Nah. You just have to kneel against the cliff long enough to be swept up and carried through it, several seconds.

I also remember spending countless hours trying to figure out a peculiar deadend near the end of your quest, at this marshy deadend is an invisible staircase, but never found anything to it. There's also this one spot where you can walk down a step (also invisible) into the blocks so that you're feet are halfway in them, this though is apparently a mess up with the programming.

Though I never discovered this one on my own, is the glitch that allows you to fall down through floors, standing on the edge of a block and taking a step forward and whipping at the same time. This one took perfect timing, but after having gotten it to work once, I can't help myself but to try it out several times every time I play the game, just because, its one of those hard to do glitch moves that kinda gives me a little bit of satisfaction knowing that I pulled it off.

That's what's great about NES games, chock-full of glitches that sometimes gives those games that have 'em some extra weight, some new gameplay element to play around with, even though it wasn't supposed to exist. Afterward they took more care in removing things like this before putting the games out, or in the case of Super Mario Brothers, correcting the glitch, no minus world in Super Mario All-Stars, bah, they took out a fun element, even if you only do it just for kicks.

Some glitches can F'up your game, but most can be pretty useful, hey, look at Double Dragon, the invincible invisible enemy that you can rack-up all your experience points on.

Yeah, I sure was. And then to top that off I was having trouble accessing certain websites (Yahoo. MySpace, Nintendo Age) but others still loaded up as they should (Gamefaqs, Wikipedia, Youtube), boy it was an aggrivating night. But I think the problem is fixed, I performed a system restore on my computer, all the sites that were taking forever to load or simply not loading up, are now, and quickly like they were when we'd first got the computer. Never mind, its F'ing up again. Had it diagnose the problem, and repaired the connection, or whatever. Pages are loading up normally again. We will see. Damn glitchy ass technology.

Back to the gaming conversation. I think that's my problem with getting into most games nowadays, aside from them being overly long, damn tutorials, especially when they pop up suddenly while you're in the middle of the action, possibly jumping over a pit. Besides it slows things down, having these things pop up telling you stuff that is usually common knowledge, or if it isn't you'll learn soon enough on your own. And I certainly don't need anything telling me where to go, what to do next. When you've started out on the NES, or earlier console, you tend to gain a lot of experience with handling things yourself, so when games suddenly start telling you how, makes me think how moronic they must think we are. Too much dialog, whether help stuff or story, is unnecessary, particularly in action games, if I want to read I'll play an RPG, or a game like Deja Vu.

Nothing like playing halfway through a game, only to finally discover something new that you hadn't known about, like you said...Bonus!! Then you're like, I wonder if there's anything else I still haven't found, and from that point on a new side-quest has been instilled within you: What else can I find? Nothing more rewarding and exciting than finding out cool knew stuff on your own, sometimes its a deliberate search for it, but sometimes its something you've discovered accidently, either way, once you discover one new thing, from that point on you just end up wanting to find more.

One example, I remember the first time I burned a bush in Zelda, at first I was just walking around, burn a bush here and there, nothing happening, then suddenly there's that jingle that lets you know you've just found a hidden door, surprise, surprise. And then from that point on, its like, well, guess I'm just going to have to try to burn down every tree in this game. Then you're like, going over a mental checklist: so bombs blow up walls, obvious, candles not only light up darkness but also burn certain trees, wonder if there's any special uses for some of the other items. So your bombing every wall in the game, burning every bush, pushing every single block that has free space to move, blowing the flute on every screen, trying everything, don't matter how silly it seems, you never know. Now, while many gamers nowadays wouldn't have the patience for this--I blame the developers for spoiling them with too many options--but for us, we were deep into them. Oh, and to top it off, there was the 2nd quest, but what was most interesting was when in that quest, within one of the labyriths, every which way a deadend, and suddenly you have a wild idea and try something completely new, even though you never had to do this in the first quest, and so you push against a wall where a door would be, yet there's no door there, and suddenly you pass right through it! Holy @#$%! And here's this one guy on Gamefaqs saying how he can't find the 2nd or 3rd labyrinths, claiming he's already checked every screen that he's able to get to, and yet hasn't, and we who've played that game aplenty know how both of those labyrinths are right there out in the open, not even hidden. Can't imagine, someone who's already frustrated with it now, and on stuff that don't require him to do anything but wander onto the right screens, how he'd ever get anywhere near halfway through this game, probably'll end up giving up and saying the game sucks as most of them do nowadays when they play these old games and can't get anywhere in them right away. And if thrown straight into the 2nd quest, forget it, would be stumped indefinitely once inside a labyrinth with a false wall.

Here's another one, Castlevania II, since I'd mentioned both this and Zelda in my previous post. When I first played that game I was taking everything literal, I was foolishly trying every clue given to me as told, eventually I got the hint that I was being deviously mislead. I realized I couldn't trust anyone in this game, I'd just have to explore it completely in every way on my own. I got stuck quite a bit, frustrated, wandering about feeling like I'm doing the same things over and over again. The one point that completely stumped me was Deborah Cliff, afterall there were 2 cliffs, which one was Deborah, and sure I knew how to use the crystal, but even when I kneeled on every block close to those cliffs, nothing happened, I gave up on getting through it. But its because I discovered something else more interesting, while hopping across the blocks over the water that move up and down, I noticed how Simon's jump height sometimes varied, I put that to test. Once I knew the circumstances of this phenomenon I knew exactly where I wanted to put it to use. I worked my way all the way back to the graveyard where you get the Silver Knife, tried a bunch to leap up to the ledge that you really shouldn't be able to get up to, but after several continues, the timing not right, me falling in the water, I finally reached it, one moment I'm thinking I'm just going to fail again, and suddenly I'm standing on the ledge that was 3 blocks above where I jumped from. The thrill of this discovery was electrifying, I was so friggin' happy. Then I jumped back down, tried it again, because I was pretty sure it wasn't just some one time thing, I pulled it off again, by this point I'm all giddy with excitement. I ended up beating the game my first time with me getting around Deborah Cliff by way of, what would you call it, a sprite glitch? By lashing out with your whip at the right moment as you're jumping, you actually jump a little bit higher than normal. Anyway, its somewhat similar to how in Metroid you're able to climb up through walls by rolling up into a ball, and uncurling repeatedly. Eventually I did figure Deborah Cliff out and beat the game by way of the intended route. Castlevania II was one hard game to figure out, frustrating, yet compelling. And strangely still one of my favorites games of all time.