Sumez wrote:
That isn't how games were played back in the NES days
That's certainly how we played games back in the NES days. I used warps and tricks as much as I could after learning about them. There was two levels in world 8 of SMB3 that I couldn't beat as a kid. It's the two first levels of the dark part of the world. I think the second one has a black & white sun. I always used a cloud item to skip the first one and a P-wing to fly over the second one. It wasn't until I got a bit older that I started to beat and explore every level in games and also try to 1cc games.
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and it's not what they are designed for.
Well if the game allows a certain something it's certainly designed that way, no matter what the initial intention was. The fact that a game may have both lives and continues with not much different between them, or like Galaxy or Eggerland no real different at all, is only because they remain from a concept invented in an arcade environment where it maked sense.
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Perhaps the same could be said about Super mario bros. 3. Well, if you run out of them, you need to redo the world you're on, which is a drastic change of play. But at the same time, the game is extremely generous with 1ups, and the levels are rather short (a bit like close-range checkpoint to checkpoint). So most of the time, you won't experience what a "game over" feels like.
Yes and Super Mario World is even worse in this regard. SMB3 doesn't really just make you redo a world though, it remembers what levels Mario and Luigi has cleared respectively, and if Luigi Game Overs only levels that Luigi has cleared are restored.
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In fact, this was the very first thing I posted.

That I think there are so many different approaches and different ways to play a game, that it's impossible to compare different people's takes on different games.
Yes you have a good point here. Playing style certainly affects the way you judge the difficulty.
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Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.
Oh yeah I forgot there's a trick to continue. I guess it's one of those common cheats that's considered part of the game's rules and not a cheat. I've never used it though (I didn't know about it as a kid), and SMB2j is obviously still much harder with or without it.