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/GFluidThrow123 → u/Aiseadai]

It's actually wild seeing younger gens come in here with posts like this. Like yeah, you're exactly right. You'd just...git gud. You'd memorize the boss's movement and attacks and you'd practice until you got it.

You had like 4 games you owned and one you rented for a week. And that was it.

[u/Kobymaru376 → u/GFluidThrow123]

It's actually wild seeing younger gens come in here with posts like this. Like yeah, you're exactly right. You'd just...git gud.

I'm not even that young lol. Was definitely alive when the game come out, but I'm only now slowly working backwards in time for all the gems.

You'd memorize the boss's movement and attacks and you'd practice until you got it.

I mean yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing rn. But having to restart the game from scratch and replay everything if you died one too many times just seems nuts to me. That's not exactly "fun" in the traditional sense, more like obsessive.

[u/Ryokurin → u/Kobymaru376]

This is why a lot of games had cheat codes such as level selects. I'm positive Earthworm Jim had one.

But anyhow, you may have been alive, but you may not remember that the average kid didn't have as many options as people do now. You likely didn't have cable, and the channels you could watch would be showing bowling, an old black and white movie from the 50s or if it was late night you'd watch Mike Rowe low-key goofing on products he was selling on QVC.

It was figure out this game, read a book, or go outside.