Battletoads

[Profeta Yoshitake]

Good point, Ghegs.
Here in Brazil, every Nintendo game were imported, so the prices were too high for buying.
Video game rentals business exploded in the NES era.

[Jedi Master Baiter]

Does the PAL version run at the same "speed" ?

I was always under the impression that Rare, being a UK company, when developing the game, playtested it on 50Hz, which unintentionally ramped up the speed for NTSC players. Just my theory.

[Profeta Yoshitake]

But there are lots of US NES games coded by Rare UK without this side effect... 

[L___E___T]

With the 'toads in the public eye again thanks to their appearance in the XBox One version of Shovel Knight, it might be a good time to try and get an answer from Rare themselves. I somewhat know a guy in the gaming press, I'll have to drop him a line. Though I wonder if any of the staff who worked on the original game are still around...

I know their old Community Manager well, I'll see if I can find anyone's contact info..

[Jedi Master Baiter]

But there are lots of US NES games coded by Rare UK without this side effect... 

Maybe all their other games were too slow to begin with?

[Profeta Yoshitake]

LOL! 

The existence of warps to skip stages like Arctic Caverns and Volkmire's Inferno (the most challenging stage, IMO) confirms that the dev team overdid the difficulties. I'm certain they did put warps in there AFTER developing the entire game.

[P]

It was common to add warps or level select options as a replacement for a save feature. Rare often put in these warps in their games. Then again Rare often made incredibly hard games.

[L___E___T]

Level selects and cheats are originally for debugging, they did kind of become a fun feature though.  Remember those books with tons of cheats in?  They were like gold dust!

[P]

Yeah I loved hidden tricks and such, and still do.

I think they left a limited level select options in games like Lode Runner so that you don't have to start over every time, although it was probably initially designed for debugging.