If you've played much pinball, you're familiar with the concept of TILT. If by some chance you don't know what that is, it's bump and shake the pinball machine too much and the playfield goes dead, costing you your ball.

But Pinball Quest seems to have forgotten to add this little mechanic.

You can use the Right arrow and the B button to shake the machine all you want, and the game won't care in the slightest.

Which is kind of tough to show in picture form, but trust me. I couldn't get any of the tables to tilt. So go nuts.

In the NES Teenaga Mutant Ninja Turtles game, you occasionally come across some sub-weapons. Most of them aren't really that useful, except for the Boomerang. The Boomerang is useful because if you manage to catch them after they're thrown, then you can use them again.

You can also use this property to your advantage.

First, have a Turtle with Boomerangs throw a few.

Then, before they come back, switch Turtles and have someone else catch them.

You could even transfer all of them to another Turtle with this method if you wanted to.

You might be wondering what I mean by a 'Left-Handed' joystick. Most joysticks that you'll find are set up with the stick on the left and the buttons on the right. Like my fighting stick here.

But (very) occasionally, you'll find an arcade machine set up the other way around, with the buttons on the left and the joystick on the right. They're actually getting to be so rare that I couldn't find one to take a picture of, so we'll just use the magic of image manipulation to pretend.

Now, you could just grab the stick with your right hand and mash the buttons with your left, but I find that after years of doing it the other way, that it's not really that easy.

So what I like to do is to cross my hands so that each one is hitting the controls that it's used to

Sure, it might look a little silly, but believe me, it works a whole lot better than trying to retrain your hands.

Pretty early in A Boy And His Blob you come across a couple of screens where Death in the form of these brown things rain down from the top of the screen. Most guides will tell you to use the Vanilla jellybean and use the Umbrella to protect yourself. But the Boy slips and slides around so much when you let off the cross-pad that I usually end up getting hit anyway.

So what I like to do is to use the Cola Jellybean instead to turn the Blob into a bubble.

That way it's impossible for me to get hit, since I'm protected on all sides.

And, yeah, you move a little slower, but I'd say that's a fair trade.

In Mega Man 2 when you select your favorite Robot Master, they stand in the middle of the screen and do an Action Pose(tm) in the middle of a field of stars.

But!

If you hold down A + B + Select, then hold Start, you get a surprise

The stars have been replaced by the little bird-things that plague you throughout a couple of the stages.

What's the point?

Nothing, as far as I can tell.

The Willow RPG for NES is pretty tough, and if you're like me at all, you'll give up on it pretty fast. But what if you want to see some more places that the game has to offer?

Well, you're in luck, kinda.

You could start by putting in this password:

Which has fairly normal-looking results.

You're toward the end of the game, loaded up with weapons, armor, and magic, but you're only on Level 3.

But if you hit Select

These coordinates appear in the middle of the screen. If you hold the A button and press Up and Down you can change the right one, and if you hold the B button and press Up and Down you can change the left one.

After you find some coordinates you're happy with, hit Select again to be transported there.

It'll take some trial and error to make sure that you don't end up inside a wall or in a screen full of glitches, so you might want to take notes.

Like a lot of games that I've rented over the years, the Super NES Pitfall game was way too long and difficult for me to master in the one evening that I had it. So if I was ever going to see the end of it, I needed some help.

In the case of this game, help entailed going to the title screen

and pressing

X, Select, A, Select, Y, A, X, Select

And then I was able to choose whatever level I wanted

So I just started at the end, beat the last boss, and won!

Which is way more achievable for one night with the game than working your way through the whole thing at once, right?

Spy vs Spy is kind of an underrated game (if you're playing against another person, that is). You have to take your spy of choice around a building, setting booby traps and searching around to find some spy-related stuff, put the stuff in a briefcase, and then hightail it out of the building.

One of the items you collect is a briefcase to stash your stuff in.

But it has an interesting secondary property. When you pick up the case, you get your health restored. So, after you've been in a fight with the other Spy, you can take the case and hide it inside something

And then get it back out for a quick health refill

Just be careful that you don't stick it behind something that's been booby trapped.

Super Baseball 2020 is one of those sports games where they take a look at the 'distant future' of professional sports. But, at its core, it's just baseball... with cybernetics and robots.

But, say you start a game, and when you get to this screen

you hold Select while you press Start. You can then put a password in if you like. If not, you'll be greeted with the League Selection screen. Pick whichever league you like, and then get ready.

The computer takes over, it picks the teams

And then it starts playing the game by itself.

And it'll keep going until you reset the game or turn it off.

What's the point? I let it go for two games before I got bored watching it, but you could probably do the whole Pennant race if you wanted to.

Oh, and the passwords that you get after each game do work if you ever want to use them to take over the season, or if you don't want the computer to lose its progress.

A couple of times in Nightshade you encounter these mummies

Which are fairly annoying since they have zero health. Why is that annoying? Mostly because you can punch and kick the things all day long and you can't get rid of 'em.

So what do you do?

Well, it turns out that there are two ways to deal with them.

1. You could use the Staff of Ra to fire a fireball at it. But you won't get that until late in the game. Or

2. You can jump behind it and get really close, then punch it three times to do the ol' uppercut. Turns out that the mummies are weak to an uppercut to the back of the head

In fact, it just takes one.