My two:
Very cliché, I played Ocarina of Time a ton as a child, have memories of playing it both on N64 as a wee child and on game cube as a less small child. Never got past water temple even with the game guide.
Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden memories. Played the crap out of that game on play station, constantly playing on free play praying for the cards I would need to get further. I was never able to beat more than 1-2 of the high mages. Watching speed runs on the game it turns out I was never ever going to beat that game as a kid. The final 6 are just disgustingly brutal.
Pretty much all of them… I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.
Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn’t just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.
I have the same memories of playing the Commodore 64. I can’t think of a single game I was any good at, but I remember playing the shit out of them.
Or you only had the shareware? Back then I thought doom was only episode 1.