I've been playing Kid Icarus on the virtual console. It's one of those games I always wanted to play, but never owned in my childhood. I had it on the Wii, but got very fed up with the control-scheme and frustrated with the difficulty. Now that I have it on the Wii U I've been playing it a little more diligently. I'm only on the third world boss, but I can see how this game was well received. As per my Super Ghouls and Ghosts run I've offset the difficulty by using the restore point option on a frequent basis. May be cheating, but I see it like this: Many games in my past took me months of play to beat. Specially ones that had high difficulty and no save features. Some games have password features, but even those get you just to the start of a level. Games like Kid Icarus are challenging because the levels are so unforgiving. You miss-time a jump and that's it. Game over, and start from the beginning of the level. Sadly I don't have the time in my life to spend mastering a game the hard way anymore.
Despite overcoming the difficulty with the save feature, there were a few things I found interesting. Through the game I came across a bunch of hammers that I could collect, but could only ever use in the dungeons. I had absolutely no idea what they did until I did some reading online. Same thing with the Eggplant curse. I had no idea how to get rid of it (besides restarting from last save and praying I wouldn't get the curse again) until I read that the strangely empty hospital rooms would remove the curse for me. Just a few things that I had absolutely no idea how to do, which were probably covered for me in the manuals that came with the games. It's interesting how nowadays we can just pop in a game and hardly ever have to consult the instructions, assuming there even is one. The games today are pretty smart about training you as you go along.