In Dragon Warrior, like most Role Playing Games, your guy starts out pretty weak.

But!

If you start a new quest and use the name "TEST" instead of something good

You'll find that your starting statistics are slightly higher!

Making the game a bit easier.

Okay, The Little Mermaid isn't that hard of a game, but that doesn't mean that I'm above taking every advantage that I can.

Like going to the title screen.

Grabbing Controller 2, holding Right + A + B, and while holding those hitting Start on Controller 1. Done right, a new option should appear

Turning this game into a test of endurance.

A basic tenet of games based on movies is: most of them are awful. But sometimes you just have to play them to see how bad they really are. Like Jurassic Park.

But let's say that you get a game like this on a rental and don't have the chops to make it to the end before it has to go back to the rental place. What do you do?

Well, you could to to the title screen

And then grab Controller 1 and press Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left. Done right you'll hear a noise of some kind. Start your game like normal, and then any time you want to. Pause the game and hit Select. You'll be warped to the next stage!

And you can keep on doing that until you get to the end of the game (spoiler alert between these lines!)

Making the game last about three minutes (or less if you have fast fingers).

Money can be kind of hard to come across in the second Wizards and Warriors game, you don't really need it for much, but it's nice to have when you do want to buy something.

So, to make it easier to raise some cash, you could go to the title screen

Press and hold Up on the Cross Pad + B + Select, and while holding all of those, press Start. Done right, you can go to your nearest merchant and start playing the gambling game. The skull will always land in cups in the following order: 1, 4, 3, 2. And then repeat. You can sit there racking up cash for as long as you like

I was able to accumulate a tidy sum until I screwed up the rhythm and picked a cup out of sequence. Once that happened, the pattern ended and I had to go do something else.

Dracula's a pretty tough customer in Castlevania, and if you die while fighting him, you only get very few powerups to fight him again, making things tougher.

But!

You could go back down the staircase leading to his chamber, and then back up again. If you do, the candelabras will reset and you can collect the powerups again. And as long as you don't walk far enough to the left to trigger the boss fight, you can repeat as many times as you want. And using some techniques I discussed earlier, you can really load Simon to the teeth with weaponry

Making this a slightly slower version of the method in Castlevania IV

Ever been playing Zanac and got just so far before you got frustrated and quit? Or maybe your playtime was cut short by a power failure or something and you had to stop before reaching the end. What do you do?

Well, you could start over again from the beginning, or you could power on the game, and wait for the title screen to appear

And then press the Reset button on your NES 13 times(!).

Done right, when you hit "Start" to bring up the Start / Continue screen, you can use the Left and Right arrows on the Cross Pad to choose whatever level you want.

Just be aware that you have to hit "Continue" to start on any level other than 1. Also, I couldn't start on anything higher than Area 10. When I tried to pick anything higher it'd kick me back to 10, so there's still a little bit of work to do, it seems.

Mega Man 3's password system may look pretty complicated, but it's actually pretty easy to figure out. For example, it uses the placement of a single red dot to record how many Energy Tanks you have, and you can totally use this to your advantage.

For example, take this code that I got for having beaten no Robot Masters and having no Energy Tanks.

Consulting the chart below, I know that a single red dot in square C5 means 0 Energy Tanks. From there, it's a simple matter of moving that dot up to A6

To start the game with 9 Energy Tanks, the maximum!

From there, it's a simple matter of recording your password, moving the dot, and continuing on each time you need a refill!

And here's the list of dots and their Energy Tank attributes

      #   Dot Position
0      C5
1      E6
2      E4
3      B4
4      A5
5      C1
6      D2
7      C3
8      F2
9      A6

If you're a fan of the Star Wars movies, there's a good chance that you're also a fan of the musical score from the series. And if you liked the score from the movies, odds are that you want to listen to it in any form, right?

Well, then good news!

If you pop your copy of The Empire Strikes Back into your NES, and when the "A Long Time Ago..." appears

Press Left + Select on Controller 1. Done right, you'll be taken to a screen where you get to hear each of the musical selections from the game!

And who wouldn't want to hear these iconic songs, represented in their 8-bit forms?

If you're playing through the NES adaptation of The Hunt for Red October for some reason, you might start thinking to yourself, "Gee, I wish there was some way I could make this game easier". And if you were, today's your lucky day.

First, crash your subs into the landscape until you run out, which sounds counterintuitive, I know. But when you crash your last one, and before the screen tells you "Game Over", pause the game.

Then while it's paused, grab Controller 1 and press

A, B, Select, Right, Left, Left, Right, Select, B, A, B, B, A

Under normal circumstances, that is your single-use Level Skip code, but since we're out of ships, the circumstances change and instead, you're given a full complement of submarines! How many? Well, the counter rockets up to "I5" if that tells you anything

Which means you can play this game until you finish it or you're absolutely sick of it. Win-win!

The Lolo games are pretty tough, but maybe you've gotten pretty good that them. You've practiced enough and can finish the levels backward and forward without batting an eyelash. You're ready for the Pro levels.

The second Lolo game has four Pro levels, accessible by going to the password screen and using the password PRO*, where "*" is either A, B, C, or D, depending on what Pro level you want to play.

And these levels are doozies, check 'em out.

Pro A:

Pro B:

Pro C:

And Pro D:

And, yeah, there's only four of them, but they're tough. But you're up to the challenge, right?