I remember one time as a kid getting to world 6 and then the power going out in my building. I was crushed.

Yeah a save system would have been better, but kind of too late for that.

The warp system was pretty helpful back then

My save feature back then was to just pause the game and leave the NES on 24/7. lol.

But Mario 3 is short, so it really isn't necessary, imo. You can beat that game in under an hour if you get good enough. Even less if you use the flutes like most of us did back in the day.

Ha. I jokes on y'all I only played the GBA version(SMB ADV 4) so I wasn't annoyed but the save shortcomings of the NES. Although that was a time where my skill at platformers was pretty low. I despise that last world with all my might !!

Pretty much this. I dont think i even noticed.

Virtually every game ever made should have a save system, no matter how difficult or easy it is. Without warping, SMB3 takes a bare minimum of a few hours to beat unless you're a speedrunner.

A save system in the NES days required a watch battery in the cart, so greatly added to the cost. Most games were "die three times and you start from level 1" back then, so no-one really noticed...

Git gud.

Ah yes, the 80s. The good ol' days when games had artificially inflated difficulty so kids wouldn't beat them in a weekend and return the cartridge and also no batteries to bring down the costs.

People who think GAAS and stuff are bad should look back at how the market for arcade or early NES/MS games worked.

(That said, SMB3 is the game that aged the best of all pre-4th-generation titles. It just had this, ahem, design flaw.)

The 80s and early nineties had a culture of play till you die and start again. The benefit to this was you also had cheats and hidden shortcuts. Those secrets were sold through magazines and the word of mouth helped garner even more hype for the game. We humans love to be given a challenge especially when we have the inside scoop on winning. So if you lost you just found a cheat or shortcut to get back to where you were. It was part of the fun.

Back in the days, videogames still had this arcade character. Arcade games, due to economical reasons, by nature needed to be hard and punishing while still keep you motivated enough to feed the machine with another 10 cents. It took surprisingly a long time until console game developers actually realized that console games can be so much more than just high scores and the usual punishing 5-6 levels.

Unfortunately, although I have bright memories from the NES times, nowadays I can play those games only for nostalgia a little bit as most of them are simply too frustrating to play (same applies to many former cult SNES games). Even Super Mario Bros. 1, if you haven't played it for years you die surprisingly fast, especially as there are no continues.