Dr. Mario, for the two or three of you that haven't played it, is a game about matching multicolored capsules to eliminate viruses. Basically, the gist is that you line up four segments of one color and they disappear.

Now when I see most people playing this game they only seem to get half of it. They do pretty well making vertical clears.

But for some reason it doesn't seem to 'click' with them that clears can also be made horizontally

But they totally can!

And I know some of you Dr. Mario vets are going 'Well, duh!', but hey, beginners need some love, too.

I've been thinking a lot about Tiger Heli lately. It's pretty tough, and since the helicopter you have to pilot is slightly more maneuverable than an above-ground swimming pool, I get shot down a lot.

And that means that I see this a lot

But, that's actually OK. Every time I see that Game Over screen I hold down the A and B buttons. Why? So I can continue where I left off, of course

Sure, I lose my score, but I don't have to start the game over from the beginning again, and that's pretty awesome.

Fire 'N Ice is a whole lot like Solomon's Key, except that your little wizardy guy has the power to create ice blocks instead of generic brown blocks. And you have to put out all the flames instead of finding items that are hidden everywhere.

But!

What if you get bored with the beginning part of the game? What if you need to have a greater challenge to test your block-making and fire-busting skills?

Well, if that's the case, you could go to the Title screen

Then hold down the Select button while hitting the B button 10 times. The result?

A sound test and a level select screen, rolled into one!

Now you can choose your starting round, but I hope you're ready, they get a little bit tough toward the end

For today's pro tip, we go all the way back to 1982, just before the video game market crashed horribly. We go back to a home computer system/personal computer manufactured by a company now known for calculators and pitched by Bill Cosby.

No, really.

One of my favorite games for the system was Parsec. You had to shoot alien ships without overheating your laser, dodge obstacles, and manage your fuel supply.

Once your fuel reaches critical levels, a refueling tunnel will appear to test your maneuverability to get at the precious resource.

But, going through the tunnel (especially later in the game) requires fine control, which your craft just doesn't have.

Or does it?

Down in the center of the screen toward the bottom, you see where it says "LIFT 3"? That determines how fast your ship moves vertically. 3 is the fastest setting, and 1 is the slowest setting. How do you change it? By using the 1, 2, and 3 keys on your keyboard. Something not immediately obvious to me since I got this game without a manual many years ago.

So, by changing the Lift setting to 1

We can easily make it through the tunnel, refueled and ready for more action.

Just make sure you bump the Lift back up to 3 before you start shooting aliens again. Otherwise they're way more maneuverable than you are.

When you're playing the Punch-Out!! games and you haven't yet learned how to bob and weave properly, you're going to get punched a lot.

Which means that you're going to be knocked out pretty quickly unless you do something.

But what?

You do have one secret weapon.

Once every match, when Doc's giving you his pep-talk, you can hit Select. His fist will start pumping faster, and when you get back into the match:

Boom! Health Boost!

The amount of health you get appears to be random, sometimes you get a little sliver back and sometimes you get nearly the whole bar back. It's less reliable than I'd like it to be.

And if you do it before the match starts? Then your health gets halved. Good for a challenge, I guess.

And this does work on the Wii version. Plus the amount of health you get back has been normalized, making it well worth your while to do this trick every chance you get.

Low G Man is a pretty tough game, and once you finish it (if you make it that far) you still haven't fully completed it. You have to go through the game 3 times total to see all of the endings.

Unless you put in some passwords to help out.

Put in this password to see the first ending:

This one to see the second ending

And this one to see the third (and final) ending

All of the endings are essentially the same

Just with a couple of screens changed at the end, so you might want to just skip the first and second and go for the third ending.

Or not, your call.

The Adventures of Lolo 3 is pretty much the same as the older games in the series, but with a couple of minor changes, the biggest one is that the passwords are way more complicated, so there's no simply swapping some letters around to jump ahead if you get stuck.

But you can see some of the later levels if you get stuck early on.

Go to the password screen and put in the password as all 2s

Now when you walk into Levels 1-3, you'll immediately finish them without having to solve anything!

Then you can start puzzle-solving at Level 4, where the game starts to ramp up its difficulty.

But, since you skipped the first part of the game, you won't be able to proceed past Level 8, that's where your 'preview' ends. Which is just as well, those later puzzles are real brain-benders.

If you've never played Yoshi's Cookie, you're missing out on a... unique puzzle experience. You have to arrange the cookies into rows or columns that span the entire width or height of the puzzle so that they're easier to pack (it's easier to show than it is to explain).

And you can start at any level up to 10 to challenge your cookie-sorting abilities.

But, if you're some kind of expert cookie-sorting master or something, then you might not think that level 10 is much of a challenge.

OK, tough guy, change the Speed to High, the Music to Off, and then go to Round and hold Up while you hold Select.

The result?

You can choose any level up to 99.

Where the cookies turn into characters from the Mario universe somehow, but the game's the same.

And you need to be on top of your game, it gets pretty tough toward Level 99.

In the classic Castlevania games, you get the very useful sub-weapons. You can only throw one at a time until you find the Double-Shot and the Triple-Shot powerups, which let you throw two and three of them at a time (obviously).

But, aside from certain blocks that always have shot upgrades, finding them is pretty random, right?

Wrong!

You can make the Shot powerups appear simply by using your sub-weapon to hit things.

You can hit candles, enemies, whatever, as long as you actually hit something. Hit about ten somethings and you'll make the Double-Shot appear

Hit about ten more for the triple shot.

Just make sure you actually hit things, if you just throw your sub-weapons off a cliff, you won't accomplish anything other than wasting Hearts.

Part of the fun of the Mega Man games is getting the special weapons from the rogue robots and then finding out which weapon does the most damage to each one. Mega Man 2 takes that to the extreme.

Toward the end of the game you have to fight all of the Robot Masters again, even though you've already beaten them once. And that means that you could use their own weapons against them. This doesn't usually do a whole lot... until you get to Metal Man.

Once the battle starts, throw one of his own Metal Blades back at him.

If it connects, BOOM!

Easiest fight in the whole game! Heck, easiest fight in the whole series!

Which is a pretty big reprieve after you've battled your way this far into the game.