Make no mistake, Battletoads hates you, but there are ways you can even the field a bit.

Like in Stage 1 for instance, if you're fast enough dispatching the first two enemies (and you have to be really fast, under 10 seconds fast), you'll notice a flashing area up on the first platform on the right.

If you can touch it, you'll be warped away to level 3, a.k.a. the Speeder Bike level

The main drawback is that you will have skipped Stage 2, and will have missed the opportunity to stock up on some lives there, but you have alternate methods for that anyway.

This one's kind of fun.

In Golden Axe 2, if you go to the Options screen and set the type of magic to Special

Then play the game normally until you come to a boss. When the music changes, hold in the A button (or whatever button you have designated for Magic

Don't let it go until the battle's over and the screen transitions to black. Then, when you go to the bonus stage, don't press any buttons at all.

It'll kind of look like the bonus stage will go on forever until you thwack the enemies walking around, but it will eventually end.

When you start the next stage, your character will immediately unleash a magical attack

After which, you'll see that your stockpile of magic books has suddenly grown enormous!

If you use more than your character's normal maximum, you can occasionally use other characters' spells

But, if you use too many, the game will freeze, so staying within your characters' limits is probably for the best.

In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, you pick up these cards that are used in something called the "DSS System" do give you special abilities, you have to pick one from the top row and one from the bottom. And then you press the L button to activate the combo.

For example: choose the Mars and Manticore cards and your whip will be replaced with "Poison Claws"

Then you press L again to deactivate it.

What's interesting is if you press L to activate a combo

And while your character is going through the animation of activating the skill, you go to the status screen

And pick a combination of cards that you don't actually have, you get its effect anyway! Like here, this combo activates a familiar that follows me around

The only drawback is that some of the effects are kind of hard to figure out what they do, and if you do manage to figure them out, the game won't actually record the description for you (unless you eventually collect the cards, of course).

One of my favorites is this combination

Which gives you the Item Crush ability. It costs 20 hearts, but you unleash a super attack with whatever sub-weapon you have equipped, if you put in the correct button combo

It's quite useful, especially on bosses and powerful normal enemies.

Today's Pro Tip has some pretty big .gif files, hit 'Read More' if you want to read the rest of it

In Fester's Quest you have red and blue Gun powerups. The blue ones increase your gun's level and the red ones decrease it. And, while most of the levels of shots you get look kind of neat, you'll quickly discover that most of them are completely useless when you get into close quarters.

The Silver Surfer game is pretty tough, mostly because a being with super-galactic power can somehow be defeated incredibly easily. Which means that you'll be seeing this a lot

But there's a way around that.

If you go to the title screen

And press Up on both controllers at the same time, you'll be taken to a password screen. Enter this password

And hit Start. You'll get a confirmation noise (and can enter more passwords if you want)

Start the game, and you'll find that the Surfer is now completely unhittable!

Meaning that you can start a level, go have a sandwich, come back to fight the boss, and repeat the process to finish the game with the smallest amount of effort possible.

If you're into that kind of thing.

In the 'grassy' stages of Super Mario Bros. 3 (like stage 1-2, for example) you might notice that there's a dark green patch at the bottom of the screen.

You may be thinking that was an artistic choice, but if you're properly prepared, you'll find that it's more than that.

Enter one of those stages with a P-Wing equipped and fly down the closest pit (being careful to not actually fall in, of course) and you'll find that the dark green stuff is actually a tunnel that runs most of the length of the stage!

Of course, stuff like enemy fireballs that go through the ground can still hit you if you're not careful, if you stop mashing the A button you'll fall off the bottom of the screen and lose a life, and you can't actually finish the stage from down there, you have to be above ground to hit the Card at the end.

But it's a fun novelty to do once or twice.

I never was particularly good at Burai Fighter, and that means that I got to see this a lot

So, to lengthen the time before I had to see that screen, I would go to the Password screen and enter this password

Which would give me 99 lives to play with

And you should, too.

Occasionally, while you're slinging Root Beers around in Tapper, you'll notice that occasionally a patron will drop a tip on the counter.

If you grab it, you get a 1500 point bonus, and some 'entertainment' plays

But I typically avoid picking them up for 3 reasons:

1. Grabbing it takes you away from slinging root beers, which means that your patrons get closer to the end of their bars and tougher to get out
2. Some of the patrons quit paying attention to the drinks being slung at them, and when they start to overlap with each other, it can be tough to tell who wants a drink and who's watching the show (check out the bottom bar in the second picture, for example)
3. While patrons are watching the show, more patrons file in, filling the bar, and making it tougher to clear the level

This doesn't mean that you should necessarily avoid grabbing all of them, but I'd avoid them until you're ready to increase the game's difficulty.

The first few levels of Bee 52 are pretty easy. They're intro levels to help you get to grips with the control scheme, the game mechanics, that kind of thing. But what if you're already an old hand at the game and don't want to do the super easy stuff at the beginning?

Well, good news!

All you have to do is start at Level 1, go out the Front Door

Go all the way to the end of the Field

And hop into the very last flower. You'll be rewarded with...

A level warp! Which will take you directly to Stage 4

Where the difficulty ramps up significantly.

In Gun Nac you get to visit a shop between levels to spend the money you've collected in your travels to increase your firepower. You even get to visit the shop at the beginning of the game to get a few complimentary bombs to get started.

But, if you hold down Left + Select as you're pressing A or B to dismiss the shopkeeper's text, you'll be presented with the purchasing menu

And, even though your indicator says you have $0, you actually have $10, enough to buy one thing.

Choose wisely!