Old games are freaking hard! (playing Dangerous Dave)

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Most of the games that we play today are created to entertain you. You are supposed to have fun by playing. But when you look back at the old days, the first games were created as an arcades. Their were designed so they could give you a little playtime but make sure you lose fast so you can put some more coins and play again. They were deliberately challenging so you would spend more money trying to beat them. But even when the games started coming out to personal computers they still followed this same logic because that was people's perception of the games back then. The reason I'm talking about it is because I just picked up a really old game from a famous (or infamous for his "Daikatana") video game designer John Romero. It's a game called Dangerous Dave, one of his first that came out in 1988 for the Apple II and was later ported for DOS in 1990. And this game is kicking my as$. It's really frustrating but I'm so determined to finish it just for the sake of finishing it that I can't stop playing. I'm kinda OCD when it comes to that, I can't just quit. I've played this for the past 2 hours and I accomplished nothing, I play I die, I start all over again, I die again, start over, die again...AAAAAAAAAARARRRRRGGGHHHH This game is making me crazy. It's a side scrolling platformer but the problem is that the camera doesn't follow your character like in Super Mario for example. Romero didn't know how to do this at that time. So basically camera moves only when you reach the edge of screen and you don't see what is there. Sometimes you have to jump into unknown and hope you'll land or something. Sometimes there's an enemy waiting for you. When the camera finally moves it always disorients you. The physics are weird, you don't feel like you have a good hold on the character. Sometimes you try to move just a bit and he goes to far, right into the fire. You have only 3 lives and there are no save points. You lose them and you have to start again. Now OK, after some time spent with the game I really got a hold of this. I know each level memorized perfectly in my hand and I learned little tricks that will help me move the guy precisely. And I managed to get to level 9 out of 10. But then the game started to get totally unfair and does all sorts of cheap crap. I can't believe this! There are some platforms that look like any other that you can stand on, but when you jump on them you just fall through into certain death. There's no way to tell which one is real platform and which one is fake. You have to try and fail and memorize for the next time you go to that point. But to get here you need to play all the previous levels which aren't that hard once you get a hold of it but it's really time consuming. There's no way for you to finish level 9 for the first time you get there because if you want to know where you can stand, you need to fail and fail and fail many times before you memorize the exact pattern. You need to play this game around hundred times if you want to finish it. And it's so unfair it's frustrating and I want to just quit playing this stupid crap but I'm not a kind of person that quits. So I'll leave it for today and I'll give it a try tomorrow and I'm gonna lose some more time to this pointless game just so I can finish it and write it off my list. Did you play any game that made you feel like this? What was the most frustrating gaming experience for you and which game do you think was the most unfair towards the player?