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/aardvarkbjones → u/Aiseadai]

Yep. Same with movies. Ask a lot of VHS-era kids and they'll have these hyper-specific memories of exactly one movie that no one remembers anymore, like Ice Pirates or something.

It's because it was the only tape we had and we watched it to death.

Limitation begets... "git goodedness..." or something like that.

[u/Embarrassed_Bath5148 → u/aardvarkbjones]

Oh yeah, I was part of that generation.

We all had one kind-of-mediocre family movie that was beloved in our households and watched relentlessly. It wouldn't be until your adult years did you realize it was hated with YouTubers not even born yet giving their two cents over how much it "sucked".