>>713451024
>The reason why games like Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, and many of Nintendo's other offerings are considered classics is that it was actually possible to fucking beat as a kid without banging your head against the wall
This has a lot of truth to it, but kids are fucking awful at games. If you are an adult who has played video games for most of your life, you should be able to turn on Castlevania 1 for the first time and beat it in a few hours. Maybe you'll take a couple unfair deaths in Ninja Gaiden, but you're not a dumb kid and you should be able to learn that the bird is an obstacle for that pit and shouldn't die to it a second time.
A lot of these NES games are not nearly as hard as people gave them credit for, and as long as you don't take a 15 year old AVGN video to heart and just say that it's impossible, you should be able to beat them without much difficulty.

Seriously. I'd suggest anyone who bothers to read this and has long thought of "NES hard" games as actually super difficult to actually sit down with a well known one they played as a kid but couldn't beat, and give a real try towards learning the game to beat it. There's a lot of fun to be had and satisfaction in beating games that don't just give you a free win. I feel a lot of people learned that thanks to the popularity of Souls games but never bothered applying the lesson to older games.