Frogger is one of those games that just about everyone's heard something about. There's just something appealing about making a frog, who can't swim somehow, cross a road and a river to make it to his home.

And, if you let the title screen sit there long enough, like in most arcade games, you get a non-interactive demo of the game.

But!

It's only non-interactive until the frog onscreen gets to the final row of logs/turtles before the opposite side of the screen.

Once the frog gets there you can use the joystick to gain control!

Though you can't do much, you can still play a tiny sliver of the game for free, that's fun, right?

When you're playing Xbox 360 games, you amass these points, which are added to your profile, for completing certain objectives in the games. The points are cumulative and don't really do much except let people know how many games you've played, and to what completion. There are usually 1,000 points per full game, spread out over any number of challenges.

But, say you want to quickly beef up your Gamerscore. You could rent (I wouldn't bother buying it) Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth, then you can run over to the left as soon as the game begins and start hitting enemies with your ranged attack. As long as you don't get hit you keep your combo multiplier going, and all you need to pass all of the challenges is to get the combo meter to 50. This video (not by me) explains things a whole lot better than I can.

Of course, this is kind of cheap, but it's not strictly cheating. And who knows, the game might not actually be terrible, but once I got all of the achievements, I put it back on the shelf.

Solstice is pretty hard, your wizardy guy is very fragile and not very maneuverable, kind of like real life wizards. But there's a way to give yourself an advantage.

First, press Start a new game and then press Select to access your inventory screen.

Then, press the following buttons:

B, Start, Start, B, B, Start, Start, B, B, Start, Start, Start, B, Start, B, B, B, Start, Start, Start, B, Start, B, Start, Start, B, Start, Start, B, B, Start, B, Start

Your screen will start flashing weird colors.

Exit the inventory screen and come back to find that you have four full potions and a stack of lives (about 90). Will that be enough of an edge for you to finish the game? If not, it'll sure help you play longer.

Comix Zone is tough, partially because you have one chance to get through the whole game, which means that you're going to be seeing this a lot:

So you might be tempted to go to the Jukebox

And you might be tempted to play the songs (by pressing the C button) in the following order:

3, 12, 17, 2 , 2, 10, 2, 7, 7, 11

And then you'll hear your character yell "Oh yeah!".

Start the game and you'll discover that you now have infinite health!

Which knocks out some of the challenge, true, but you can still die from falling in a pit or any of the other Instadeath(tm) methods in the game.

So it's not a total cakewalk.

The Sonic games always start out easy enough, but they ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly, and I usually peter out after about four or five Zones.

But what if you want to see the rest of the game without working for it? Easy!

First, go to the Options screen.

Then play the sounds in the Sound Test in this order: 19, 65, 09, 17.

Then hold C and press Start to go back to the title screen, and once there hold A and press Start. The result?

A menu that lets you decide where you want to start the game!

Which is very handy if you're lazy (like me).

Gun.Smoke is one of those games that's a self-scrolling shooting game, but with cowboys instead of flying machines. You start off pretty weak (natch) and have to slowly walk forward shooting the bad cowboys and buying guns from the townsfolk.

But, what if you went to the title screen

And quickly pressed

A, A, A, A, Select, Select, Select, Select, Right, Right, Start

And then checked your inventory?

You'd have a machine gun to do anything you want with.

Me, I like mowing down everyone in the first level with it.

So you're out at the store and you find a new game that you want to play on your PC. But you're not a hardware enthusiast, so you don't really know what that stuff in the 'system requirements' box means or worse, if your computer meets them.

What do you do?

The easiest thing to do is to go to this site .

You pick a game from the dropdown list and install the ActiveX or Java control, and after a few seconds you're presented with a screen that tells you whether or not your PC is up to the task of playing your selected game.

It even has a breakdown to show you where your system isn't quite up to speed (if applicable), and is actually a pretty good indicator of your machine's performance in the game you picked.

It's Windows-only, though. But if you can work around that, then it's a pretty handy tool.

The second Legend of Zelda game is polarizing in the Zelda fan community because it's way different than the first game, but assuming you did like it, I've got a tip to that'll help you out.

Normally, once you lose all your lives (you get three to start) you get the game over screen and the choice to save the game or to continue. Which is great, until you want to save and quit and there's no easy way to blow through your extra lives to generate the Save screen.

In that case you would press Start to pause the game

Then press Up on the Cross-pad and A on Controller 2. The result?

Taken directly to a Save screen!

Handy!

So what do you do if you want to hear some of the sounds that Tecmo Super Bowl produces, but don't want to bother playing through a game to do it?

Do you go to the title screen?

Do you hold B and then press Left on the control pad?

Do you then listen to all the sounds available in the game at your leisure?

It turns out that you do!

In the main Pokémon games you capture and train creatures to build your ultimate fighting team, and when certain conditions are met, they change into more powerful forms, called 'evolution' in-game.

A few have the rather unusual condition that you have to find someone to trade them with, and as a result of the trading process they will evolve into their more powerful forms.

So, you had to track down someone who had a copy of the game and negotiate a trade where you likely traded monsters, let them evolve, and then traded back so you could have your original creature, now powered up.

But! There's a better way!

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl have introduced the ability to trade over the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection. You put up something and what you'll take for it and then wait for someone else to take your offer, kind of like a Pokémon trading post. If what you put up there doesn't get taken, then you can withdraw your request and try again.

But! What if you put up one of the Pokémon that evolve via trading? Then request something that's impossible to get via normal means (such as a Level 1 Blastoise) to ensure that nobody will actually be able to trade with you? Then immediately take your original Pokémon back?

It evolves! Just like you had traded it with someone.

And you have, sort of. You've traded with yourself.