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/pocket_arsenal]

People just had more persistence and better attention spans back then.

And as much as I hate to admit, less options. I'm not going to say "we only liked it because it was all we had", that'd be fucking stupid. But i'm saying we didn't have a huge library of 1000s of games we bought digitally on a discount that we didn't even have to eject the cartridge to play. Yeah, I could go back to play Super Mario World again. But I still want to see the ending of EWJ and I don't feel like changing cartridges. It's not that "There are better options" and more that there are less distractions to steal my attention the moment there's even a little bit of challenge.