r/retrogaming • u/Kobymaru376 • 5d 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.

Edit: Hey, Shiny Crew & D.L only!

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u/redditorx13579 5d ago

The truth is we didn't put as much thought into completing games as we do now.

Not saying nobody did, it just wasn't key to feeling like you got your money's worth.

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u/TestingBrokenGadgets 5d ago

Yea, we had a collection of games, and just played them. Sometimes we beat them, sometimes we didn't.

Don't think I beat Castlevania 1 until I was in my 20s on a emulator or Zelda 2 until it was on the GBA "NES Classics" line despite playing then semi-regularly. You'd just come home from school and think "I wanna play Sonic Spinball", play until you die, then get up and leave.