Pro Tip of the Day

I have to preface today's tip with a serious warning: Do not try this at home! Seriously, doing this glitch can corrupt your save game, costing you hours upon hours of work, or worse. I'm doing it here so you don't have to.

To find the mysterious Glitch Pokémon MissingNo (or possibly 'M), perform the following steps. You'll need to be pretty far into the game (at least far as Cinnabar Island)

1. Start in Viridian City. Find the guy that offered to teach you how to catch Pokémon

2. Take him up on his offer and watch the show

3. When he's done, immediately Fly to Cinnabar Island (yes, I know the picture says Fuchsia City, don't worry about that)

4. And begin Surfing up and down on the thin strip of terrain where the water and the land meet (remember, even encountering this thing can cause some game hiccups, don't do it)

5. Eventually a battle will start, and the Pokémon is a glitchy mass of pixels with a 'M in its name or MissingNO. It's level 0, so it shouldn't be much of a challenge to capture or defeat (extra warning catching it causes lots of glitchy and unpredictable behavior, don't do it)

6. As an added bit of fun, if you fought 'M, like I did here, the sixth item in your inventory will have inexplicably multiplied to an amount so big, that the numbers glitch out trying to display it (around 128)

If MissingNo or 'M is caught, glitches will happen (in fact, just encountering 'M will make weird things happen). But, like I said, this can have disastrous effects on your saved game, whether you save it or not.

The first Mega Man game (like hundreds of other games) has a 'feature' where if you get hit, your character flashes for a few seconds and is invulnerable. And in Mega Man, this also extends to the boss characters. Probably to keep you from trapping them in a corner and getting a cheap victory.

But you can totally get a cheap victory anyway.

If you hit a Robot Master with a shot of any weapon you like, he'll start to flash

But if you hit Select to pause the game and wait a few seconds

You'll find that the momentary invulnerability he enjoys will wear off while the game is frozen.

Allowing you to unload a stream of shots, and as long as you pause between each one, they're all going to hit home.

Making it much easier to win.

The second Legend of Zelda game is the only one with this weird experience point system. Get enough points and you can level up your Attack, Life Points, or Magic Points. And, after a while, it takes a lot of points to get to the next level. Thousands of 'em, in fact.

But, if you go to the end of one of the Castles and set a jewel in the statue at the end, your experience is ratcheted up to the next level, no matter how much you have to go.

So, as soon as the experience starts counting up, pause the game

Do a Quick Save by hitting Up + A on Controller 2

And start a new game (or continue an old one)

You'll notice that your new Link will start to get the rest of the experience points that the old Link was going to get before you paused and exited the game!

Which is great for a few levels early on in the game.

Though this does have rather limited use. You have to actually get pretty far into the game for the amount of experience points that transfer to amount to more than a level or two for the new guy, which kind of implies that you're going to be pretty far in the game (or have finished it at least once). But if you're sharing the game with a less-skilled player, it's a good way to give him a bump up in strength to make the early going slightly easier.

When you're playing through Chip 'N Dale's Rescue Rangers, you'll occasionally come across these grey crates that you have to stack up to make any progress.

But, if you grab one of the crates off the bottom of the stack, you're going to be in for a surprise, the ones on top don't fall down!

Which will allow you to do some interesting thing with their formations.

You might remember a while back that I told you how to get lots more points in Super Mario Bros. by waiting until the timer runs out before you clear a stage.

It turns out that you can so this in other games, too.

Like Duck Tales, for instance.

First, go to your favorite boss and defeat it, open the treasure chest, but don't grab the loot.

Then, wait around until time runs out. The moment that time runs out, grab the prize

Done right, you'll grab the treasure, and the clock will roll over and start counting down

Giving you lots of bonus dollars

I don't really recommend this, though. You have a very small window of opportunity to grab the loot before you lose a life. You have to grab it the precise moment that the clock rolls over to "TIME UP", otherwise you have to beat the boss again, and wait for the timer to count down, which takes a real long time.

But you might want to do it once, just to see it.

This one's kind of fun.

In Golden Axe 2, if you go to the Options screen and set the type of magic to Special

Then play the game normally until you come to a boss. When the music changes, hold in the A button (or whatever button you have designated for Magic

Don't let it go until the battle's over and the screen transitions to black. Then, when you go to the bonus stage, don't press any buttons at all.

It'll kind of look like the bonus stage will go on forever until you thwack the enemies walking around, but it will eventually end.

When you start the next stage, your character will immediately unleash a magical attack

After which, you'll see that your stockpile of magic books has suddenly grown enormous!

If you use more than your character's normal maximum, you can occasionally use other characters' spells

But, if you use too many, the game will freeze, so staying within your characters' limits is probably for the best.

In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, you pick up these cards that are used in something called the "DSS System" do give you special abilities, you have to pick one from the top row and one from the bottom. And then you press the L button to activate the combo.

For example: choose the Mars and Manticore cards and your whip will be replaced with "Poison Claws"

Then you press L again to deactivate it.

What's interesting is if you press L to activate a combo

And while your character is going through the animation of activating the skill, you go to the status screen

And pick a combination of cards that you don't actually have, you get its effect anyway! Like here, this combo activates a familiar that follows me around

The only drawback is that some of the effects are kind of hard to figure out what they do, and if you do manage to figure them out, the game won't actually record the description for you (unless you eventually collect the cards, of course).

One of my favorites is this combination

Which gives you the Item Crush ability. It costs 20 hearts, but you unleash a super attack with whatever sub-weapon you have equipped, if you put in the correct button combo

It's quite useful, especially on bosses and powerful normal enemies.

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 Double Dragon's Mission 3, you will eventually come across a pair of green Abobos. They're kind of tough, since you have less room to maneuver than normal.

But you can use that to your advantage.

If you can back Abobo up so that his back is touching the wall on the left

And give him a jumpkick to the face, he'll fall through the wall!

Saving you precious life-points.

If you managed to get past the Crab boss in Area 5 of Blaster Master, you get to move on to the ice stage, Area 6, which features these blocks that you have to destroy from below to proceed.

But, say you need to check your status screen for some reason, or you just want to pause the game for a breather

Once you leave the status screen...

The blocks are back!

I sure hope you didn't need to go back down that shaft.

Also, as a bonus tip: the boss's room is to the right once you get to the top of this shaft. If you go left it'll lead you back to beginning of the stage, and some of these mysterious blocks will be back, making you take the long way around.