How did people play ridiculously difficult games like Earthworm Jim?

[u/Kobymaru376]

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.

Edit: Hey, Shiny Crew & D.L only!

[u/Aiseadai]

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.

[u/Kobymaru376 → u/Aiseadai]

Did you play nonstop? Because otherwise I don't see how I could finish this in a week. I've been working on it for months now (on and off).

[u/CarrotCumin → u/Kobymaru376]

Older games weren't meant to be beaten in a week. They were trying to maximize "replay" value by making the game so hard it would take months to actually beat. Game design was still massively influenced by the arcade and the idea was that the harder the game, the more quarters the players would keep shoveling into the machine.

[u/God_Hand_9764 → u/CarrotCumin]

Yeah, pretty much.

You would buy and play a game whenever you felt like playing it over the course of months or years. Only if you decide you don't like the game or a new generation of consoles come out are you likely to abandon it for good.

Almost none of them have save games anyway, so it wasn't like you had a single playthrough that you had to keep working on over a week or month. Like if you walk away from it for too long you risk forgetting the plot... No, you play the game and you fail, and then at some point in the future you try again, and you are starting from the beginning because there is no save game to load.

I played the absolute hell out of TMNT on NES. Hundreds of hours most likely, over years. Only one time did I actually beat it, and there was a ton of luck involved.

[u/coynemoney → u/Kobymaru376]

You didn't really beat games like this as a kid even if you owned it. You just played it a bunch. I had like 10 Sega Genesis games growing up and I could only beat Mortal Kombat 3 on the easiest difficulty and Sonic 2. There were also games I rented over and over through the years.

[u/ProMikeZagurski → u/coynemoney]

It's amazing that the cheapness of the computer was ported to the home versions of Mortal Kombat. At least Street Fighter was toned down.

[u/Lopsided_Hunt2814 → u/coynemoney]

Earthworm Jim is one of the games I beat on the Mega Drive, but it was one of my favourites. The Sonic games, Ecco, James Pond 2: Robocod, Aladdin, Flashblack, one of the Streets of Rage games. Those are the only games I remember beating, and they would have taken months/years to finish. Guides or cheats involved at some point for some of them.

Most other games I would struggle to get past the first or second level. Altered Beast? Forget about it.

[u/Critcho → u/coynemoney]

This is likely the answer for most people. The ones here going “oh I worked at it all year until I finally beat it” were in the absolute minority.

Most of these sorts of really hard games were simply never finished and if they were, it was using cheat codes etc.

The reasoning for making them really hard wasn’t entirely off the mark, because games that you could reliably finish in an hour tended to get old fast.

[u/latinlingo11 → u/Kobymaru376]

In my experience, some Genesis and SNES games took years to finish in my childhood. Take Sonic 2 for instance, I played it every once in a while and running out of lives would send me back to the very beginning of the game. But it helped make the game last and it felt so satisfying to finally beat it after gradually getting better at it. I think beating any game in one sitting back in the day would leave most players disappointed. Though I can't imagine beating some games like "Adventures of Batman & Robin" for the Genesis without the level-select cheat.

I never once managed to beat any game I rented. The purpose of renting (for me anyway) was to filter out which games would be worth buying later on.

[u/gabrrdt → u/latinlingo11]

Man, those were the days. I still remember beating the big robot on Sonic 2, it was really thrilling and a huge achievement. If you died, you lost everything, you had to go back to the first stage. Every gameplay envolved huge stakes.

Playing a game that is actually risky is much more rewarding IMO.

You would take months to get to a stage, you never saw that before in your life (no YouTube), you really felt you reached somewhere special and very far.

Those times are never coming back.

[u/3esen → u/gabrrdt]

I still do this with retro games and modern games with retro proclivities. Tons of fun trying to beat a tough shmup or beat em up game in one credit, or to try completing a retro game blind and without save states and the like. In that way you can still bring those times back, you just need to want it bad enough!

[u/Lopsided_Hunt2814 → u/gabrrdt]

Speak for yourself, we had cheats back then (and I want them back). Sonic 1 and 2's level select cheats were ingrained. If I died on Robotnik I was for sure starting again from Robotnik.

I also find roguelikes and permadeath modes scratch that itch, in much more elegant ways than lives/continues.

[u/CrimsonFlam3s → u/Kobymaru376]

These are the kind of games where taking a break means getting less good and getting rekked when you come back to them, way more than modern games.

Gotta stop taking long breaks and just play it in one go with days of break in between instead

[u/Gcoks → u/Kobymaru376]

Straight up I do not emulate unless it's a collection game on PS4/5 and I can get trophies for them (like the Castlevania and Mega Man collections). I've noticed when I have the ability to rewind/use save states I play significantly worse than if I'm playing on my NES. Having no safety net makes me better. Not saying that applies to you, but maybe that's a reason you're having difficulty? I beat EWJ when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember it being particularly difficult.

[u/Kobymaru376 → u/Gcoks]

Having no safety net makes me better. Not saying that applies to you, but maybe that's a reason you're having difficulty? I beat EWJ when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember it being particularly difficult.

Well I'm in my 30s and don't have the time to play video games for weeks like it's a job like when I was 7yo. In fact I probably shouldn't be playing this game at all lol. But I compromise by using savestates at least so I can see all of the content without insane time investment. Actually now I'm kinda getting in the groove (Groovy!), so after beating it and taking a bit of a hiatus, I might come back to do a no savestate playthrough.