The Video Game Critic

For me, two things come to mind; the bongos play in Super Mario World every time you mount Yoshi. I always thought that it was random. And now here I am playing Majora's Mask, thinking about what a pain in the rear it would always be having to collect everything each time I played. Because I always thought that the only way to save was to play the Song of Time, meaning that you lost all your items. When I played the remake on the 3DS, I thought it was pretty cool feature as to how you can now save at all the owl statues. Little did I know that you could also have done that in the original. Would have saved me loads of time had I known that.

In any case, what have you guys discovered about your favorite games years after you played them?

I never knew how to Continue when you got game over in Super Mario Bros when I was a kid. I had done it by accident a couple times and would always mash buttons to try and get it to give me the continue option (I thought it was a code, not just holding one button).

I used to love Darkwing Duck for NES as a kid, I had a loose copy and didn't have the instruction booklet. I beat it many times. When I was older, I dug it out and found out that when you press up on the d pad he puts up his cape as a shield. Had I known this when I was a kid it would have saved me some headaches. I don't know how I missed that because I would usually mess around with the controller to see what I could do but somehow I managed to miss that.

My favourite fighter on the Spectrum was Renegade, never beat the game as a kid but could get to the last level. Revisiting it as a adult I never realised you could throw your enemies, this slight variation in tactics meant I can now beat the game.

Up until a few years ago, I never realized in Super Mario Bros. 3, you could determine which way a mushroom would go by which half of the block you hit (For those who might not know, if you hit the left half of a block, the mushroom would go right and vice versa). I used to just think the movement of the mushroom was random.

I never knew about Kill Screen in the arcade Pac Man.

I even read those pattern memorizing books, but I don't recall ever hearing about it. Of course, those books were written in a hurry to cash in, and I happily bought them. I don't know when the kill screen was first discovered. It may have been a few years as I read that Ms Pac Man has similar issues. I don't know when I heard about it, and I worked in an arcade.

There have been rumors of a secret way to move past the Pac Man kill screen (without using the rack test switch on some machines), but it remains just a rumor.

Is it sad or fitting that these famous video games end in glitchy screens?

I played Sonic 1 all the time as a little kid, but I had no clue about the debug mode until years later. Do any other games other than Sonic even let you access a debug mode through a cheat code and without hacking?

What a great topic!

There were a few stories not too long ago about easter eggs still being uncovered in 20+ year old games, which got me thinking... how neat would it be if some old game, like say a flight sim, turned out to be something else entirely and we never knew it. For example, it turned out that if you could land a certain plane inside a certain building (without crashing) then somehow that would open up the true game hidden underneath the packaging complete with a full story, quest and characters.

Mega man 2 has a lot of these cool "zips" you can do where you skip portions of the levels by seas hung mega man against certain ceilings. Pretty cool when you get one.