Block when Soda squats to do an uppercut. He'll get confused and freeze so that you can get a star off him. Star punches knock him down. You can get two quick and easy knockdowns this way before he starts dodging star punches.
The control is actually very tight but it takes practice to get the timing down. Eventually you develop the muscle memory for what you have to do. At least it's a very short game.
The world record holder yelsraek made a beginner tutorial that might be helpful.
I find myself obsessively replaying the games that I love, often until I'm quite good at them. On the negative side this means that I'm not getting to try more games that I haven't played before unless it's for a contest.
Thanks. I also spent a few days trying to speedrun it. I got 19th out of 87 on the leaderboard with a time of 2:55. At least it's top 20.
Speedrunning is so much more demanding than playing for score. I can't do silly fast enough.
https://www.speedrun.com/marblemadness#Any
Marble Madness
It's tied with Tetris for my favorite game on the NES. I never get tired of it.
And I don't want my high score that I posted over on NintendoAge to be lost. I dunno, maybe it wouldn't be lost, but here it is again anyway.
Never played Dark Souls. I only know that it's supposed to be hard.
Ghosts n Goblins is the original hard game. It's the hard game that other hard games should be compared to.
I voted ALTTP. But it's the one that I am currently most familiar with. I haven't played the NES games in too many years and I haven't played the Gameboy games or any modern Zelda beyond OOT.