Behind the SHELP: Taking a Screenshot

Here at SHELPSHOT, we take pride in providing you with only the most detailed and helpful screenshots, so that you can plan your videoland strategies with ease. Many of our readers ask how our Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors manage to take such precise screenshots.

Well, today you're in luck! See the step-by-step diagram below and find out how the professionals capture the most intense scenes from your favourite game paks!

Hot Help: Pizza Hat

In an earlier article, we mentioned that it might be possible to unlock a secret hat in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game™ for play on the Nintendo Entertainment System Control Deck. Well, our Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors have been hard at work ever since, and they have finally uncovered the secret you've been waiting to see!

If there's one thing our favourite bodacious green Turtles™ love, it's pizza. In fact, this particular game pak comes with a free coupon for a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut™! (Offer expires December 31, 1991. Void in Quebec and Mexico)

But the pizza fun doesn't end there. Certain levels of the game contain little reminders of the delicious pizzas made with only the most wholesome ingredients, as seen in the screenshot above.

By controlling your Turtle™ with the directional buttons, you can steer him towards the Pizza Hut™ signs, and wear the legendary Pizza Hat™ for yourself! While this secret item does not directly affect your power levels or extra plays, it will strengthen your resolve the way the promise of pizza drives the boys in green to defeat every foe.

For the best results, we recommend performing this trick while eating a nice big slice of pizza. Just don't forget to wash your hands before handling the control paddle. You'll never be able to defeat The Shredder™ with greasy fingers!

Hot Help: Treasures in Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls: fiVe is a medieval action adventure and dragons game for personal gaming computer consoles wherein you take control of an unnamed dragon hunter aiming to stake out a claim for fame and fortune. While you can do literally everything you can think of throughout the Skyrim Province of Nirn, one of the main features of the game is collecting mementos from your dragon-killing exploits.

Knights, Soldiers, Highwaymen, Peasants, Priests, Ghosts--even Bears and Bugs: all of these baddies will block your path to glory. They pose varying degrees of challenge, and all will yield up spoils of war relative to your level of expertise. Still, while gold coin, stronger weapon, and bigger armour are fine, you'll find yourself selling off most of it to shopkeeps for a fraction of their worth anyway.

Don't worry, these beat baddies are only sleeping until they see you quit the game.

No, a true treasure hunter knows that the item's of greatest value are often of incidental or negligible worth. While grave-robbing is a foul practice, it is common knowledge that the victor of a skirmish is owed exactly a tenth of the losers belongings, or all the items on their person. When the last foe falls, pass by those coffers of coin and spend your time amongst the newly dead. Turn out their pockets and take inventory: Who was this soul? What do their former belongings tell about their life? Chances are that these bandits aren't the richest individuals, but what worth did they ascribe to which items? If there is a semi-precious trinket amongst the dross, then think upon its meaning in that context. Piece together, as best you can, an understanding of the soul you just sent to Oblivion. Pocket their preciousness to keep in a chest in your home, and pass onward towards more adventure!

Hot Help: Pausing for Effect

Almost every video game lets you pause the hot electronic action in case you need to eat or go to the toilet (excluding Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, which, being the most hyperrealistic boxing game pak to date, will not allow you to perform non-punching actions in the middle of a round).

But did you know that many action and adventure games also feature a secondary pause feature that can only be initiated by you, the video game player? Our Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors have uncovered this amazing new tip which is guaranteed to significantly increase the emotional realism of your favourite titles!

Although this example comes from Super Mario 64 for the Ultra-64 game-play system, you can experiment for yourself and see if it works in any other game paks.

Simply follow the instructions below:

• After achieving at least 70 stars, Super Mario should finally be able to ascend the endless staircase leading to his final showdown with the evil Turtle King, Bowser. Unlock the door and prepare to ascend the stairs. 
• No cheating! Remember, this trick will not work if you take hasty shortcuts. 
• Rather than running up the staircase in a hurry, hold the game pad firmly without touching any buttons. 
• Take a moment to reflect upon your journey and quietly remind yourself what's at stake. Your adventure has taken you to the highest skies and the depths of the ocean. Without your dear friend Princess Toadstool to secure the magic shielding of the Mushroom Kingdom, the denizens will be doomed to a life of enslaved servitude (if such a thing can be called life). 
• Now you're ready to approach the final battle. Rather than pushing the paddle's control stick to it's furthest position, instead, slightly tilt the stick so that Super Mario climbs the stairs at nervous, but steady, walking pace. 

• The lengthy staircase, when taken slowly, provides further moments of reflection. The hall is lined with paintings of King Bowser on the left and Princess Toadstool on the right. This is the final battle between good and evil. The very balance of the world lies in your hands. 
• Before jumping down the chimney (pictured at the top of this article), hold Super Mario steady to push all fears of the Turtle Dragon aside, then jump bravely into the abyss. 
• You are the only remaining hope.

Good luck on the final battle! You may wish to pause for a moment of reflection again before descending the final drainpipe, and once more before touching the final Star, thus breaking King Bowser's dark spell forever. 

Hot Help: Lightening Your Load Time

This week's Hot Help comes at the behest of our readers who want more power out of their gaming systems. We get plenty of letters inquiring about the technical specifications of our cutting edge video game devices. Take this message we received through electronic mail:

Dear SHELPSHOT:
I really like my state of the art video game consoles--I have them all and must have played almost ninety games! I play them for the newest and most realistic electronic experience, which makes me feel like I'm in the future! I have a pretty big gripe though: Every game I play seems to take forever to load to the next level! Blazing through titles is majorly difficult when I have to spend sometimes over fifteen seconds waiting. Is there a faster game deck I can buy to cut down on my downtime?   

 James G.
Cheyenne, WY

Gosh James, we're sorry to hear that your control decks aren't able to keep up with your input, but this is the perfect opportunity to discuss an often overlooked feature of video entertainment: load time! Games will often, for dramatic purposes, cut to a black screen while bits and bytes are walked along the various information caches located throughout the electronics boards of your game consoles and game cartridge packs. While energy moves at the speed of light, these pauses or "load screens" are elongated to draw out the suspense of what lies in subsequent stages, or to drive home the ultimate goal of the experience. Some games even display graphics and minigames with the load screen.

Take the game program Tomba! for the PlayStationX: the main goal of this game is to bite as many evil pigs on the head as possible--an easy task for any experienced game player. But there is so much realism in the settings of Tomba! that it is easy to get lost in the beauty of the neolithic utopia. That is why the game designers programmed in a secret mini game on the load screen.

While you may just see a looping enemy screen, but this video of the loading screen shows the evil pigs tiled in such a way so as to actually function as an autosteroscopic image! By crossing your eyes just so, it can appear that the evil pigs are dancing out of the screen to taunt you, which may strengthen your resolve even in idealistic locales! This helps to raise the stakes of the game, making you more eager to progress to the next challenge. Hope that answers your question James, and thanks for writing in!

Hot Help: Become a Legend. Become a Ghost.

This week we bring you an amazing trick for the Animal Crossing software series, a game that lets you do all the things you do in real life! You can spend your time doing whatever you like, making money, catching bugs, making friends, and even losing friends.

From time to time, your friends will move away. Even if you've put everything into the friendship, you will grow distant, drift apart, and eventually you'll wake up one morning and they'll simply be gone.

We'll it's time to give your animal friends a funny taste of their own medicine! Follow the guide below to become a legendary ghost in your village!

• Play Animal Crossing daily for about a year (long enough to settle into a home and establish a presence in your community)
• After a year has passed, play Animal Crossing late at night, so that fewer watchful neighbours are out. We recommend 3am. 
• Empty all of the furniture, items, fossils, and other goods from your home and spread them around your house. Cut down all the trees. IMPORTANT: do not speak to anyone as you do this.
• Now for the hard part: don't play Animal Crossing for at least one year. Three is better. Seven is best, since seven is a number rife with superstition. 
• From this point on, only play the game in the middle of the night. Walk around town, speak to no one, hide from everyone. 

If this trick is done correctly, the village will be overrun with weeds as your sudden disappearance takes its emotional toll on all the villagers. Doubtlessly, you will have become the stuff of legends, spoken about only in hushed tones behind locked doors. And as long as you continue speaking to no one, your occasional appearances will only lend further credence to the legend of your restless ghost. 

Note: This trick has only be tested on the Nintendo Gamecube version of the software. It is unconfirmed for the DS, Wii, N64 and 3DS versions.

Hot Help: Anger Mismanagement

The inhabitants of Liberty City are pretty high strung, which might have something to do with their cars getting commandeered left and right. To keep things light though, Niko Belic likes to prank the citizens at every chance. You too can follow this trick for pranking all the self-centred citizens in Grand Theft Auto: 4!

Step One: Setup

After arranging to meet your cousin, Roman, pull up close to where he is in your car. Wait for a busy-looking pedestrian to pass in front of Roman before sounding your horn. The alarmed pedestrian will, in a state of egocentric rage, cuss out Niko for disturbing his day!

Step Two: Execution
You know that you were honking to get Roman's attention! Roman will know this too and get in the car, but the persnickety pedestrian will not know your intent and continue to chew you out for being rude! Quickly drive off happily with your loving cousin for an afternoon of fun.

"Cousin! We are prank pulling like true Americans!"

Step Three: Payoff
While Niko and his cousin Roman go off together, they leave behind a Liberty Citizen in mid-rant. With the object of their anger speeding away, the pedestrian's wroth words will slowly fall away into dawning embarrassment at their gut-reactions. They'll have been yelling like a crazy-person at you for no reason whatsoever!

With any luck their day will be ruined, as they can't shake the fact that it is their default mood to be so angry. They may not be able to immediately integrate that information, which will throw them into bouts of more misplaced anger and self-loathing. Just what kind of person goes from zero to blowing up at strangers at the drop of a hat or the sound of a horn anyway? The person may also be upset that they assumed the honk was at them--I mean, it's not like everything in the world revolves around them--they're nobody!

You have successfully revealed an ugly aspect of this person's personality and they will wordlessly contemplate the insignificance of their existence, dwelling on their inability of fully understand the world they thought they knew. Though they may not be able to articulate this emotion to those they are close to, they will carry it with them forever. Eventually, they may forget about it and keep having a short-temper for these things, but in their quiet moments on the bus or while falling asleep at night they will remember who they really are. And a hot flush will creep up the back of their neck and their stomach will drop as they struggle to expunge their silent shame, or at least to quiet their mind and forget again. What fun!!