This has proven to be a pretty fun game, despite its simple mechanics. You wander around a maze-like world with a wide variety of aliens. It's pretty expansive and this is not a quick play, so fortunately they allow you to save your progress. Side note, it can be a bit of a pain, but you can save on your own data disk if you format it as a data disk using the PC-8801 disk formatting utility. You just have to remember to put the game disk back in after you die because it assumes you haven't switched it out. If you forget, it's reset time.

Your job is to kill the aliens. Actually, your job is to collect disks, but in order to do that, you have to kill aliens. You have a lot of energy to start with, but low strength. If you don't have enough strength to kill a particular enemy, it's not that you have to hit them multiple times, it's that you simply can't overpower that enemy yet and they will sap your energy until you die. You have to find the enemies within your range. Your strength goes up every time you kill an alien, which allows you to kill more types of aliens. But the chart in the instruction manual has only the thresholds for the first five types of enemy, after that you have to test whether you can kill a certain alien type or not. There are energy packs throughout the land but don't get confident, they don't seem to respawn, and so far I haven't found all that many of them. There is a good deal of variety of landscape and labyrinth to explore.

There are also some secrets. For example, if this doesn't look suspicious, I don't know what to tell you. It's a trap, for sure!

There is a door here, you can choose to go in or not, but once you go in, the game for some reason decides to walk you to the other side. You can't control the movement, and for some reason your character doesn't quite walk straight there, taking a detour about three steps to the left and back in the middle of the room before finally walking through the opposite door. When you get to the other side, you are in an area only accessible through that door; if you go to the left you end up in one of the earlier areas of the game and can't go back to that area without finding the door again.

One trick you can sometimes use to kill enemies is a diagonal attack between environment obstacles. The rules of strength still apply, but sometimes it can get you an extra kill or two which might push you up to the next threshold and let you kill other enemies.

And in this little area, going over the path will sometimes leave a trail of brick road in your wake. But it doesn't stick, it turns back to regular turf when you exceed the bounds of the changeable area and then leave the screen. I am not sure of the purpose yet.

I finally broke 10000 strength, but died before I remembered to take a picture. So here's my strong but dead character. Time to reload!

The artwork was intriguing, so I decided to buy the game. Just like the Atari 2600 days. But this game actually seems to take good advantage of the hardware it's running on and creates a nice aesthetic.