I beat Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island legit with no crazy shortcuts or save state scumming, with 100% in Yoshi's Island. I didn't play them as a kid when they came out, but as an early-20s adult through emulation, and while SMW was difficult, it never felt unfair or impossible. Yoshi's Island is more like a story, not really that difficult, it's probably my all-time favorite game overall.
A Link to the Past was significantly harder to beat.
Earlier NES-era and older games could be absolutely punishing. The original Metroid is bonkers hard and Super Mario Bros. 3 is much harder than Super Mario World.
I think it's a matter of acclimatization. I grew up playing mostly platform games (mostly on PC), which I think has given me an innate sense of how the 2D world physics and interactions work most of the time. I remember the jump to 3D games being like learning to ride a bicycle all over again.
Fun addendum: because I grew up playing Commander Keen and Duke Nukem and so on, using directional keys with my right hand is hard-wired for me, I simply cannot do it with my left hand, and I'm actually left-handed. I can use a mouse equally well with both hands, but I just can't do WASD normally for 3D games. I have to remap and flip the controls to IJKL. Today I just play most games with a controller, aside from FPS games.
Interestingly, I was going to blame my inadequacies at Mario on having grown up only playing PC games and therefore relatively little in the way of platformers. I'm not sure there was a big-name platformer for PC was released in my entire formative years, and if it was, I certainly didn't play it.
Link to the Past was also quite hard, but I cheated at that (abusing the saving/loading from the Switch emulator version) so I can't compare. But I blamed it's difficulty on its old-fashioned controls: you can't attack in a direction unless you move in that direction. I find this extremely frustrating and limited after playing more modern top-down action games like Hotline Miami.
A Link to the Past was significantly harder to beat.
Earlier NES-era and older games could be absolutely punishing. The original Metroid is bonkers hard and Super Mario Bros. 3 is much harder than Super Mario World.
I think it's a matter of acclimatization. I grew up playing mostly platform games (mostly on PC), which I think has given me an innate sense of how the 2D world physics and interactions work most of the time. I remember the jump to 3D games being like learning to ride a bicycle all over again.
Fun addendum: because I grew up playing Commander Keen and Duke Nukem and so on, using directional keys with my right hand is hard-wired for me, I simply cannot do it with my left hand, and I'm actually left-handed. I can use a mouse equally well with both hands, but I just can't do WASD normally for 3D games. I have to remap and flip the controls to IJKL. Today I just play most games with a controller, aside from FPS games.