But just finishing the game and beating Bowser as a kid, definitely did that.
P.S.: If you know one of the secret spots in the second world (near top ghost house), you can get practically unlimited power-ups (flowers, feathers, mushrooms and a Yoshi) and lives.
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A Link to the Past was significantly harder to beat.
Earlier NES-era and older games could be absolutely punishing. The original Metroid is bonkers hard and Super Mario Bros. 3 is much harder than Super Mario World.
I think it's a matter of acclimatization. I grew up playing mostly platform games (mostly on PC), which I think has given me an innate sense of how the 2D world physics and interactions work most of the time. I remember the jump to 3D games being like learning to ride a bicycle all over again.
Fun addendum: because I grew up playing Commander Keen and Duke Nukem and so on, using directional keys with my right hand is hard-wired for me, I simply cannot do it with my left hand, and I'm actually left-handed. I can use a mouse equally well with both hands, but I just can't do WASD normally for 3D games. I have to remap and flip the controls to IJKL. Today I just play most games with a controller, aside from FPS games.
Link to the Past was also quite hard, but I cheated at that (abusing the saving/loading from the Switch emulator version) so I can't compare. But I blamed it's difficulty on its old-fashioned controls: you can't attack in a direction unless you move in that direction. I find this extremely frustrating and limited after playing more modern top-down action games like Hotline Miami.
But it could also be because I grew up playing them, I'm used to the gameplay style. Some newer games are like you describe, I cannot get past some levels and I quit in frustration.
Also other games. I'm just a bad player and have to find games that are fun nonetheless (Crusader Kings III), or very easy.
Food for thought: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/easy-mode-guilt
I get frustrated and impatient with my lack of progress and give up, which is of course entirely a personal problem. My wife loves video games though and I’m sure will bring our children up right.
You'll play 100 times and only get 10% of the way in, so you still need to practice the later parts just as much. A bit like agile software development, really!
NES platformers rely on precise timing, and the controls just _feel_ sluggish and laggy. I can absolutely believe that some combination of delays introduced by the bluetooth stack for the controller, the OS' input event queue, the emulator itself, and the whole modern video pipeline add up to a few frames worth of delay compared to the original game drawing itself on a CRT.
I was a kid during the SNES/Megadrive era, and I didn't beat most of my games. That's fine. Since there were no saves for platformers, you would play from the start each time, and get better.
Sometimes you would get further than you usually go, so you would discover new content, and it was harder, the thrill was really nice.
Then when you finally beat a game, the feeling of accomplishment was really awesome. Something to brag with your friends during recess. Because most games weren't meant to be finished by the average player, finishing one really meant something.
Games back the were really hard, especially without any sort of saving, there’s no shame in finding them difficult.