Over at the mercurial 1UP, Jeremy Parish has a fun post on games that use the infamous Konami code for the NES, outlining the shared cheat method for some rather classic titles.

Parish notes: "Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the man who crafted many of Konami's NES home conversions, was a kind-hearted saint. Well, no, basically he was as weaksauce as the rest of us. Whatever; he was nice enough to add a debug code to some insanely difficult games so that he could actually finish them, and no one bothered to remove the code before the game shipped. And because we're all mere mortals, once we learned the code we abused it."

After going through games like Gradius, Contra, and Life Force, Parish also steps in to point out that Gradius III on the SNES brought the code back, albeit in tricksy fashion, and Harmony of Dissonance on GBA continues the tradition ("This is a game where the best magic spell causes your hero to be supported by a shield straight from Gradius, featuring arcade-accurate sound effects. So, yeah, it's little surprise that this is where the Konami Code made its Castlevania debut, allowing you to play as Simon Belmont in Boss Rush mode.") This is the kind of rich geek tapestry that only a toasty frog can weave, y'know?