Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States, so I thought we'd go with a Thanksgiving-themed tip for today.

Just start up the game, go to the title screen

And type the word 'gobble' (without quotes) on your keyboard. Done right, Lex will momentarily don a turkey outfit

How appropriate!

In the not-too-distant past, to save progress in some of your games, you'd be given a password of some kind. Which was usually fine until you get something like this one from Super Castlevania IV.

Now, what're you supposed to do with that? Draw a little 4x4 grid and draw symbols in each of the squares? Write out the words "heart, space, space, holy water", etc.?

Well, you could do those things, but I prefer to substitute numbers for the symbols. Like so:

Then the code becomes:

Which is much easier to write down, much easier to type, and much harder to screw up. It's a win-win...win.

Make no mistake, Solomon's Key hates you. The game is long, difficult, and unforgiving.

But, if you're a glutton for punishment, at the game over screen, where you get your GDV

If you hold Up + A + B, you can continue your game

Prolonging the experience.

Just make sure you have a few extra controllers on hand, some of them might sail across the room in frustration.

In Double Dragon's Mission 3, you will eventually come across a pair of green Abobos. They're kind of tough, since you have less room to maneuver than normal.

But you can use that to your advantage.

If you can back Abobo up so that his back is touching the wall on the left

And give him a jumpkick to the face, he'll fall through the wall!

Saving you precious life-points.

In the Super NES game Vegas Stakes, your goal is to wander around the different casinos of Las Vegas and eventually earn $10 million.

And eventually you get access to the Royal Palace casino which features, among other things, no maximum bets. So let's say that you get close to your goal of $10 million. Real close, like over 9.9 million. Then you head to the Roulette Wheel and plunk down your whole wad on one number.

The ball spins, and if you win:

You win well over $R million!

Which, according to my math, should be around $350 million.

Maybe none of the developers thought that someone would be dumb enough to blow that kind of cash on such a long bet, I don't know.

But I sure was.

Life Force is the sequel to Gradius, so you might assume that our old friend the Konami Code would also work with this game.

And you'd be right.

Normally, you start the game with three ships.

But, if you go to the title screen.

Put in the famous button sequence

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

And then begin your game, you'll have increased your fleet tenfold

And if you have two players, hit Select before Starting your game to give both of you the battalion of ships.

And good luck! You'll need it!

I played Vegas Dream a lot, but never really got what you might call 'good' at it. So I like to use various tests to check out all of the content that I might have missed.

If you start a new game

And then press

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

At the Game Select screen, you'll hear a noise. Then you've got several options at your disposal.

Hold A + B and press Start to enter Message Test Mode

Move the cursor to Blackjack, hold A and press Start to see the ending

Move the cursor to Roulette, hold A and press Start to play the Last Chance Slot Machine

Move the cursor to Slot Machine, hold A and press Start to check out a Face Test

Move the cursor to Keno, hold A and press Start to check out the Sound Test

You'll have to reset the game and to the code again once you get into one of these modes if you want to try out the other ones.

Bejeweled Blitz is one of those things that just kind of pops up on Facebook once in a while. People just can't seem to stop playing it for some reason. If you've never played it, it's a stripped-down version of normal Bejeweled where you have to score as many points as possible in one minute.

But, one minute isn't very much time.

Luckily for you, you don't have to wait until the creepy voice says 'Go' before you start matching gems. You can start pretty much right away.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but when you have a pretty rigid time limit of 60 seconds, a couple of extras are going to come in handy.

In The Punisher, you find all kinds of things to pick up, some, like moneybags, food, and precious gems, are good for some points, but others, like pipes, shurikens, axes, chairs

oil drums

And all kinds of other things can be used as weapons.

But there's another reason to pick them up.

At the end of each stage, you get bonus points tallied up, and there's a special category for item pickups.

You get some bonus points for everything you've picked up in the level, whether you smashed it over some malefactor's skull or not. So you should definitely spend a few extra seconds picking up everything you come across in order to build up an impressive score.

Unless having your initials across the top of the game screen doesn't mean that much to you.

You get a few games with your installation of Windows, to help you pass the time, and to help you learn how to use the mouse.

But if you've moved beyond that bog-standard Klondike solitaire, you might have noticed another game lurking in the wings, Freecell.

The rules of Freecell are a beyond the scope of this tip, so I won't be going into them here.

But say that you're playing the game and you get stuck, or bored, or both. What do you do?

Well you could press Shift + CTRL + F10. That'll bring up the "User Friendly Interface" with a couple of options.

So, pick your favorite (mine's "Abort to Win"), and the very next move you make will result in your selected outcome.

Oh, and this doesn't work for Windows Vista or Windows 7. Only the version of Freecell included in Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP, I'm afraid.