I mentioned Bad Dudes the other day when I was talking about finding our friend Karnov in more games than just his own. The game was brought to the NES, but since putting quarters in your NES doesn't actually get you any continues, the game's actually pretty tough.

So, you do what I do to make it easier on yourself. Go to the title screen.

Then pick up controller 2 and (quickly) press "B, A, Down, Up, Down, Up", then Start on controller one. Done right, you'll see this:

Which probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you, so when you get into the game proper, it displays correctly

Now, with that many chances, you'd practically have to try to fail to rescue the president from the ninjas.

Ikari Warriors is a pretty tough game. You take your shirtless hero up against a heavily armed army in an attempt to kill them all for one reason or another.

It's just about as hard as it sounds.

But if you just can't seem to make good progress in the game, you can put in the longest level-select code that I know about.

First, go to the title screen

wait for the guys to get done with their little dance (or just press Start). Then put in the following on Controller 1:

Up, Down, A, A, B, Left, Right, A, B, Up, A, Down, Right, Right, Left, B, Up, Left, A, Right, B, Left, Right, A, Left, Up, A, Down, A, Right, Left, B, Start

You have to get all that in before the demo starts.

Then you see the familiar plane-landing sequence

Here, press A or B and you'll see the familiar 'Area 1' display come up. Press either A or B to change it and press Start to begin on the area of your choice.

They get harder as the game goes on, so, good luck!

The Who Framed Roger Rabbit game can be kind of tough because the locations of the items you need to solve the game change every time you play it. You get passwords to save your progress, so it's not all bad.

However, keeping track of passwords is kind of tedious if you don't have a super-memory. So here's one that's kind of easy to remember:

Just put that code in and you'll have everything you need to complete the game... except for the dynamite. The dynamite isn't too tough to find, though, (though, that's another pro tip).

Is there a code that will give you everything and the dynamite?

Sure, but it's not so easy to remember.

Spy hunter is a neat game about a spy car (and sometimes boats) that goes real fast and has to destroy other, evil, cars (or boats) on the road for points, all while looking out for the civilian vehicles.

Occasionally a weaponry truck will come around and give you something awesome to enhance your destructive abilities, like this one carrying the Oil Slick attachment.

But, the trucks come pretty infrequently, wouldn't it be awesome if you could just start with all the weapons from the get-go?

Well, hold on to your hats.

At the title screen, hold down A + B + Select and hit start and bam!

Access to all the weapons that the game has for you, even the anti-aircraft missiles!

Just be warned that you lose them all if you crash, so try to not do that.

Ninja Gaiden is a pretty good game that tells the story of ninja-guy Ryu through several cinematic cutscenes with the occasional gameplay section thrown in.

And you'll probably also notice that there are some pretty good sounds/music in the game. But, who wants to actually play the game to hear them all?

Not me.

So I use the game's built-in sound test when I want to hear the songs.

First, go to the title screen

Then while holding hold Down, Left, A, B, and Select, press Start.

Now you can check out all the sounds the game has to offer without actually getting good at it and progressing the storyline.

Though getting good at the game would be OK.

Taboo isn't so much a game as it's a Tarot card reader. And it's not even a real good one of those, either.

But you have it there, and it's doing its thing, which is fine. You'll notice that after you ask it your question that it will start shuffling the cards before dealing them, natch.

Now I had read in just about every magazine that I could get my hands on when this game was newish (that also bothered to cover this game) that you could influence the direction that the cards were cut and shuffled by pressing the different directions on the control pad of your controller.

It turns out that that's not exactly the case.

I pressed the buttons on my controller's cross pad in random directions, and could only get the cards to go in the direction I wanted less than half the time. So, the next time I tried to get the cards to go the same direction every time... and it only went the direction that I was pressing about a quarter of the time... which is pretty much what you'd expect if it was random.

So, yeah, this 'trick' doesn't exactly work. Don't fool yourself into believing it.

In the second board of Donkey Kong Jr. you come across some handholds that look different than the rest of the vines you've seen thus far.

They move left and right

and you have to make your monkey grab the left one and then gracefully transfer to the stationary vines on the far left.

So you reach out...

But, if you try to press 'Up' to start climbing instead of 'Left' to transfer over...

Junior's graphics kind of freak out. He's still playable and everything, and if you move him back into position, he goes back to normal.

I just think it's pretty interesting to see.

Oh, and it does not work on the arcade version of this game, so don't bother.

Take a look at this picture:

Looks like a regular old screen shot of Super Mario Bros, right? But take a closer look at the clouds and the bushes.

Turns out that they're the same, just with their colors altered slightly.

You might be asking yourself, "How's this useful information?" I'll leave that to you, you're resourceful and can figure out something.

If you've ever played Marble Madness, then you've probably seen this screen.

You'll notice also that there are these numbers on the ground kind of outside the regular field of play.

If you use the conveniently-placed ramps to get your little marble over there, then you get a nice bonus.

1,000 points times the number you landed on. Pretty awesome for pretty much no effort.

Oh, and this works on the NES port, too.

This is Proto Man.

There's a whole lot to his angsty story in the Mega Man universe, but I'm really not going to go into that here. In Mega Man 3 he just kind of appears every once in a while to fight you in a dead end for a few minutes and then he opens up a path for you to proceed. And his arrival is preceded by five very distinctive notes on a whistle.

But, if you've ever finished the game, you might know that there's more to the little ditty he plays. And, you can hear those extra notes pretty well any time you want, with a little timing.

So first, go to a stage where Proto Man appears, like Gemini Man's stage above. Then, once you get to the screen that Proto Man appears on, but before his song starts, hit the Pause button.

Done right (and you have an extremely small window of time to do it) the song will keep playing for a bit. Once it's done, unpause the game and then continue normally. And, this does work for both the original NES version and the Gamecube Mega Man Collection.

And, no, this isn't all that useful, really. But it is kind of neat, especially if you're a huge Proto Man fan... Those exist, right?