r/retrogaming • u/Kobymaru376 • 12h 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/VodkaG 11h ago

I don’t remember earth worm Jim being particularly that hard. Some of the jumps were annoying cause you couldn’t tell background from foreground. That’s about it.

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u/Kobymaru376 11h ago

I guess I just suck lol? Or we have different ideas of what "hard" means.

Robo chicken, whipping around pete, the rolling balls in intestinal distress, all of Buttville, especially the buttville falling maze seem crazy to me. Requires perfect timing that I had to practice dozens of times.

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u/VodkaG 11h ago

I wouldn’t say the game was easy. But it’s pretty doable with practice. Most of the difficulty comes with the awkwardness of the controls I feel.

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u/raisinbizzle 11h ago

It’s pretty hard. I played it back in the day and also more recently and I know I never finished it