61 Frames Per Second

Well, there's fun and difficult, and then there's difficult and rage-inducing.

Exhibit A: Battletoads.  Really fucking hard.  But one of the most fun and innovative games ever.  I spent a month playing through and memorizing the levels, which is pretty much the only way to beat it.  It was really hard, but it was damn fun.

Exhibit B: Ghosts and Goblins.  I spent a month playing this, and now there are seven holes in my wall and my drinking problem got worse.  And I never actually beat it either.  Part of me wants to play again just to say I beat it...but the logical part of my brain tells me to stop those crazy thoughts.

Yeah, I draw the line at the ZX Spectrum. Screw you, England. One-color transparent sprites on isometric monochromatic backgrounds are just frigging lame no matter how moony-eyed you get over them.

I've finished all of the original Mega Man games, 1 through 8. You may bow. You know, if you were really having that much trouble with the Yellow Devil, you should have been cheap and used the pause trick. You can kill him in like five seconds using that.

My tolerance for difficulty is pretty high, I guess, as long as the game is fun enough and there's enough of a reward. For Mega Man, the reward is being able to say, "I've finished all of the original Mega Man games, 1 through 8. You may bow."

Probably one of my biggest gaming accomplishments in terms of pure difficulty was beating Viewtiful Joe on the hardest difficulty. I tried that final boss like three dozen times. I sat down one morning and I told myself I wasn't getting back up until I had finished the game, and I did it. I unlocked Captain Blue as a playable character and everything.

But my answer to the actual question (enough bragging!) about my tolerance for retro, I think really old RPGs aren't very fun. RPGs have a lot of aspects that can be very annoying, and later RPGs (at least the good ones) try their best to avoid those traps. Dragon Quest 1 is not fun. Not at all. (The fact that it's changed so little in like 20 years means that Dragon Quest VIII isn't particularly fun for me either.)

That initial warping shouldn't kill you, even if you do take a couple of hits. (You can't be THAT bad at it, can you? :P I mean, you obviously made it that far, so it's not like you're completely hopeless at Mega Man games.) And that bug was left in Anniversary Collection. I used it.

The only things the Anniversary Collection does differently (besides screwing up the controls for the Game Cube version) are allow you to save instead of just using passwords, and allow you to use a different mode that provides hints when you pause the game. That trick is still in the Anniversary Collection. :P

I never knew of this trick. I came soul crushingly close to beating the Yellow Devil one time, but sadly I've never completed MM1.