Yeah, I know, I felt the same twisted emotions when I first played Abe's Oddysee, but today I love that game. I gave my AO CD to a friend for a couple of weeks, and after that, he couldn't go through zulag 1 of Rupture Farms. He gave me back the CD with a frustrated look on his face: "this game is damn hard, I give up..."
Fortunately, they fixed many details in Abe's Exoddus. the quicksave feature was great.
keep playing, don't bother if you missed a couple of muds, you will still get the good ending(not the final reward for bing a perfect one, though)