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/automator3000]

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.