One of the kinds of games that have kind of fallen out of favor in recent years is the button-mashing competitive sports game.

And no, that's not a bad thing.

But if you're playing one, like the original Skate or Die and its High Jump mode

You and (optionally) your friends will take turns hitting the buttons as fast as you can, getting cramped arms, and getting lame scores

But plug in a turbo controller, though, and you can sail to superhuman heights. Just make sure that you pass the controller around so that everybody gets the same high scores.

Then you can move on to the events that take actual skill, and save yourself from getting cramped forearms.

One of the... sort of interesting things about Super Street Fighter II is that you can pick lots of different colors for your characters. What color you get depends on what button you use to select your fighter (your choice of A, B, X, Y, L, R, or Start).

But!

If you press and hold any of the buttons in (except for Start) when you pick your character, you'll notice that you get yet another color!

And most of them look pretty awful, but there are a few good ones in there. You just have to dig around to find them.

The Clayfighter games were just kind of OK, so I usually look for a way to minimize the amount of time that I have to spend with them, which is where this comes in.

If you go to this screen:

Press and hold the Y button on Controller 1 and then press L, L, R, Down, Left, R, you'll hear a strange sound. From there, you go the Options Screen and notice that you can take the speed from 3

All the way to 10!

Which is so fast that you're going to have a hard time doing anything because your guys move around so fast. But that means that the matches are going to end quicker, which is definitely not a bad thing.

Super Buster Bros. is a kind of tough game, and if you want to get to the end of it, you're going to have to invest a lot of time, effort, and energy.

Or you could take a shortcut.

You could to go the Game Select screen, grab Controller 1 and press

L, R, R, L, Up, Down

Done right, you'll see a number appear in the middle of the screen.

Which you can ratchet all the way up to 40, where the game gets kind of tough.

Or you could use it as a kind of continue feature to start the game where you left off the last time. It's up to you, really.

When you're playing through the Super NES Legend of Zelda game, you come across lots of walls that look like they can be destroyed to find some goodies behind them, but some of them are just old, crumbly, and not real breakable. Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to tell them apart?

And there totally is!

First, find a wall that you want to test. Then press and hold the Sword Button (commonly known as the 'B' Button) then walk into whatever wall you want to test. Keep trying to walk into the wall and Link will eventually start tapping on the wall with his sword.

If it's a normal, non-breaky wall, you'll hear this tapping sound.

But!

If it's a breakable wall, you'll hear this tapping sound instead.

Which will save you time, effort, and you won't waste time throwing bombs around walls that will never break.

So it's totally win-win... er... win.

Pretty much since the video games kept score, it's been the obsession of a lot of people to get as many points as possible to show that they were the best player. And an arcade game called 'Giga Wing' takes that to its crazy extreme.

In Giga Wing, you have the ability to reflect enemy shots back at them, which allows you to collect these shield emblems, emblems that when collected increase your score multiplier, and your score multiplier increases the number of points you get every time you shoot down and enemy ship. And very quickly in this game there are lots of shots and lots of enemies that explode into a shower of pickups when hit

Seriously, it's enough anyone to get a score in the hundreds of millions.

But that's nothing compared to people who are actually good at the thing. Heck, you have to go through the whole game on one credit to see the 'real ending', and if you manage to do that, your score rockets up to the crazy-high territory: the Trillions.

Needless to say that I'm probably not going to achieve that any time soon. But maybe you can, if you can find a Giga Wing arcade machine (or a copy of the Dreamcast port).

Like pretty much every other game in the series, Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts is a kind of tough game. And that means that unless you spend a lot of time getting good at it, you're never going to see the advanced stages.

Unless...

You go to the Options screen

Highlight 'Exit' and press and hold L + Start on Controller 2 and press Start on Controller 1. Done right, you'll see a second Options screen

Letting you pick where you want to start along with letting you hear whatever music in the game you want!

Which means that you'll finally be able to see what the later stages look like!

It's no big secret that before there was an ESRB that Nintendo had certain hoops game developers had to jump through to publish games on their systems. Take Final Fight, for example, a game about going through the streets of Metro City and punching people to death.

In the arcade, the first boss you run across has a unique name.

So he gets a name change for the Super NES version

Which I guess shows that the kiddos who were going to play this game would have been more affected by some boss thug's name than bludgeoning people to death with steel pipes.

In the Underground portions of Super Mario Bros. it's real tempting to try and get up to the ceiling, that way you can just kind of run to the right as fast as you can without worrying about trying to avoid the obstacles in front of you. But usually it's kind of hard to get up there.

Unless...

I alluded to this earlier, but if you scroll the screen so that one column of bricks is halfway scrolled off the screen and then start breaking them

You'll notice that Mario (or Luigi) can fit in the gap, and he'll kinda get stuck

Keep on jumping until you're at the top of the screen!

Making it much easier to pass these stages.

Bats in Nightshade are particularly annoying because they kinda swoop in and take some pretty healthy chunks of your health away when you're not really looking.

But if you've found the whistle, you can totally take care of them. Just find it in your inventory and OPERATE it. It turns out that bats in this game hate the sound it makes.

And they clear out of whatever room you're in

Making it much easier to walk through without the danger of getting rabies.