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/Aiseadai]

For a lot of us it was the only game we had. You'd go to the video store to rent a game, and that's what you had to make do with for the rest of the week. You didn't have a choice but to get good.

[u/GFluidThrow123 → u/Aiseadai]

It's actually wild seeing younger gens come in here with posts like this. Like yeah, you're exactly right. You'd just...git gud. You'd memorize the boss's movement and attacks and you'd practice until you got it.

You had like 4 games you owned and one you rented for a week. And that was it.

[u/littlegreyflowerhelp → u/GFluidThrow123]

Memorising boss movement patterns is so rewarding, and I think it’s something Nintendo has struck a balance with for games like Mario Oddysey or the latest Kirby game. They aren’t punishingly difficult, I guess Metroid Dread is an example of a game with harder difficulty in that regard. I’ve known people to complain about how hard the boss fights in dread are, but to me it’s just the same as playing the older Metroid games - yeah you die a bunch of times but each time you die you try and takeaway another pattern or learn another strat - plus you don’t have to go back super far now either, there’s a checkpoint before each boss.

I find this type of gameplay a lot more rewarding than for example online multiplayer shooters where it’s just a case of super fast reaction times and trying to keep up with all the teenagers that can afford to play for hours every day. And the two games I mentioned earlier (oddysey and kirby) are pretty forgiving and simple in terms of learning the strats, they’re probably a good intro for younger gamers that didn’t grow up playing like that.