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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

The intro was fantastic. Even with a PC speaker / no sound card.

Having to swim away as your first action, and then escape from some kind of lion is one of the most brutal game experiences ever.

Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever.

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> Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever.

I don't remember playing for much more than a few minutes (maybe a couple of hours), and barely making any progress, but that intro and the initial escape got etched in my memory for all those years. The dramatic camera effects of this game were indeed out of this world for the time.

The game itself is barely a couple of hours. It's very, very short.

I wonder, if the intro made such an impression on you, why didn't you finish it?

I also didn't finish it.

The game is hard and requires more patience than usual to figure it out.

It was on par with games at the time though.

Definitely a short, and not hard at all, game.

I beat it without difficulty when I was single-digit aged.

It's absolutely worth it, and better late than never.

Maybe you're just a good gamer. I was absolutely stumped.

As a general rule: Try not to take your subjective experience and imply that it’s either the universal experience or objectively true.

I'm in the same boat. I could not figure out how to get past the second screen. But I still remember those few minutes very clearly these decades later.

Do you mean how to get past the beast?

I had some trouble with the slugs but I don't think I ever got past the lion.

Ah, yes. Hard to time the jumps over the slugs. It helps that the beast trips and falls just as it's about to catch you. After that, you get "saved by the bell", so to speak ;)

I believe jumping over those slugs is possibly the hardest part of the whole game, it must be timed precisely and you're still learning to how to play.

It's not a lion, by the way ;) It's an alien beast, without a mane and looks like a cross between a gorilla and some giant black panther.

> Even if you played that game for 1 minute you will remember that game forever.

I’ve never player that game, but it’s been engraved in my mind for 30 years just from a 2 min? segment in a promotional VHS tape that came with a videogames magazine.

Also the artwork in the cover is amazing.

I'll never forget the "dialogue" in the game either, right after you get rescued from that lion thing by your new friend.

konanaka beetzai! motsuubo! /wave

If I remember correctly, your alien friend never rescues you from the beast. The ones who shoot the beast (and then you) are the "bad" aliens ;)

Mykaruba!

and not just the intro but the entire game fit on a single floppy disk, blew my mind.

I have the same memory of playing for one minute and getting stuck. I went back to it 25 years later and beat it. Once you get over the reaction-time hump, it’s a glorious and memorable game.

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