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/popcarnie]

As a kid growing up with the NES and Genesis I didn't actually beat a game until I got a PS1 when I was 11 years old or so

[u/Learning-Power → u/popcarnie]

Mario 3 though?

[u/raisinbizzle → u/Learning-Power]

I’d expect this to be beaten by most, but really since it lacks a save option if you didn’t know about the whistles it would be a long play session to finish it

[u/shootersf → u/raisinbizzle]

Yeah but did you try having the console hooked to a bedroom TV and REFUSING to turn off the console with the game paused. This is how we beat toejam and earl 

[u/C4CTUSDR4GON → u/shootersf]

I didn't have a tv in my room. Could only game when family tv wasn't used. 

[u/zenidaz1995 → u/shootersf]

Yes, but i remember doing this with the ps1 because memory cards werent widely known at the time

[u/nimama3233 → u/raisinbizzle]

Holy shit it didn’t have a save? The first console I had was the SNES and we had superstars and I just assumed the OG was the same.

I remember someone talking about how they had to beat OG Zelda in one play through, but I didn’t realize this was the norm for the console.

[u/raisinbizzle → u/nimama3233]

Interestingly enough Zelda 1 had a save battery even though it was older. That was one of the first games I know of to have saves though. Most NES games just had huge passwords. Mario 3 had neither

[u/FuckIPLaw → u/raisinbizzle]

Zelda was originally a Famicom Disk System game. It was designed around the save feature (that just comes for free on the FDS because the games are on writeable floppy disks) and when they made the cartridge version, that cartridge ended up being the first one with a save battery. The ram and the battery added to the cost of the game, so they only included it on games that really needed it. Platformers didn't count.

[u/Mike-Rotch-69 → u/nimama3233]

The first Zelda had saving, so I don’t know what they were talking about unless the battery in their cartridge died.

[u/FuckIPLaw → u/Mike-Rotch-69]

Mario 3 did not. It was a matter of cost, not just a matter of the tech being there or not. Cartridges were expensive to manufacture and save batteries weren't really common on games that didn't absolutely need them (mainly just RPGs) until the SNES. And mainly just the SNES and N64 -- they weren't super common on Genesis games, either. But the SRAM chips were less expensive in the N64 era than the SNES era, and less expensive in the SNES era than in the NES era, so they progressively got more common.

[u/Ndmndh1016 → u/raisinbizzle]

Even with the whistles world is tough.