A basic tenet of games based on movies is: most of them are awful. But sometimes you just have to play them to see how bad they really are. Like Jurassic Park.

But let's say that you get a game like this on a rental and don't have the chops to make it to the end before it has to go back to the rental place. What do you do?

Well, you could to to the title screen

And then grab Controller 1 and press Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left, Down, Right, Left. Done right you'll hear a noise of some kind. Start your game like normal, and then any time you want to. Pause the game and hit Select. You'll be warped to the next stage!

And you can keep on doing that until you get to the end of the game (spoiler alert between these lines!)

Making the game last about three minutes (or less if you have fast fingers).

Money can be kind of hard to come across in the second Wizards and Warriors game, you don't really need it for much, but it's nice to have when you do want to buy something.

So, to make it easier to raise some cash, you could go to the title screen

Press and hold Up on the Cross Pad + B + Select, and while holding all of those, press Start. Done right, you can go to your nearest merchant and start playing the gambling game. The skull will always land in cups in the following order: 1, 4, 3, 2. And then repeat. You can sit there racking up cash for as long as you like

I was able to accumulate a tidy sum until I screwed up the rhythm and picked a cup out of sequence. Once that happened, the pattern ended and I had to go do something else.

The original Sonic the Hedgehog game, like pretty much all the games in the series, starts out pretty easy and then ramps up the difficulty to a ridiculous level pretty quickly. So it might be nice if you could practice those advanced stages, right?

Well, then good news!

If you go to the title screen

And press Up, Down, Left, Right on Controller 1, you'll hear a sound like you've collected a Ring. Then hold down the A button and press Start. Done right, you'll be presented with a Stage Select screen!

Letting you start pretty much anywhere you want.

Just be aware that if you start at the last stage and finish it, you won't see the true ending. You need to play through enough of the game to collect the Chaos Emeralds for that.

Ever been playing Zanac and got just so far before you got frustrated and quit? Or maybe your playtime was cut short by a power failure or something and you had to stop before reaching the end. What do you do?

Well, you could start over again from the beginning, or you could power on the game, and wait for the title screen to appear

And then press the Reset button on your NES 13 times(!).

Done right, when you hit "Start" to bring up the Start / Continue screen, you can use the Left and Right arrows on the Cross Pad to choose whatever level you want.

Just be aware that you have to hit "Continue" to start on any level other than 1. Also, I couldn't start on anything higher than Area 10. When I tried to pick anything higher it'd kick me back to 10, so there's still a little bit of work to do, it seems.

If you're a fan of the Star Wars movies, there's a good chance that you're also a fan of the musical score from the series. And if you liked the score from the movies, odds are that you want to listen to it in any form, right?

Well, then good news!

If you pop your copy of The Empire Strikes Back into your NES, and when the "A Long Time Ago..." appears

Press Left + Select on Controller 1. Done right, you'll be taken to a screen where you get to hear each of the musical selections from the game!

And who wouldn't want to hear these iconic songs, represented in their 8-bit forms?

If you're playing through the NES adaptation of The Hunt for Red October for some reason, you might start thinking to yourself, "Gee, I wish there was some way I could make this game easier". And if you were, today's your lucky day.

First, crash your subs into the landscape until you run out, which sounds counterintuitive, I know. But when you crash your last one, and before the screen tells you "Game Over", pause the game.

Then while it's paused, grab Controller 1 and press

A, B, Select, Right, Left, Left, Right, Select, B, A, B, B, A

Under normal circumstances, that is your single-use Level Skip code, but since we're out of ships, the circumstances change and instead, you're given a full complement of submarines! How many? Well, the counter rockets up to "I5" if that tells you anything

Which means you can play this game until you finish it or you're absolutely sick of it. Win-win!

Vectorman came out late enough in the lifecycle of the Genesis that I had pretty well moved on to other things, so I didn't get to play it very much outside of the demo machines in the store, which means that I didn't get very much playtime with it.

Which is why when I do decide to play it, after I start getting frustrated at it I pause the game

And then on Controller 1 press: C, A, Left, Left, A, C, A, B. Which kind of spells "CALL A CAB". And when I un-pause the game

Vectorman turns into what looks like a giant Mouse Pointer! He can now go anywhere and when he crosses paths with minor enemies, they explode!

But, when I got to the boss of the area, I had to fight him the old-fashioned way

So there's still some skill involved here.

The Adventures of Dino Riki is a pretty tough game, so you're going to be seeing this a lot.

But all is not lost!

If you hold Up on the Control Pad and press Start, you'll start at the last checkpoint you passed, even if it was partway through a stage!

Which, aside from having your score reset, is just like having infinite lives.

And you'll need them.

Flicky is a pretty cute game with a simple premise: you lead baby birds away from cats.

But what if you want to play and start on a level other than the first one? Well, you'd be in luck.

If you start the game, and when the screen full of instructions pops up

Hold Up on the Cross Pad + A Button + C Button, and while holding all of those press Start.

Done right, a screen with the phrase "ROUND 1" will appear

Which you can manipulate to say any number up to "ROUND 36"

Where Flicky gets tricky.

Good luck!

Since there's been some hubbub lately about this Mortal Kombat movie-pitch thingy, I figured it would be appropriate for a Mortal Kombat themed tip.

So, in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, after choosing your characters, you come up to the Vs. Screen, which has this row of symbols across the bottom.

Which you and your opponent can manipulate by pressing the buttons on your respective side of the cabinet. So, say you both press Low Punch exactly one time so that the display looks like this

Then when the match starts, you'll get confirmation at the bottom of the screen that the code worked

This one, for instance, disables throwing, so you have to beat up your opponent the old fashioned way... with punches, kicks, and special moves.