In Mega Man 4, one of the weapons you get is the Pharaoh Shot, which, if you hold down the B button, produces a big ol' bubble of energy above Mega Man's head.

One of the interesting things about it is that if a particularly weak enemy collides with it the enemy is destroyed but the bubble stays up and you don't lose any weapon energy.

So, if you find a place where weak enemies come down at you from the same angle in a steady stream, like this spot in Skull Man's stage

You can stand there, B button held in, and and when the enemies plow into your charged shot, the goodies fall right onto your head. Stand there long enough and you'll not only refill your energy pretty quickly, but you'll also max out your lives.

Which might be better than having full energy.

Oh, and if you think that this is similar to the technique I described for Mega Man 9, you'd be right.

If you play Bubble Bobble enough, you might begin to suspect that the collectible items that appear are essentially random.

But you'd be wrong.

Some of the more useful items are the bubbles that hold the letters that spell the word EXTEND. To get them, all you have to do is encase a lot of enemies in bubbles and maneuver them so that they all pop at the same time.

If you popped enough, when the next stage starts you'll notice that the lettered bubbles start pouring in!

In fact, you get two less than the number of enemies that you popped at once (pop 3 enemies, get 1 bubble; pop 5, get 3 bubbles; etc.)

And this works on every version of Bubble Bobble that I tried it on.

It's pretty well known that in the original Super Mario Bros. game that you can warp from World 4-2 to either 6, 7, or 8 by using a hidden Vine, but what you might not know is that there's another way.

Toward the beginning of the level, you have all these blocks making a path. What you want to do is to scroll one of the columns halfway off the screen so that when you go back to break them, they make a 1/2 block-width column.

If you duck-jump into this column and then stand up, Mario will start to slide toward the right.

If you start walking to the right just as he gets to the edge of the screen, it'll start to scroll. You're going to want to stay as far to the right as possible (which is kind of tough, since you can't really see what's coming). You might want to back up a little bit so you can see stuff like that moving platform across the first pit.

An alternate method would involve making the Vine appear here, scrolling so that the block that sprouted it scrolls halfway off the screen and then trying to jump on it. Done right, you'll be teleported to the far right of the screen. Done wrong, though, and you risk getting Mario stuck until the time runs out.

Make your way to the third pipe and enter it

If you were far enough over, you will be whisked away to the Warp Zone instead of the bonus room you would be expecting!

Amazing!

In Super Mario Kart's Vanilla Lake 2, the center of the field has become melted, and kind of dangerous to drive on, y'know, because it's a lake.

But you can use that to your advantage.

While you're racing, as soon as you cross the finish line, take a hard left and head straight into the water.

Then, at the last second, turn 90° to your left so that you go back behind the Start/Finish line before Lakitu picks you up. Done right, you should be on the next lap.

Which will whittle down your best lap times to well under 10 seconds!

Not bad!

It's the first of the new year, and that means (among other things) that it's pretty much the middle of Winter, and that means that (around here, at any rate) that it's really cold outside. But I can get some company.

All I have to do is start up Bookworm Adventures, go to the title screen.

And type the word: Winter

Then Lex dons a scarf, produces a hot beverage, and prepares to weather the, erm, weather.

Which sounds like great advice on a day like today.

In the Adventure of Lolo games, the controls are pretty simple: Press A to use your magic shot, and press B to use your PW item.

But in the second game, if you go to the password screen and enter the password "CSTM"

Which kind of looks like the word "CuSToM", you get whisked away to a config screen

Where you can customize the controls to your heart's content.

Not that there's a lot of customization to do.

Whenever Dan appears in a Street Fighter game, you can bet that he's going to be way underpowered and tough to use, which makes him quite the challenge to get good with.

Take his "ultimate" maneuver, for example. So if you're playing as him and you get the Hyper Combo gauge up to maximum (L. 3) and you press:

Hard Punch, Light Kick, Back, Light Punch, Light Punch

He moves in for the kill!

Except that when he's done, his opponent loses very little energy, and Dan loses almost all of his!

So why would you ever want to do it?

My best guess is that you'd use it to show off as you're beating someone senseless with Dan. But, since he's kind of hard to master, I've never actually been able to prove that.

Rockin' Kats isn't really that tough of a game, especially when you can refill your HP any time you want. But, you still have to play through the game to see the ending, which could take a while.

Or, you could go to the password entry screen and put in this password:

Which will take you directly to the (rather silly) ending sequence.

Which is great if you're borrowing the game and don't quite make it to the end before you have to take it back.

In Bejeweled Blitz, if you manage to get five gems in a row, you get what's called a Hypercube, which is kind of like a Wild Card. You match it with a gem of any color and it clears all gems of that color from the board.

But what if you're skilled (or lucky) enough to get two of them next to each other?

It turns out that if you clear a Hypercube with a Hypercube that it clears every gem on the board!

And at 250 points a pop, that's an easy 16,000 points!

Today is Christmas, so I decided to fire up my GameCube and throw in a copy of The Simpsons: Hit & Run, and I was greeted with this:

The halls are decked, and Homer is passed out on the couch in a Santa outfit. Sounds like something to aspire to on a day like today.

Also, I understand that this works on the PS2 and Xbox versions as well, as long as the clock is set to the correct date.