I’ve never played Kid Icarus, but if I did I’d probably try and do it without save states.

I’m surprised you never found the fake Kraid. I think I’ve played through the game 3 or 4 times, and I always end up encountering it.

If you do Kraid’s hideout first, then I don’t think the wave beam is useful because of all the missiles you’ll have.

I don’t really think that it matters that Norfair is so confusing. You keep everything you found when you die. I just wander around collecting stuff with no idea where I am, and then die and restart at the elevator (or wherever it is) and I’m fine. Actually, I wish the challenge was balanced differently. There should be a life-and-missile recharge by every elevator, but you should need to get back to the elevator to get a password.

Really the thing that pisses me off about this game is the farming after you die. Other than that, there are some hard parts, but I don’t think it’s that ridiculous.

You played it at a truck stop? Did you have a laptop back then? Was that were you worked?

Super Metroid was the first game I owned and the first console game I ever beat. It was already my favorite game when I won an SNES that came with it for selling candy for my school. I’d played it alot at my friend’s house, although he did all the hard parts. The only important thing that I remember figuring out when we were playing it together was that you needed to power bomb that glass pipe. He has the Nintendo Power that took you up through the Crockomire, and I remember that we learned the cheap way to kill Draygon from a guide we looked at at Best Buy.
I hadn’t played it with him in a year when I got it, and I’d never seen any of the game past Draygon, and I didn’t have any sort of guide or help while I was playing it. I was actually really awful at it, never finding the Plasma Beam or the Spring Ball my first time through, and although I remembered that I should have gotten the Spazer before Kraid, I couldn’t find it and only got it on the way from Ridley to Mother Brain! I beat the game with something like 67% of the items.
Now it’s really easy, and I don’t care for speedrunning, so the only reason to play it is nostalgia. But from a graphics/music/atmosphere/gameplay standpoint I still think it’s the greatest SNES game. The ending is amazing too.
The hardest part is Draygon without cheating, or Phantoon if you want to use Super Missiles, although I guess that if you know not to do that then it’s another self-imposed challenge.

I hope you at least saved the animals at the end.