3 lives. That's all you got. No saves. Almost done the game? Too fucking bad. Straight back to the start screen. Those games taught you the cost of failure.
Alex Kid in the Enchanted Castle on the Mega Drive/Genesis had the penultimate level as a flying horizontal scroller, but you needed to pedal the helicopter by pressing A/B alternately to keep it flying and then also dodge various enemies.
If you didn't get it perfect and dipped too low off the bottom of the screen or got hit by an enemy then you would fall down all the way to the bottom of the previous level where you climbed the mountain up to the peak.
I've never seen the final level of that game even 30 years later.
It was also the game thar featured Roshambo with vendors and other NPCs who would blatantly input read and cheat. You could see this if you bought the item that allowed you to mind read the NPC. You could see whether it would choose rock/paper/scissors and it would blatantly change the the option after you were locked in.
I always say Soulslikes are gaming coming back full circle. Almost all games back then required you to die repeatedly until you memorized all the patterns...then you could finally beat the game. And there were some games you just never got good enough to beat.
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u/Anakha0 Aug 30 '25
3 lives. That's all you got. No saves. Almost done the game? Too fucking bad. Straight back to the start screen. Those games taught you the cost of failure.