The concepts of difficulty today and difficulty of yesterday are completely different things. Where today we measure difficulty as how intelligent the A.I. is or how quickly the difficulty curve rises, the games of yesteryear were about how many times you died. Difficulty was about the number of times you would die until you had the patterns of enemies and stages memorized. After all, there was no abstract A.I. constructs like there are for games today, so they had to rely on the “pattern” to throw people off their game. This also factors into today’s games, the whole memorization concept, but it’s intertwined with all that modern technology offers. That’s why we revisit these nostalgic games and find ourselves being trounced; we’ve become used to how modern games conceive their difficulty and have forgotten the old method of “Die until you get it.”

Destructoid – I suck at games: Nostalgia’s curse.

Both old school and recent titles can provide challenges, and it’s interesting how hardware limits (like for A.I.) has caused developers in the past to structure difficulty in a different way.