In Donkey Kong Country you have these animal helpers that you can ride, which kind of give a little variety to Donkey Kong's banana-hunting exploits. And each of those animals has their own bonus stage where you have to collect lots of emblems that look like the animal that you're riding.

But getting there takes a lot of work, and they're kind of rare. So you may not be as practiced as you want to be when it's Game Time(tm).

So what do you do?

Well, you could go to the Intro sequence.

Grab Controller 1 and press Down, Y, Down, Down, Y (which, if you write 'D' instead of 'Down' spells 'DYDDY', which kind of looks like 'Diddy')

Done right, you'll be taken to a cave full of complete sets of the Animal Emblems

From there you just collect the complete set and begin your bonus stage!

And you can do this as often as you want, so practice away!

I admit, I never really played much Star Soldier, so I used a couple of shortcuts to help me along with the game.

For instance, if you go to the title screen

Grab Controller 1 and hit Select 10 times, then on Controller 2 hold Down and Right on the Cross Pad, then grab Controller 1 and start holding Up and Left on the Cross Pad and the A and B buttons. With all of those held, press Start on Controller 1 a couple of times (you might need a couple of extra hands for this).

Done right, your ship will be significantly powered up!

And those powerups will reset when you lose a life, so go nuts!

I was bad enough at Rad Racer that I didn't even know it had an ending. But it's been brought to my attention that not only does it have an ending, but you can see it with almost no effort (which is one of the best kinds!).

So if you want to see it without actually racing, you first select a car

Then while at the 'Press Start to begin' screen

Grab Controller 1, press the B button 64 times(!), then hold Up + Right on the Cross Pad and press Start.

Done right, the ending will start

But be aware, there's not much more to it than the screenshot above.

I never really was much of a snowboarding fan, so I never really played Heavy Shreddin' much. Which pretty much means that when I did play, I saw this a lot

But I now know that if I'd have gone to the title screen, grabbed Controller 1, and held down Left on the Control Pad + A + B while pressing Start, I'd have 99 snowboards to play with

Which meant that I could have practiced a little more before running out of lives, greatly extending my frustration.

I've talked a little about 3D Worldrunner in the past. It's a 3D game on a system that's not really supposed to be able to do 3D, which makes it a little on the tough side. And that means that you're going to end up seeing this a lot.

But fret not!

If you hold Up on the Control Pad + the A Button + Start, you can continue at the beginning of the level where you left off!

Meaning you can keep plugging away at the levels until you either finish them or you give up in frustration.

It's really a no-lose situation.

Think you're good at U.N. Squadron? Think you're a real gamer? Well, you're about to get the opportunity to prove it.

Pop in your copy of U.N. Squadron, go to the Options screen.

With 'Game Level' highlighted hold down the X and A buttons on Controller 2 and start ratcheting up the difficulty. As long as you're holding down the buttons you can take it from Normal

All the way to 'Gamer'

Do you have what it takes to defeat 'Gamer Mode'?

(Thanks to user Dakota for today's tip!)

I never really spent as much time with Arcana as I'd have liked, mostly because every time I scraped together a couple of bucks it was already gone from the rental shop.

But if you did and you want to hear some of the music in the game without actually playing through it, you could go to the title screen

Then hold L + R and press B on Controller 1. Done right, you'll see one of the most boring Sound Test screens I've ever seen

How exciting!

One of the... sort of interesting things about Super Street Fighter II is that you can pick lots of different colors for your characters. What color you get depends on what button you use to select your fighter (your choice of A, B, X, Y, L, R, or Start).

But!

If you press and hold any of the buttons in (except for Start) when you pick your character, you'll notice that you get yet another color!

And most of them look pretty awful, but there are a few good ones in there. You just have to dig around to find them.

The Clayfighter games were just kind of OK, so I usually look for a way to minimize the amount of time that I have to spend with them, which is where this comes in.

If you go to this screen:

Press and hold the Y button on Controller 1 and then press L, L, R, Down, Left, R, you'll hear a strange sound. From there, you go the Options Screen and notice that you can take the speed from 3

All the way to 10!

Which is so fast that you're going to have a hard time doing anything because your guys move around so fast. But that means that the matches are going to end quicker, which is definitely not a bad thing.

Super Buster Bros. is a kind of tough game, and if you want to get to the end of it, you're going to have to invest a lot of time, effort, and energy.

Or you could take a shortcut.

You could to go the Game Select screen, grab Controller 1 and press

L, R, R, L, Up, Down

Done right, you'll see a number appear in the middle of the screen.

Which you can ratchet all the way up to 40, where the game gets kind of tough.

Or you could use it as a kind of continue feature to start the game where you left off the last time. It's up to you, really.