Anyone who played any beloved third-party NES game:
Oh, that's cute! 😏
Edit: Just so we're clear, I'm poking fun here, I like Demon/Dark Souls just fine.
but waay too many games get compared to them as though they're the first game with ball-retracting difficulty, lmao.
Thing is, that applies to 80% of NES hard games people are talking about here.
Go play some of them with a Quick Save or Rewind feature that is becoming so common now, and you realize most of the difficulty is "we surprised you, you died and its a 3-5 minute level until you get back and you'll have forgotten it by then, if you even learned how to avoid it."
They were literally designed to eat all your time so you didn't buy other games (or had to rent them for longer) because we were still transitioning out of Arcade milking, and its really only people's nostalgia and the "street cred" they derived from the suffering that keeps them defending it.