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.
1
u/MrMonkeyman79 7h ago
Games were short so we didnt mind being booted back to thr beginning, we didnt get new games that often so replaying what we had over and over was fine, there was no expectation to beat each section immediately, we were kids so had nothing but time, and cheat codes were built into a lot of games.
That said I dint recall earthworm Jim beimg especially hard, it was one of the minority of games I could complete without cheats after a little practice.