How did boomers figure this out back in the day without the internet or guides

Did the game tells you that you can redo Fortress/Castle stages by using button combinations?
I only know years later after. Wish I know when I did a no warp marathon run since I can't save on the console.

I never realized this was a puzzle, I just kept moving until something happens

i did, they sucked ass, i fucking hated everything on the nes and dos

Socializing and old internet forums. Do zoomers really believe the internet only started existing when they were born?

A message block tells you.

Hey Zoomie, maybe they should remake the game with yellow paint for you.

tfw finding the secret path in Vanilla Dome and finding Vanilla Fortress for the first time

They don't make overworlds like this anymore, that's for sure.

socializing and guides back then. i got magazines also.

game gets remade

levels with multiple exits now get yellow paint on then dot

now normal levels and levels with multiple exits are both yellow

BRAVO!

I remember the summer at the cabin I got stuck in Forest of Illusion. Took me like three weeks to finally progress.

They didn't. I didn't see vanilla world or beyond for ages. I could still beat the game by going through star world, but the rest of the levels taunted me. It took forever for me to find the pipe on forest of illusion 3.
Soda lake was the hardest level for me to find though.

At one point you realize that each level has a secret exit and you just look for them.

On the previous worlds you're trained to associate red levels with "levels with alternate exits", so you KNOW that every level on it has something hidden, and then you find it

My friend got SNES and Super Mario World when we went to 1st grade so every day after school we went to play it. I was better than him so I got to play after he failed. Took us about 2 months to complete the game. The Bowser castle was hype as fuck when we reached it and eventually beat it. After that we found Star road and Special stages. Tubular, the one with the P balloon took us the longer to clear.

it wasnt a rom you downloaded
it came with a manual that explicitly told you how to play the game
so the real trick was literacy

"You read the manual" is a meme. Most kids just flipped through to see the concept art pictures and never looked at it again.
In actuality, you find out that that type of level has multiple exits earlier in the game. You just replay the level until you find the secret that you know is there somewhere.

The game literally tells you that red dots on the map = multiple exits to the level.

t. gen x that paid attention.

There were countless good games before 1991 you noob.

i fucking hated everything on the nes

Extremely poor taste

No one read the manuals even back then

No one read the manuals

The retarded kids still don't read.

Some games were fucking unplayable without the manuals. If you got stuck you couldn't just google it

everyone read the manuals in the car on the ride home, zoomer
i just told you we didnt download our games on the e store
you had to go get them

Shit like this would've made more sense if it was a PC game because of the piracy issues back then; they often included physical items for DRM purposes back then

kys graphicsfag

I look like this

You're so incredibly wrong
During the era of game rentals almost everyone read the manuals
In the late 90s or very early 2000s most rental places had to start renting manuals to you separately because people would steal them.

We played the game. Of the top of my head, the only real secret exit that took me awhile to find when I was a kid (12 or under) was one where it was hidden behind the exit goalposts and I think you needed to suicide jump with Yoshi to reach it.

brother what
reading the manual of a new game you picked up was an absolutely amazing feeling

It was a fuck you to rentals.

I was like you until recently, glad I snapped out of it. The games are a little raw but full of soul.

for me, it's choco island 1
i have no idea wtf they were thinking with the condition-based layout of the level

They used to care. Sometimes the game's story couldn't fit on the cart, so the manual was all you got. Sometimes the sprites were so small the only way to know how the cast looks is the art in the manual. Sometimes it was just shenanigans, but that was pretty great too

Mario 3 better

be me, 5 or 6 years old playing super mario world

I and the other kids could never beat donut bridge because the thought of waiting was incomprehensible to us

some big kid had somehow found out about top secret area

and star road, includingg the enteance where you go under the level to the secret keyhole

even opened special area

meanwhile even using their save we could never escape forest of illusion

SMW was so magical the first time completing it. The wonder of secret exits and keys and journeying across the overworld map was so much fun

I still to this day have no idea how the first players discovered too secret area and soda lake, the methods of unlocking them are all “that kid” levels of bullshit

I still to this day have no idea how the first players discovered too secret area

We played SMB 3 before World and learned to use the flying to check if there's any secrets in the top. The Top Secret area is accessed by flying to the ceiling of the first Ghost House in the area that first introduces the feather power-up that allows flying. It wasn't that hard to find if you have pre-conditioned yourself to use the flying. Especially when SMB3's first fortress has secret exit on top of the screen if you flew there- And SMB1 too had secret on top of the screen in the second level leading to the warp pipes.

I had some issues with that choco island level that changes depending on coins/time.

I was the autistic kid who flew everywhere the moment I got cape and blue yoshi, even discovered some jank shit like some cave map having an endless corridor if you fly under what is normally a death pit then going out of bounds.
That first experience at the right age really is magical, in gaming as a whole when you just do everything expecting a sceret, when if you do that shit later or too early you just never experiment and instead follow whatever formula you are shown on a surface level.

Yeah man, games back in the day were like little mysteries
And I know there was gaming magazines back in the day but not many kids had access to them
I usually learned about secrets from word of mouth or watching others kids playing and trying to show off their skills/knowledge

you played the same games for months so basically trial and error
personally, I had no idea you could throw items up so to beat bowser I had to glitch him, which was some finnicky shit involving the cape and dive bombing
I was 6

somewhere in the game, it says red stages have a secret exit. you go from there and find all the secrets

I doubt someone here is old enough to have played SMW blind back in the 90s.
At most, they played the GBA port, and by 2002 gamefaqs already was widely accessible

when does he say git gud

I was 7 when I played SMW blind in early 90s

without the internet or guides

the answer to obtuse game design and hidden data back then was in fact to sell guides. ignore all the smartass replies about gamers back in the day being different.

Well you proved me wrong, there's 1 (one) person here who played this blind in the 90s

Anons are lot older than you think

By going over every tile while spamming action key. Pixelhunting is a term for a reason.

There's two

We read magazines, like caveman. Nintendo had their own magazines and for everything else there was Prima Strategy Guides.

Also we werent that autistic back then, so even if you didnt have access to magazines/guides someone at school did, and that info spread like wildfire.

This is a myth propogated by retards.

Mario

Did it explain why some levels were big red/yellow dots? I thought those stages were suppose to be harder at first but after experience that isn't the case.

They be longer levels

the game doesn't require any strategy

How good is Cranky at Fire Emblem?

Choom, these days people read the wikia. A lot of games you can't even play without reading the wiki. Look at Minecraft.

doesn't crouch down every pipe in mario games

cannot sniff out the obious solutions to the kindergarden level puzzles

based

I wasn't able to find this one, as a kid.
I do remember making my own maps of LoZ so I could chart out all the walls I bombed.

Soda Lake was widely considered the hardest secret to unlock back in the day. Only things that came remotely close was the bowser valley ghost house coin snake thing.

As far as SNES bs sections specifically go, pic rel is one of the few indefensible ones.

I could read in the car so I read manuals on the way home
Didn’t do that for the SNES box and bundled game, though
Some people get carsick when they read in the car
I’m old enough
We’re not just in There’s a guy in who says he’s in his 50s, which is a good bit older than me

Yeah, I didn’t really pay attention to the before-game movie and got filtered by this

these days

The guy we're replying to said

No one read the manuals even back then

which was stupid and false. Sure, now everyone has decent internet in their pockets and devs can easily fit volumes of information in game. But that wasn't always the case.

Knew something was strange when the camera kept scrolling past the first goal, if you didn't have blue yoshi you just had to kill it.