Continuing my quest to upload every scrap of video I've ever captured to YouTube, I found some footage of me playing Bionic Commando (the game where you take control of a cybernetic super soldier who can't jump for some reason and guide him on a mission to rescue a different soldier who got captured at the end of a different game). I used this to demonstrate farming energy pellets back when I updated protipoftheday.com.
I used to be good enough at this game that I was able to finish it a time or two, which I still think was pretty impressive since I didn't have a manual and the only real tips and strategies that I could get were what I could get from tip books with no pictures.
I, for whatever reason, decided that I would play this game until I finished it. I went all in and did things that I didn't normally do when I played games like these. I made maps, I made a list of what radios worked in what areas, and I plugged away at it for weeks until I got to the ending, which, if you've never seen, is crazy-gory (you probably shouldn't click on that) for an NES game released in America in the 80's.
This is one of those games where the difficulty is brutal, but it never really seems unfair. Yeah, sure, relying on precision grappling is pretty rough, and not being able to jump is really weird, and having to earn continues and hit points seems like busywork, and you sometimes get a Game Over because you ran out of Continues and there's no in-game counter of them that I could find. But the game never really feels unfair.