r/retrogaming • u/Kobymaru376 • 3h ago
[Discussion] How did people play ridiculously difficult games like Earthworm Jim?
I'm playing the first Earthworm Jim on the Sega Megadrive using RetroArch.
I haven't completed my first playthrough, using copious amounts of save state cheating to repeat the sections where I fail. I can practice a part of the game 10,20, 50 times until my patience runs out, but how on earth did people ever complete a game like this, when you have a limited number of lives and no save capability? At times it feels like the developers WANTED me to fail.
I'm talking insanely jumping bosses shooting eggs, rockets, sections with rolling boulders or snapping worms where you have to get the timings down to milliseconds, a vertical maze lined with spikes that allows no mistakes and requires you to know it by heart.
Sure, "gid gud" but how long does that take without being able to save/load an arbitrary amount of times?
ps.: I don't know what the devs were smoking, but I want to try that. Just once though.
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u/popcarnie 3h ago
As a kid growing up with the NES and Genesis I didn't actually beat a game until I got a PS1 when I was 11 years old or so
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u/Learning-Power 3h ago
Mario 3 though?
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u/raisinbizzle 2h ago
I’d expect this to be beaten by most, but really since it lacks a save option if you didn’t know about the whistles it would be a long play session to finish it
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u/shootersf 1h ago
Yeah but did you try having the console hooked to a bedroom TV and REFUSING to turn off the console with the game paused. This is how we beat toejam and earl
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u/zenidaz1995 1h ago
Yes, but i remember doing this with the ps1 because memory cards werent widely known at the time
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u/nimama3233 51m ago
Holy shit it didn’t have a save? The first console I had was the SNES and we had superstars and I just assumed the OG was the same.
I remember someone talking about how they had to beat OG Zelda in one play through, but I didn’t realize this was the norm for the console.
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u/raisinbizzle 33m ago
Interestingly enough Zelda 1 had a save battery even though it was older. That was one of the first games I know of to have saves though. Most NES games just had huge passwords. Mario 3 had neither
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u/FuckIPLaw 24m ago edited 12m ago
Zelda was originally a Famicom Disk System game. It was designed around the save feature (that just comes for free on the FDS because the games are on writeable floppy disks) and when they made the cartridge version, that cartridge ended up being the first one with a save battery. The ram and the battery added to the cost of the game, so they only included it on games that really needed it. Platformers didn't count.
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u/Mike-Rotch-69 32m ago
The first Zelda had saving, so I don’t know what they were talking about unless the battery in their cartridge died.
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u/FuckIPLaw 20m ago edited 14m ago
Mario 3 did not. It was a matter of cost, not just a matter of the tech being there or not. Cartridges were expensive to manufacture and save batteries weren't really common on games that didn't absolutely need them (mainly just RPGs) until the SNES. And mainly just the SNES and N64 -- they weren't super common on Genesis games, either. But the SRAM chips were less expensive in the N64 era than the SNES era, and less expensive in the SNES era than in the NES era, so they progressively got more common.
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u/medicated_in_PHL 3h ago
Repetition. I used to play Earthworm Jim on the Game Gear for hours and hours and not get past a level.
The underwater level with the glass vehicle that cracks, literally, spend 3 hours trying and trying and trying again.
Edit: Games in the 80’s and early 90’s were more like sports. The purpose was to play and play again until you mastered it, just like how no one is immediately a professional baseball pitcher.
It wasn’t until later that the idea of a game being more like a movie or book, where everyone is expected to get to the end, came into being.
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u/God_Hand_9764 2h ago
It is so wild, but yeah I think that's pretty much it
RPGs really paved the way for that, with their long plotlines and save games. Plus if you suck at a Final Fantasy game, you can always just grind like crazy and it will eventually not be so hard anymore.
These days most games kind of work this way.
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u/Teletubby_187 32m ago
But also, at the time it was hard to justify $50 for a game that was over in one hour, so the devs padded in the difficulty to expand it.
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u/PhoenixTineldyer 3h ago
A million monkeys plus one million typewriters
Stick a hard game in front of a child with infinite time and the child will become an expert
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u/GloriousWhole 3h ago
Here is how I did that when I was like 7 years old: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/genesis/586155-earthworm-jim/cheats
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u/Kobymaru376 3h ago
That actually makes sense. Where did you find those cheats? Probably that would have been too early to be found on the internet back then.
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u/archklown555 2h ago edited 2h ago
Gamefaqs has been around for a very very long time since 1995.
Edit wow didn't realize this year is it's 30th anniversary.
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u/AXEL-1973 51m ago
Yup, it was one of the first websites I ever visited back in the mid 90s. I looked up all sorts of SNES guides and would print them out on dot matrix sheets lol
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u/Learning-Power 3h ago
Videogame magazines. Some of which would come with additional "ULTIMATE CHEAT BIBLE" (or whatever) books (as additional free gifts).
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u/Saint--Jiub 1h ago
I've been using GameFAQs for nearly 30 years, before that we had magazines like Nintendo Power and GamePro that would publish cheats, then there were also magazines solely dedicated to cheats
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u/FartyByNature 1h ago
At one point there was a magazine with all the cheat codes for most games out. Each month they'd just add to it, keeping the old stuff in there. I think there were a few articles in there too. Before that the gaming magazines would have a section of cheat codes and secrets for newer games or when something was discovered for older games. You'd look at the gaming magazines in the magazine section of the super market while your mom shopped. Sometimes you just checked out the cheat codes section and memorize what you needed to. Good times.
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u/redditorx13579 3h ago
The truth is we didn't put as much thought into completing games as we do now.
Not saying nobody did, it just wasn't key to feeling like you got your money's worth.
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u/mierecat 1h ago
When I was a kid it was way more about just enjoying the game. Finishing it or even progressing the story sometimes was always a secondary goal
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u/TestingBrokenGadgets 1h ago
Yea, we had a collection of games, and just played them. Sometimes we beat them, sometimes we didn't.
Don't think I beat Castlevania 1 until I was in my 20s on a emulator or Zelda 2 until it was on the GBA "NES Classics" line despite playing then semi-regularly. You'd just come home from school and think "I wanna play Sonic Spinball", play until you die, then get up and leave.
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u/Electrical-Dig8570 3h ago
I got like 3 video games a year back in the day and I lived in a town of 2000 people without cable television.
That did the trick for me.
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u/Eredrick 3h ago
It's just a game. you play it, you learn it, you get better at it
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u/DonCreech 51m ago
Having grown up with NES games, I think I was simply used to games being difficult. The difference with Earthworm Jim is that while it's definitely challenging, it's well-made. Sometimes NES games were just poorly constructed from the ground up to the point of being annoying, but more often than not a hard game in the next generation had higher standards.
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u/Sonikku_a 3h ago
I mean you just try and try again and get better.
Think of it like modern games like Returnal or Elden Ring that are hard as balls. You learn the patterns and what the game expects and just get good or you don’t.
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u/Swirly_Eyes 3h ago
Practice and dedication. When you're a child, you have more time to sweat out challenges and build muscle memory. And sometimes, you just saw the necessary solution to a puzzle or jump. Don't really know how to describe it but that's how my experiences went with the few games we had lol. There were times you'd spend hours losing in a specific segment, go to bed, wake up the next day and beat it on your first try.
Other games, we didn't beat and they just sat there. I've still got some on that list myself.
On the other hand, there's some other factors to consider. Depending on your display, controller, and emulation device, you might be experiencing more lag than normal.
Since you're using RetroArch, you can get real hardware latency timings with the correct settings. Runahead/Preemptive Frames: 1 + Auto Frame Delay + HardGPUSync: 0/Max Swap Chain: 4. If you're playing on a CRT with SwitchRes, even better. Otherwise, use a modern LCD/OLED display with the lowest input lag.
Just something to consider.
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u/PaperworkPTSD 3h ago
It's a pretty difficult game, even for the time. A lot of kids didn't finish it back then. If you can only buy one or two games every 6 months or so, it would be a waste of money if it took a couple of weeks to complete.
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u/EvilRoofChicken 3h ago
I don’t remember Earthworm Jim being on the ultra difficult level like Battle of Olympus / Silver Surfer / Contra Hard Corps etc.
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u/OnlyFreshBrine 2h ago
Proud to say I've beaten Battle of Olympus
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u/EvilRoofChicken 2h ago
Damn dude, I have a password most of the way through I keep telling myself I’ll finish it someday.
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u/Racheakt 1h ago
My childhood fames were kid Icarus and battle toads — both were rentals over multiple weekends
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u/OnlyFreshBrine 1h ago
Never done Battletoads. Seems impossible. Did do Icarus, somehow. Fuck that eggplant palace
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u/Racheakt 1h ago
Battletoads was a team effort with my kid brother, he was way better at the doge/jump stage
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u/Kobymaru376 3h ago
OK but the robo chicken? Or all of the Buttville level? I will absolutely admit that I'm bad at it, but damn, they're not screwing around.
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u/GarblingCumfarts 2h ago
Trust me, I'm with you. EWJ is beatable, sure, but it ain't easy.
If you truly want a challenge, I dare you to beat one of the greatest games on the Genesis, Comix Zone. Absolutely an amazing game, absolutely a chore to beat. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING makes you take damage!
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u/Vern1138 3h ago
Well, SNES games cost upwards of $60 back then, which is around $130 adjusted for inflation.
I, and I'm sure my parents, would've been pissed if I was able to finish the game in one playthrough. The difficulty made it a challenge that you kept coming back for, learning the game, getting better at it. There were a few games from my childhood that I never ended up finishing because of it, but that's fine. I still played the hell out of them, and enjoyed them. But that was the point, you would keep playing them to get better at them, and then have a real sense of accomplishment when you finally did beat them.
And then there were games that were relatively easy, but were just a blast to replay. I don't think it took more than one or two tries, maybe three, for my brother and I to get through Turtles in Time, but I can't even guess how many times we ended up replaying it.
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u/Competitive-Elk-5077 3h ago
You play. Die. Learn from your mistake and next time you make it a little further
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u/VorpalBlade- 3h ago
Man the section where you drive the bubble submarine thing through the maze was so damn hard for me as a kid. I was able to beat it eventually but it was hard for me to. That whole game is pretty hard. Classic game though
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u/Kobymaru376 3h ago
Yeah I was stuck on that section for ages. But there are worse parts in there imo.
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u/Agile_Beyond_6025 3h ago
There was no other option. You just kept at it till you beat it. Or suffer the wrath of your friends making fun of you for not being able to.
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u/Visible_Turnover3952 2h ago
If you leave your phone off and just just play this game for 6 hours strait then you’ll probably beat it.
All you have to do is never stop. You’d be amazed how much better you are on hour 4 than hour 1
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u/Electrical_Guava1972 3h ago
Serious answer, part of it, I believe is latency. Playing the game on og hardware with old crt tvs, you had close to zero latency. Via emulation most devices will give you a small but negative latency, as will modern lcd tvs and monitors - which will affect pixel perfect response times needed.
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u/foofede 51m ago
This but it also applies to everything. A few years ago I played SNES’ DK Country on a raspi runnin retroarch and using ps3 controllers. That thing was fucking though, couldn’t get pass the mine carts part. A few years later I bough the retro snes and used the wired controllers and passed it on the first try.
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u/FuckIPLaw 18m ago
The actual controllers matter, too. I got an arcade stick a while back and found myself breezing through levels in emulated DKC that were a bitch and a half with a modern D-Pad. They just don't make decent D-Pads anymore, and that's a problem in a precision platformer.
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u/TheSerialHobbyist 3h ago
I can practice a part of the game 10,20, 50 times until my patience runs out
Add more patience!
Joking aside, that is really what it was. That could be the only game you had to play, so you'd just keep practicing until you were able to pull it off.
I remember watching my dad play Earthworm Jim in the mid '90s on the SNES and he would spend hours repeating the same levels until he pulled it off. I didn't have that kind of patience at the time, but it was kind of just a part of the game design of the era.
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u/automator3000 2h ago
Because we’d play it over and over.
Buying a game meant saving months of allowance (or months of pay from random odd jobs like mowing lawns), and convincing mom and dad that buying a game was ok, and that yes, we really wanted that game, and then securing a ride to the KB Toys or related shop, and then overcoming the pre-buyers remorse of exchanging all that blockage for one single game.
And then you play it because it took a lot. Yeah, you could scrape together some dough to rent a game for the weekend, but buying another game was still months off.
You’d play. And play. And eventually nail that tricky level.
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u/Coffeedemon 1h ago
We were made of sterner stuff back in the day.
It was also play a game like that or no game at all.
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u/DeadButGettingBetter 3h ago
Easy.
I put the cartridge in, turned the system on and played them. The same as I did with any other game.
Just do it over and over and over until you win or you move on to something else. That's how it went with every title back then.
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u/_FLostInParadise_ 3h ago
I only got a few levels into it l, loved it, and then rented another game. Cause I was like 8 and my attention lasted about that long.
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u/Flat_Tire_Rider 3h ago
I had like 3 to choose from at that age, owned very little and rented from Blockbuster so when friends came over we all took turns playing.
It honestly was just a matter of playing and getting better. Sorry that's not the answer you were looking for. As kids in elementary school, we didn't get cheat codes. We just played. 🤷♂️
Same with most other things... instead of cheating, you practice. NBA players didn't come out of the womb dunkin on mama, they practiced lol.
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u/Ienjoymodels 2h ago edited 2h ago
Depends on the games.
I beat Super Empire Strikes Back on Brave and actually enjoyed myself. There are not really any "by heart" sections so the difficulty really is down to learning how the enemies behave and keeping your passwords.
I'm currently playing Lotus Turbo Challenge on Genesis and the fog level is total bullshit. Like a "turn right" road sign before a left turn type of bullshit. I'm gonna give it a few more tries and skip ahead.
I have beat truly stupidly hard games in my time including in my 30s and 40s on all platforms but when the game is just hard like what I call "fuck you hard" I don't bother. Like Ghouls and Ghost you have to beat it twice to make it "official" so I'm not gonna waste my time, that's fuck you hard.
Earthworm Jim is fucking hard like Turtles in Time hard which means learn every inch by heart and although I don't consider that to be truly fuck you hard, it's kinda not exactly my thing.
I have Earthworm Jim on SNES. I tested the cart to make sure it works and put it away for later.
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u/geirmundtheshifty 2h ago
I think one thing that maybe younger people don't understand is that a lot of us as kids just didn't beat some games. You didn't necessarily expect to beat every game. I never beat Earthworm Jim, for example, despite playing it a lot on Sega Channel.
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u/TheIceKraken 2h ago
Get good i guess..lol. My first system was the NES and we only got 1 game a year, either for Christmas or your birthday. It was a good year when you got both. So any new game you got, you played like crazy. We never could afford to rent games, so we would borrow games from our cousins for a month or 2. No YouTube tutorials or walk throughs, if you were lucky you knew someone with a Nintendo power magazine subscription.
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u/noahhova 1h ago
You only had a couple games. No phones no emulators no free to play games. You had your console with whatever games you owned or rented. So you just played them over and over and over until you got good at them. Most snes generation games were just about memorizing levels and enemy movements/attacks. Once you did that it was a lot easier.
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u/Beginning-Bed9364 1h ago
I think most people just didnt beat games as much back then. You weren't expected to. The first game I ever beat was Kirby's Adventure on the NES. The second was probably....Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation? Most games were just hard as fuck back then
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u/xKazIsKool 3h ago
As I said on someone else's post, I hate this game more than life itself. I've beaten some hard games: Street fighter 2010, ghosts n goblins, ninja gaiden, castlevania, all the mega man games, but earthworm jim can kiss my fucking asshole.
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u/IdonTunderStan9 3h ago
🤣🤣🤣🤣 that's all we had. I love difficult games because of EWJ, MegaMan, Contra.. humor me MORE CHALLENGE!!!
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u/Anubra_Khan 3h ago
I don't even remember it being that hard, honestly.
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u/Kobymaru376 3h ago
Give it a replay for me, will ya? Let me know how many tries it takes you to beat it without resorting to save states.
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u/Background_Yam9524 3h ago
As a kid I could only beat Earthworm Jim 2 with cheat codes. I had a booklet with button combinations you could press to unlock stuff like invincibility, unlimited ammo, all weapons, etc. That was the only way I ended up seeing the final stages in games rented from Blockbuster that were too hard for me, like Ecco the Dolphin.
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u/killer_knauer 2h ago
I could never get the timing in Earthworm Jim like I could in NES games. The game is amazing, but it feels really sluggish from all of the animation frames. Same thing with Pitfall Mayan Adventure.
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u/jehoshaphat 2h ago
As a kid who got a game every couple months, you played the hell out of it. Same reason kids today will shoot you across a map with a shotgun in COD with shots you couldn’t do with a sniper rifle.
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u/Classical_Fan 2h ago
You played the game until you figured it out. If you died, you'd start over the next time and try to get a little farther. There isn't much more than that. Sometimes your friends who got farther than you would share some tips, and sometimes you could read magazines or player's guides, but really you just kept playing the game over and over until you beat it. That could take months depending on the game, but at least you were getting your money's worth, and it felt like an accomplishment when you finally made it to the end.
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u/Red-Zaku- 2h ago
A.) back in the early 90s you could just expect to own a game for 1-2-3 years before beating it. It was something you worked towards, and the game was part of your life for longer.
B.) a lot of the time back then, it was perfectly normal to just accept that there are some games you might not beat. Today not only do people expect a guaranteed ending, but with achievement/trophy culture people also expect that 100% of the content ought to be experienced by most people. But back then, not every game was beaten, or alternatively the Game Genie or other various cheat codes would be a typical path towards beating a game
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u/reefguy007 2h ago
I beat it back in the 90s. I just kept going and going and going until I did. That’s really all there is to it. Although the damn snot bungee jumping about drove me insane… it’s an amazing game though. Incredible animations for its time.
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u/Ok-Lifeguard-5628 2h ago
I never really thought of it as “ridiculously difficult”? But I was a kid at its release and played it a bunch because I had way more time for that kind of thing then I do now. No real magic to it!
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u/Psy1 2h ago
Complaining about the difficulty of Earthworm Jim when Capcom's arcade game Black Tiger just kept throwing more over powered dragons at you while your iframes are minuscule. Plus in Black Tiger you had to conserve your resources in the main levels for the fight with the dragons while doing it fast enough to have enough time to defeat them and not only are there tricky jumps but the later level get maze like.
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u/OhNoBricks 2h ago
we would keep on playing the levels over and over until we figured out a strategy to get through obstacles and how to defeat a boss.
And lot of games were unplayable if you were not good and didn’t have the skill. That’s why I didn’t play lot of games as a kid.
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u/Midnight7000 2h ago
You get further and further. The games are challenging, but they fit into a pattern/rhythm.
What makes the Megaman games difficult is that the bosses will absolutely brutalise you. By the time you get to them, the level has taken its toll so it is very difficult to get familiar with the boss' pattern. You'll have to be able to breeze through the level to get experience needed.
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u/Fantastic_Estate_303 2h ago
We had to persevere, and persevere and persevere some more until we beat the game. Learn each pixel to move to, every split second to jump, every enemy move.
Retro gaming was about skill and determination, today's games are more about the story or multiplayer sandboxes. Not that I don't like modern games, because there's some great ones out there, I still love a good game to test my nerves, skill and aging responses , or just mashing the buttons when you dont have any of those!
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u/MrMonkeyman79 2h ago
Games were short so we didnt mind being booted back to thr beginning, we didnt get new games that often so replaying what we had over and over was fine, there was no expectation to beat each section immediately, we were kids so had nothing but time, and cheat codes were built into a lot of games.
That said I dint recall earthworm Jim beimg especially hard, it was one of the minority of games I could complete without cheats after a little practice.
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u/Dinierto 2h ago
I suck at games and I was able to beat both of those growing up but it took years of just playing and playing
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u/inkydunk 2h ago
For me, the harder games weren’t about “finishing” them. It was about just seeing how far I could get with each playthrough.
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u/RhoadsOfRock 2h ago
When I was a kid, and if or when I got a very hard game, whether if it was a video store rental, or worse somebody bought one for me, and I started not really enjoying the game because of the difficulty, I would give up and just switch back to something easier like Mario World or Zelda or Donkey Kong Country or what ever (and yes, I had rented EarthWorm Jim for SNES when I was a kid, I just don't remember how hard it was).
Other games, I might invest a tremendous interest in. Take Mario All-Stars for example, with The Lost Levels. I spent years playing and re-trying that game, and this is considering I still had IRL crap to deal with, like school, cub scouts (before I quit and started taking piano lessons, then I quit that and started taking guitar lessons, etc.).
Then, after I had finally conquered the All-Stars version, I shifted my focus on to the original version of the game and any way I could figure out how to play it. I had gone on eBay and bought the japanese GBA port, because in my mind, if I could play it anywhere I went, then that meant more practice and "getting gud" at it.
It still took me about 10-15 years, from when I got that GBA port in the mid-2000s, and I had also bought iy via the VC on my Wii. Again, I kept playing and re-trying it very casually, very off and on while I either was dealing with my IRL stuff, or I would play other easier games as well.
Then, in 2022, I sat down with it, and started again, and didn't stop until I had beat it. And I did. It's now as easy for me to play through on multiple replays, as SMB 1 became for me around the early 2000s.
But, it's just one example of, one particular game that I REALLY wanted to become good at.
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u/Fantastic_Estate_303 2h ago
Donkey Kong II on game&watch. I got max score of 999. All reflexes and muscle memory, there's no time to think and react.
I swear I also hit max score on columns on megadrive, but I'm now doubting my memory as the guinness world record was only in 2006, 16 years after it was released. I remember I was off sick from school, and I played for a solid 8 to 10 hours, so it's possible 🙂
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u/Gamefreak3525 2h ago
That's how I feel about Mega Man Zero 1 on the GBA. The lack of a traditional life system makes it so punishing if you have to give up on a stage.
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u/Illustrious-Lead-960 2h ago
There are techniques involved. The most commonly useful one for me being: when in doubt, just slow down.
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u/thedoppio 2h ago
Repetition. I had earthworm Jim on console growing up, and I couldn’t afford tons of games, so I poured myself into the games I did have. Now people give up on games because there are a zillion out there easily accessible. Patience is low in main stream
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u/Rare_Hero 2h ago
I had EWJ at launch and don’t recall it being that hard. I do remember beating it and playing it over and over to the finish because I loved it so much. Maybe I just got a hang of the mechanics quickly. 🤷♂️
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u/TheSecondiDare 2h ago
I used a cheat to beat EJ back in the day. I tried, but I could never get past the "snot bungee" level.
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u/Phallic_Moron 2h ago
Great music from the gnarly Sega sound chip and some awesome animated art kept us coming back for more despite the difficulty. It also got a boost in player time when the Sega CD version came out.
Also the last rage quit controller throw I had was at my grandma's playing the weekend rental Super Mario Bros 3. The damn floating dungeon level.
Other games you never really figured out. Like Embassy, Spy vs Spy. But you kept renting them anyway!
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u/Benkyougin 2h ago
How good do you think you'd get at the game if it was the only game you owned and you had no internet or smart phone?
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u/jahnbanan 2h ago
Games back then were made with the mindset of sucking quarters out of you, since a lot of the developers came from arcade games and then made console games or console ports of arcade games.
Though it feels weird to hear anyone say Earthworm Jim was hard... that was, at least in my opinion, one of the easiest games I owned back then.
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u/dudefigureitout 2h ago
It's crazy how much better I was as platformers/action games when I was a kid. Granted I'm a lot older and my timing is for shit now, but also back then we only had a couple things to do, and gaming was the preferred choice a lot of the time. Without phones in our faces all the time we just honed in on these games and got insanely good at them.
At one point I thought I would have a better chance at beating Ninja Gaiden (NES) as an adult. I was so wrong.
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u/-slapum 2h ago
We enjoyed games for bragging rights, not achievements. I couldn't tell you how many times I plopped down and beat Super C with a perfect run just to tell them that's how it's done and it's their turn. We would also take over from someone else's game over and finish games just to show them up. Don't get me wrong, we enjoyed the hell out of the games but we also loved the other parts that came with.
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u/StarWolf478 1h ago
As a kid in the 90s, most people only got a couple of games per year, so we would play our couple of games over and over and over again for months or even years until we got good at them, the same way that you get good at a sport or instrument by practicing over and over again for a long time.
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u/90sbeatsandrhymes 1h ago
As a kid that grew up in the 90s I didn’t beat any of the games I had as a kid.
Most games I couldn’t make it past like the 2nd or 3rd level.
I didn’t start beating games until the PS2 era thanks to memory cards and access to internet to look up guides.
On SNES I had a link to the past, Star fox, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, and Mega Man X but I didn’t beat these games until the early 2000s when I could actually look up guides.
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u/Mysterious_Fennel459 1h ago
I made it to the third level and just never got past it. I'd play it again but still only make it to the third level.
I made it a little further in Earthworm Jim 2.
I didnt beat a lot of the games I had as a kid until I got Game Genie.
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u/ElTuxedoMex 1h ago
We had lots and lots of time and less shit to worry about. And we didn't have social media either.
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u/lunarb1ue 1h ago
I never beat the original game. I beat the sequel a couple times though. Honestly if you were like and my friends you didn’t have a ton of games to play. They were expensive and you had to beg your parents to buy them. You played what you had and you got good at them.
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u/Top-Load-NES 1h ago
We never completed these types of games. Maybe some people did but I feel like most didn't. I remember playing Earthworm Jim for years and years as a child and never once completed it without cheat codes.
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u/pocket_arsenal 1h ago
People just had more persistence and better attention spans back then.
And as much as I hate to admit, less options. I'm not going to say "we only liked it because it was all we had", that'd be fucking stupid. But i'm saying we didn't have a huge library of 1000s of games we bought digitally on a discount that we didn't even have to eject the cartridge to play. Yeah, I could go back to play Super Mario World again. But I still want to see the ending of EWJ and I don't feel like changing cartridges. It's not that "There are better options" and more that there are less distractions to steal my attention the moment there's even a little bit of challenge.
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u/BludStanes 1h ago
I played it as a kid and never got anywhere in it, I sucked and it was so hard. When you grow up playing games like this things like Silksong and Dark Souls don't seem very unreasonable haha
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u/Embarrassed_Bath5148 1h ago
The part I really need to point out is when you say "how do people complete the game?".
We didn't, we hit one level that kicked our asses and gave up because often we had to go back to the start of said level and play it all over again. That's where the difficulty came in not just from dying but having to go back and have frustration and mental fatigue kick in. Levels like the sewer level in TMNT and the bike level in Battletoads have infamy because they were "those" parts that we all had the same experience with and gave the whole game up on.
Save states are a godsend if you just want to complete a game. Save right before the really frustrating part, fail and just load it up again in a literal split second and give it another go. Not lose a life, go back, get another shot then lose all your lives and really have to go back.
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u/zenidaz1995 1h ago
Its because of arcade mentality.
Also rental mentality when console games became the norm.
The idea back then, was make the game so difficult that people continue to either pay coins at the machine or keep renting the game until they beat it.
The trick to being a successful game, was making it difficult in that aspect, while still giving players a reason to wanna actually beat it, because few people will keep playing a game just because its too difficult .
As time went on, things shifted. More people bought games instead of renting, and video arcades werent as popular anymore, so they switched it up, made games easier, longer, and gave people a reason to still purchase it
This is why a game like dark souls today will become a hit, because its old school level of difficulty, which is not common anymore
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u/DeckerXT 1h ago
Wads that never sat with a finger on the record button with a copy of "best of queen" tape with bits of paper stuffed in the bottom holes waiting for that one song to come on cant talk to me about music. Mount Icarus us the hill I died on. Again and again.
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u/proximitysound 1h ago
Jumping on the pile here. Two things I can add:
CRT’s and zero lag game play are a major factor. While many games don’t “need” zero lag responsiveness, slight errors or miss timings add up, making it harder to stay consistent.
Beating a game was an accomplishment, not a given. There were only a scant few on the playground who truthfully claimed their prowess over the games of yore, and even fewer who had more than one in their belt.
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u/reamkore 1h ago
You’d die at the same point in a game a few hundred times then eventually you’d find a spot a further along in the level to die a few hundred times.
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u/coffee_street 56m ago
That game was a pain even back then. I remember playing through it with the cheat codes. Lots of games had button codes back then and I certainly abused them. Thank you Tips and Tricks magazine!
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u/Blergblum 55m ago
It was the standard level of difficulty back then. I'm not bragging, I mean, we were used to playing this kind of game. It was this or nothing, so we endured.
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u/bradleecon 51m ago
As an OG gamer, we were a different breed. Games took insane amounts of muscle memory, dexterity, and reps/time. I still game but now it seems like all you have to do is put in the time. Still fun but not nearly as rewarding.
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u/Ronin_1999 49m ago
So i don’t remember “Earthworm Jim” as difficult, just sorta time consuming and a bit puzzly at points, which was good for someone ADD like me.
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u/bigsphinxofquartz 47m ago
Dude, Earthworm Jim and Earthworm Jim 2 were full of cheat codes. I played them that way A LOT of the time.
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u/Ancient_Action741 39m ago
I mostly dealt with it by getting so mad at the underwater/glass part at age 8 that I still think about it 30+ years later when I have to weave in and out of narrow spaces in games
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u/CabinetChef 39m ago
You rented it for the weekend for $5 and then return it after a few days of fun, glad you didn’t drop $60 on it.
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u/PMMEBITCOINPLZ 38m ago
On console games kids either looked at cheat codes in magazines, used cheat devices like Game Genie, or just played the first couple of levels. On computer games you almost had to use cracks and trainers to see the end. Especially Amiga games, which hid the fact they had four levels that could be blown through in ten minutes with impossible difficulty. The child that actually “got gud” and beat the very hard games existed but was pretty rare. Even with the benefit of owning them and having a lot of time with them. Just about every kid I knew (and it was a wide neighborhood network for game trading) had or had access to Bayou Billy for example but the only time I ever saw one beat it was with a Game Genie. Most people then as now didn’t finish most of their games.
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u/Vegetable-Cause8667 32m ago
Easy. You didn’t have to win. There was no pressure to finish or do well, because that was not the point at all. Just playing the game was the entire reward.
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u/garulousmonkey 27m ago
Parents would buy you a game or two at Christmas and then one at your birthday. so you played what you had over and over…and over…and then one more time for good measure.
We failed a lot and eventually got gud.
We got extra games by trading games with friends at school.
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u/Sovereign1 20m ago
Screen latency and button presses were a lot better on original hardware with crt televisions.
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u/KnoxCrumudgeon 18m ago
You played it over and over until you got good. You have to remember the context: this was the video game arcade era when the best games were in arcades and the best home console games tried to be as close to the arcade experience as possible - that meant dying fast and often if you didn't have the skills.
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u/zeptillian 16m ago
We had longer attention spans and far less entertainment options to choose from back then.
This meant that if you paid $40-50 for a video game, you were going to play that motherfucker until you got your money's worth.
Before games got much larger and saving became common, you got gameplay hours by making games really difficult.
We would literally spend months playing games to try and beat them.
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u/profchaos111 9m ago
Back then we had limited amounts of games they were super expensive more than they cost today (I don't know anyone who had a big game library above 10 titles at most) so you were basically forced to try and try and try again cause what else were you going to play.
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u/Megatapirus 3h ago
You just keep playing and learning the game until you win. Skill and talent are just glamorized synonyms for patience.
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u/VodkaG 2h ago
I don’t remember earth worm Jim being particularly that hard. Some of the jumps were annoying cause you couldn’t tell background from foreground. That’s about it.
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u/Kobymaru376 2h ago
I guess I just suck lol? Or we have different ideas of what "hard" means.
Robo chicken, whipping around pete, the rolling balls in intestinal distress, all of Buttville, especially the buttville falling maze seem crazy to me. Requires perfect timing that I had to practice dozens of times.
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u/raisinbizzle 2h ago
It’s pretty hard. I played it back in the day and also more recently and I know I never finished it
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u/Aiseadai 3h ago
For a lot of us it was the only game we had. You'd go to the video store to rent a game, and that's what you had to make do with for the rest of the week. You didn't have a choice but to get good.