You remember Karnov, right? The muscular fire-breathing circus strongman? He has his very own NES game, and it's actually pretty tough. Tough enough that if you make any kind of progress that you might not want to turn off your NES when you're done because you'll have to start over from Stage 1 if you do.

Or do you?

If you go to the title screen

And on Controller 1 hold Right + Select + A + B, and while holding all those down, press A on Controller 2 one time for each stage you want to skip, and while still holding down all those buttons on Controller 1, hit Start on Controller 1 (you might want to enlist the help of another hand or a foot).

Done right, you'll be whisked away to the stage of your choice

The only problem is that you won't have the benefit of having collected the items scattered around the levels that you skipped, but that's a small price to pay, right?

You might remember some time ago that I covered a method for continuing in Super Mario Bros. But would you believe that this works or other games, too? Because it totally does.

Like Kung-Fu Heroes.

Get the Game Over screen (and you will, trust me)

Head back to the title screen

Hold A and press Start, and wham!

Back to where you were to try again!

Which is much faster than trying to work your way through the beginning stages again.

I'm pretty sure you all know about the 'All Your Base' thing. It's old and played out at this point, so I'm really not going to get too far into it here.

So I'd like to draw your attention to another game that I might not have the chops to become the next 'All Your Base', but is still loaded with weird typos and mistranslations:

Beast Wrestler is a game about big ol' monsters that you have to make wrestle each other in some kind of bizarro wrestling match. The hook, I guess, is that at certain points you can take monsters that you've defeated and combine them with your current monster to make one that is possibly stronger than before. In fact, the game can explain it better than I can:

Which seems pretty straightforward... until your monster sustains heavy damage, that is

Then you're taken to my favorite typo in the whole game

A screen where they have misspelled the word 'two'.

I still crack a grin every time.

Play James Bond Jr. long enough and you'll eventually see this screen.

It would be pretty awesome if there were some way to put off seeing that screen for as long as possible, right?

And there totally is!

If you go to the passcode screen and enter this code:

The timer will go up to 99:99 and your bullets will be maxed out!

Which should go a long way toward delaying that screen from appearing.

If you've never played Rival Turf!, it's kind of like Final Fight, you run around various cities across the country beating up wave after wave of identical twins.

And just like lots of other games, if you end up running out of lives and continues, you have to start over. But if your score is high enough, you get to enter your name in the High Score Table. If you pretend for a moment that your name is 'CHRCONF'

And then hit 'EX', you'll be taken to a secret screen

Where you get to change the names of all the characters in the game. There aren't any restrictions that I could find, so go nuts

And that should make having to repeat the first few stages a little less tedious

You remember the ol' Konami Code, right? In case you've forgotten, it's:

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

And it's used in lots of Konami-branded games.

Like the arcade game compilation Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced, which has five old-school arcade games for you to test your mettle in. Complete with original graphics and sound!

But, go to the title screen of your favorite game and put in The Code and you'll hear a sound

And when you start the game, behold!

Better Graphics for you! And this works for all the games in the compilation.

Except for Rush 'n Attack, the graphics stay the same, but you get more lives to play with

Which is probably more useful in that game anyway.

Knight Rider is an OK game, but not one that I was ever very good at. So, I got to see this thing a lot.

After failing to do whatever it is I'm supposed to do in the game a few times, I just hold down the Select button on controller 1 and hit the Reset button on my NES

Then, the ending starts to play

Just be aware that it's one of the lamest, most unsatisfying endings you'll ever see. Which looks to be a pretty big letdown if you earned it the hard way.

Let's say that you're playing Bionic Commando. You go through Area 13 and get the intel that you need to take Flares into Area 4 so you can see.

Then you get to Area 4 and then either forget or are uncoordinated enough that you go in without them. What do you do?

Well, you could try to play the stage in the dark, but trust me, that's virtually impossible to do successfully. Or you jump into a spike-filled pit to sacrifice all your lives, then continue (if you have any) and try again. But there's a more elegant way.

Hold down the A + B buttons

And press the Start button.

Done right, you'll be taken back to the map screen!

Ready to try the stage again!

The first few boxers in the Punch-Out!! games have techniques that teach you how to play the game better.

Like Don Flamenco, for example.

The first time you fight him, you have to throw a punch (which he'll block), so he can counter it (he's kind of a showoff)

Dodge that and he'll be vulnerable to taking punches (like everyone else in the game).

But, unlike everyone else in the game, if you keep alternating left and right punches Don will never recover, letting you pummel him until he runs out of stamina and crashes to the mat.

Even better is that each time he gets up he gets a little more aggressive and throws the first punch, which you dodge, and then you can immediately start with the alternating jabs again.

Which means that you're going to win in record time.

Just be aware that this doesn't work the second time you have to face him.

In Super Mario Bros. 3, every time you score 80,000 points, you get to play the card matching game

Ignoring the grammar error, you are presented with a grid of 18 cards and have to try to match pairs of cards to get the powerups they contain.

If you fail twice, you have to stop and try again when you get another 80,000 points. But! The layouts aren't random. There are eight possible ways that they could be laid out.

And maybe you have a better memory than I do, but I can't remember eight layouts of 18 cards each. Sure, you could write them down, but then you'd have to make sure that you had your notes handy every time you played, which might be OK.

But, take a closer look at the second picture. Notice how the last 3 cards in the bottom row are Mushroom, Fire Flower, Starman? It turns out that those three cards are the same cards in the same order on all eight of the variations! Making it really easy to remember at least the three of them.