I just watched both videos and found them very enjoyable (and very true) - sadly games today aren't like that anymore because everything seems to get explained and spoken out in the game in the most stupid way which makes you feel stupid too. But it's a different time. Back in the days games had the tendency to be harder, and as the reviewer shows you had to have a strategy for a lot of places, but in the end it felt more satisfying if you could get past that obstacle. Sometimes patience is needed as well. You have to stand still a second to watch the enemy, to see what it does, it's movements and attacks and so on. I think something like that is totally lost in present games, but I don't know if it's the fault of the game developers or the gamers.
Let me try to explain... ;)
On occasion, I happen to spend some time on YouTube watching videos from people playing my hacks, this usually helps me a lot to figure out what works in the hack and what not. Well, and you get a bit of every possible gamer there, really. Some try to really do it without savestates and anything like that and overall they do a pretty good job, because they do what they are supposed to do: figure out the game, come up with strategys etc and sometimes they even have to think to move forward but hey, it actually really works.
And then there are the other guys... who hit the rewind button every time Mario gets hurt, and usually they screw up themselves during that because the rewind puts the player in a stupid situation, so rewind one more and more and more... besides that they run mindless through the stage and every single obstacle seems to be the hardest challenge every because the keep getting hit by the most simple placed enemies ever. But they don't care either. They have their almighty rewind button and savestates so why bother? They can try to do the most impossible (and not needed) jump or something and loose everytime because they keep pressing rewind instead of doing the right thing: figure out that doing an impossible jump here might not be the solution, so they should look for another strategy or something. Learning from something in the game doesn't help to these guys - they really need that "Megaman! Megaman! Watch out there's an enemy on the left!!!!! You have to shoot him to proceed!" and they need it again and again and all the time because they don't understand the game/hack/whatever at all nor do they care about anything really. Why they bother playing the hack? I honestly don't know.
But hey, when it comes to SMW-hacks, it might be the hackers fault after all. Sometimes the gamer in the video tries some really crazy shit to solve something and I go like "What?? Why do they think they have to do this crazy, impossible and sometimes even unfair shit?? Do they really think I want them to do this???" and then I realize they needed this strategy in another hack they played or something.
I also noticed that many people love to carry p-switches throughout the whole level (usually making it harder because when you carry an item Mario can't do all this fancy shit he can usually do) while sometimes the solution would be to hit the switch where you get them. So, they have a hard time carrying an item through a level which sometimes gets ridiculous and they get frustrated and thanks to rewind, they try again and again carrying the switch trough something they are not really supposed to and in the end they blame the game because it's so super-fucking hard and unfair, damnit.
People who don't use savestates on the other hand do this right, because even when it's hard to figure out where to use a switch they try it on different locations in the level every time they get there (after loosing a life for example) - "Rewinders" could do this too, even better ironically, but from what I've seen they don't come up with that idea. They just try to carry the switch through the whole level and at the goal tape they say "Oh it's over, damn I still have the switch what to do with it I haven't seen anything damnit?!" "Rewinders" also try to use the same (not-working) strategy over and over to get past an obstacle. People who don't use savestates on the other hand try a different strategy on a spot they died earlier.
So, in the end I'm not sure if Mega Man or Castlevania's game strategys would still work today, because I fear that most players today wouldn't get all this because it's really subtle (and how it should be really). Today, you have all these "in your face"-tutorials and so on.
On these videos above I really like the point about "storytelling through the game, not through endless cutscenes". I try to archieve something similar in TSRP2R but I'm not sure yet how or if this will work, because I tried something similar already in TSRPR, and my impression from watching videos on YouTube is that no one really gets anything until a cutscene comes up and explains whats happening. For example it's told throughout the game that these Roboxx came to Bowser and helped him and so on, and the Roboxx of course have their base you can visit and this place shares graphics and structures similar to the "Orbital Station"-level and what did I wanted to say with that? That the Roboxx were the ones who build all this crap for Bowser, but as I said, from what I've seen no one gets that even if its partly explained in the cutscenes. Most people don't even recognise that similar structure in both levels.
I for one know if TSRPR would have been an official game I played as a kid, the first thing I would have done after castle 4's destruction cutscene would be to go back to the volcano to see if what's been told in the cutscene is really true (that the castle crashed inside the volcano). I'm not sure but I might be alone with that. :p
I'm not really sure what exactly I wanted to say with this wall of text... maybe just that "old game rules" don't apply that much anymore because there's a new generation of players out there who don't know this old (and hard) games so they don't know how to play it or something. That has not much to do with the point of the initial post of course, because new games of course tell you what to do as well... just differently, so similar questions as posted above apply no matter what.