect it, and Mario turns small.

The next powerup block after that will have a fireflower in it (assuming you didn't get hit).

Collect that and Mario will turn Fiery, even though he's still small.

Shooting a fireball will make Mario's torso briefly turn big, but his feet will stay small if he's moving, which looks kind of silly.

A drawback to this is that you can't break any blocks while in this small-yet-fiery state. You'll have to get hit to revert back to Super Mario to do that. And if you get hit while Super, you lose a life.

But then the glitch resets itself, so you'll have to do it again should you want to.

If you're on the Internet long enough, you'll eventually come across this guy, Strong Bad:

He's part of a kind of popular web site.

Now, armed with that information, you could throw in a copy of Tag Team Wrestling for the NES and take a closer look at the teams.

Anyone look familiar?

How 'bout now?

Similar name, similar attire... I think we might have found where the inspiration for his design lies.

The NES version of Kid Niki has secret rooms all over the place. They're pretty well hidden, though, and I probably wouldn't have found them without the help of an old tips and tricks video I got a long time ago.

Like this one on the first stage.

Make your way to 1-9 and position yourself like so:

Then duck for a bit. Maybe hit the B button a few times to spin your sword around.

After a few seconds (and usually right after pressing B a couple of times) you'll be transported to a secret room!

Unfortunately, there's not a lot in this one

But there are a few others later on that have lots of bonuses, which we'll talk about another day.

You might think that 3D Worldrunner is called '3D Worldrunner' because the worlds that the Worldrunner runs on are presented in a pseudo-3D.

But you'd only be partially right.

If you press the select button, you'll notice that the screen kind of freaks out and displays most of the game in red:

and Blue

It's what's known as a 3D Anaglyph. If you have those funky glasses with the film for the lenses, you'll see the images in glorious 3D!

Well, kind of. The 3D isn't really all that good in this game, but, hey, they tried.

In Deja Vu, you play an amnesiac detective who's been framed for murder. You have to clear your name and implicate the bad guys. You do this by going around the city and searching for clues, both real and planted.

Eventually, you have to go to the police with what you find to clear your name. But if you have any incriminating evidence against you, you go to jail.

So, you have to get rid of the incriminating evidence. You do this by going down to the sewer.

You can throw anything you want into the waters down here and it'll disappear forever. So all you have to do is throw away the stuff that incriminates you and you're home-free.

How do you know what you should throw in?

Easy, just throw everything you have in. Your character is a good enough detective that he won't let you toss anything that you'll need to clear up the mess. So just throw in everything you can, walk to the police station, and win the game.

You'll probably want to wait until you've gathered all the evidence first, though. Otherwise you might get stuck.

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.

Lunar Pool is a kind-of odd pool game. You get tables of different shapes, and you get to play with the physical laws of the universe. On the screen where you can pick what round you start with, you can also pick the coefficient of friction between the balls and the table, anywhere from 0 to 255, with the default being 32.

If you set it all the way to 0, then the balls will never come to a stop, they'll just roll and roll until they all go into the pockets and you lose.

If you set it all the way to 255, the balls hardly move at all, and you'll never have enough shots put them all in the pockets.

So, I'm really not sure why you'd even want to go to those extremes.