I can´t imagine beating super mario 3 on the NES like that. I played it on GBA with saves and it still took me weeks because of how many times I ragequit.
I can't either, but it may be because I personally didn't grow up with any Mario game available to me, and I didn't have any friends that would give me a chance to play the game with them long enough to learn how to play those 2D platformers. I mean I played some of Super Mario Bros 1 years after my childhood, in fact just a few years ago,
I didn't rage quit, but I felt like I was in hell at the time, so I just quit and played something else. I made it to about the 2nd or 3rd level "probably in world one" before I ran out of lives and had to start the game over from the beginning.
you get 3 lives and if you are hit or touched 3 times with full powerups by anything that moves you lose a life, AND you need to make it through the ENTIRE game. however there is a way to gain more lives by getting a higher score, but you still need to make it through the entire game without getting killed. AND fight Bowser at the end, in which if I were a child and I lost my last life on bowser I would not be happy.
My favorite games growing up were mostly Shareware version and full version first person shooters on the PC/computer.
In short if I grew up with mario I would have like it better