While I have genuine sympathy for 8-year-old you, this has made for a thoroughly entertaining story which current you can tell, I and several of my friends I shared it with have laughed thoroughly, one of them remarked:

  That sounds like me….
  Legit, the pre-car inspection and the radio killed me
  Remember it like it was yesterday

Kind of interesting for humans that things like this which at the time are so painful can be amazing to reminisce about years later.

"use nightstick" - took me ages. I didn't know what a nightstick was, it's not a term known in my country

Perhaps I was always a weirdo but while it did frustrate me when I ran into these I always found it to be an amusing part of the game. So much more so than games requiring specific twitch reflexes or hand eye coordination that I might not be able to pull together. But it probably says something that many of my favorite games back then are described as "punishing" today. Of course these days I wouldn't last 5 minutes if parachuted into one, but I've become soft!

The one exception to the above was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which can fuck right off.

> "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."

Most old games had a very short gameplay, single digit hours. They had to be challenging by any means so the player gets their money's worth.

You could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense.

I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.

Everytime I see a bad guy get cuffed in a movie in the front, I say "nope! the cop can get choked out now!". Thanks Police Quest, you taught us all a little safety that day.