Pro Tip of the Day

The first NBA Jam game had a few hidden characters, but it has nothing on the Tournament Edition of the game, which went way over the top.

For instance: if you enter your initials as GRM

And your birthday as OCT 31

Your player turns into the Grim Reaper! Who looks kinda funny rather than scary.

Just be aware that this doesn't work on all revisions of the game, just v.1 and v.2.

Play James Bond Jr. long enough and you'll eventually see this screen.

It would be pretty awesome if there were some way to put off seeing that screen for as long as possible, right?

And there totally is!

If you go to the passcode screen and enter this code:

The timer will go up to 99:99 and your bullets will be maxed out!

Which should go a long way toward delaying that screen from appearing.

If you've never played Rival Turf!, it's kind of like Final Fight, you run around various cities across the country beating up wave after wave of identical twins.

And just like lots of other games, if you end up running out of lives and continues, you have to start over. But if your score is high enough, you get to enter your name in the High Score Table. If you pretend for a moment that your name is 'CHRCONF'

And then hit 'EX', you'll be taken to a secret screen

Where you get to change the names of all the characters in the game. There aren't any restrictions that I could find, so go nuts

And that should make having to repeat the first few stages a little less tedious

The original Metal Gear game holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts. But sometimes you just don't have the time to play through the whole thing. Or, worse, you've lost your password that started you at the end of the game.

So what do you do?

Well, you could go to the password screen and put in "TOOOU" over and over again until you run out of room.

Which will start you just past the final boss battle!

All you have to do is survive a room full of guys and pick the correct door to leave (you have three choices)

Choose correctly and you too can pretend like you've actually finished Metal Gear!

The Silver Surfer game is pretty tough, mostly because a being with super-galactic power can somehow be defeated incredibly easily. Which means that you'll be seeing this a lot

But there's a way around that.

If you go to the title screen

And press Up on both controllers at the same time, you'll be taken to a password screen. Enter this password

And hit Start. You'll get a confirmation noise (and can enter more passwords if you want)

Start the game, and you'll find that the Surfer is now completely unhittable!

Meaning that you can start a level, go have a sandwich, come back to fight the boss, and repeat the process to finish the game with the smallest amount of effort possible.

If you're into that kind of thing.

I never was particularly good at Burai Fighter, and that means that I got to see this a lot

So, to lengthen the time before I had to see that screen, I would go to the Password screen and enter this password

Which would give me 99 lives to play with

And you should, too.

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.

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.

If you go to Bomberman's continue screen and put in 'BA' over and over again until you run out of room

You will be whisked away to Stage 0!

Which you might logically assume is going to be easier than the already pretty easy Stage 1. But you'd be way wrong.

It's actually significantly tougher.

Good luck!

Even though you get unlimited continues, Wizards and Warriors 2 is a pretty tough game, mostly because Kuros starts out pretty weak, and the powerups are hidden in pretty obscure places. But, you can give yourself an early advantage.

Just go to the Password Entry screen and put in what I like to call "Q with a bunch of Ks"

Once that's in, you get plopped into the first stage with a shield, a helmet, 10 keys

and a full compliment of spells

Plus, the password is super-easy to remember. How could you go wrong?