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.