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

HAH! Good luck, I’m betting it’s still among the hardest NES games, though Battletoads, Ghosts & Goblins and Ninja Gaiden are probably all harder.

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.

Valid point, though I rarely use missiles for anything besides opening doors and killing Metroids/Mother Brain/Zeebetites (that last one is the actual name for those tubes connecting Mother Brain to some planetary energy source).

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.

Well I guess since I was using savestates that wouldn’t have much occurred to me, though your ideas for how the game should have been are valid and were certainly echoed by AVGN.

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.

Yep, that’s what AVGN blew up over. He called the game “broken” because of the starting with 30 HP.

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

My parents owned one and it was at a corner of highways 36 and 99 outside Beattie, KS. The computer was stationed there and I downloaded WinZip and NESticle and other emulators onto it and played NES games out there at night by myself around 1997-98-99 or so. It was in front of a window looking out on the highway, which always creeped me out.

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.

KICK ASS. All we got at my school were coupons for personal pan pizzas at Pizza Slut.

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.

Amusingly, I just watched a 15 minute video giving a lecture on why figuring out how to blow up the glass pipe is the best moment in the game.

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.

I can’t remember what my item percentage was when I first beat the game, but I know the final time was 9 hours of gameplay. I’ve never gotten the Spazer before Kraid. Technically, that is correct, you don’t need the Plasma Beam or Spring Ball.

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 wonder if they thought of Draygon’s death scene after watching the Penguin die in Batman Returns. Probably not. Crocomire’s melted skeleton death recalls the blue gargoyle guy (Gaibon) in the final stage of Super Castlevania IV.

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

I would never forget to do that on a modern playthrough, but I probably didn’t do it the first time I bought the game. I think I found the tip on how to save them in a magazine or Nintendo Power Player’s Guide or something like that (I had a habit of buying those after the fact.)
Regarding the animals, I know that the little monkey wall-jump guys were called Etacoons but do not remember what the speed-booster bird was named.
I have never been able to do the wall jump at all, thank God for the Space Jump.