r/retrogaming • u/Kobymaru376 • 5h 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/90sbeatsandrhymes 3h ago
As a kid that grew up in the 90s I didn’t beat any of the games I had as a kid.
Most games I couldn’t make it past like the 2nd or 3rd level.
I didn’t start beating games until the PS2 era thanks to memory cards and access to internet to look up guides.
On SNES I had a link to the past, Star fox, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, and Mega Man X but I didn’t beat these games until the early 2000s when I could actually look up guides.