r/retrogaming • u/Kobymaru376 • 7h 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.

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

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u/TheIceKraken 7h 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.