I remember this game well. It was so difficult, and my cries of frustration so loud and frequent. When I finally reached the end scene, my family congratulated me as if I had graduated from college or something - very funny.

I loved figuring every thing out in this game when I was a kid. One of the most memorable games of my childhood for sure. The closest modern equivalent would probably be Demon's Souls on the PS3. I do really wish there were more games like this.

Edit: To clarify a little bit before people say I'm way off, Im not saying that Demon's Souls is anything like Another World. Just that its really brutal, and requires a bit of trial and error. My point in mentioning it was just to be sad that there isn't something closer. Oh well.

May I point you to Super Meat Boy :)

Also, many free games similar to Super Meat Boy are available from this guy. I especially recommend the Jumper Series, Moneyseize, FlaiL, An Untitled Story and Give Up Robot 1&2.

I blame you for a lost afternoon. Feel the burning BLAME!

(Give Up Robot has a great balance of challenge and reward, wow.)

I'm happy to get blamed for that! Glad you liked it.

I have found this to be a general property shared by all Matt Thorson's games. Give Up Robot is one of his newer ones with better production values though. The jumper series was earlier and they look a lot rougher, but still have solid gameplay. I also really liked Moneyseize... it's got a cool mechanic where you can solve levels in different ways, some easier than others, and all of them eventually being necessary if you want to collect all the coins.

i remember one puzzle where you swing down somewhere and then you have to execute three moves (can't even remember what they were) pretty much ON THE FRAME or you got utterly destroyed in one of ten different ways. probably retried that part 30 times, its the only game where i wouldn't just uninstall in that case.

frustration is knowing exactly what to do and when to do it, but lacking the ridiculous precision required. absolute joy is finally completing that checkpoint.

This game becomes quite easy once you figure it out, though it can be a little annoying trying to throw up force fields with your gun faster than the aliens who do the same and start firing from behind the forcefields.

yeah it can be frustrating at first i played the snes version and some areas i had a hard time and kept seeing the password. But at the end i finished, it was the first game i keep replaying after i finished it.

Actually, this would be a bad idea, because most puzzles in the game requires you to do certain things in certain order, and sometimes you have screwed the solution without knowing. Checkpoints actually help you understand when are you going on the right track.

Playing this game for the first time recently, I absolutely love it. It´s like a puzzle game: there´s a solution in each part and you have to solve it. And the best the game can do is kill you when you are wrong. Hardest parts were the ones when you weren´t doing the right thing, yet the game didn´t kill you...

Somehow I doubt that.

I know there have been some helper links posted already, but i found this high-res walkthru to be very helpful:
http://youtu.be/WKD8UT4cRxI

The fun fact is that the game can be finished in about 16 minutes if you do it right.
Used to time my playthroughs for it years ago. :)

Interesting you should say that, cause I have also been playing games for roughly 30 years and I actually found a lot of what he said to be pretty valid and even spot in in many respects. Someone says "I wish we had more hard games like this" and I'm sitting here wanting to explode because I actually think a lot of games these days are harder than what we had growing up.

The way I see this is that a lot of early games were hard because of limited and/or plain bad programming/design. Games these days have no real excuse for being controller-smashing hard unless the player wants them to be. And that's just it: not everyone does. I grew up on games that would grind you into the dirt and then laugh at you - not unlike certain people on various message boards.. I wonder if there's a cause and effect there. Anyways, as I was saying... I'm getting on in my years and I certainly don't have the skills or even the reflexes of my younger self, but I still enjoy gaming and it's nice to know there ARE easier games in the genres I love.

However, my point about games these days being harder still isn't explained. Games are indeed a bit easier.. to get to the end of, but that's not the same as "completing" the game. You look at games like Mario Galaxy with it's purple coins or Cosmic Luigi races, or Megaman X8 with it's palace of spikes and a final boss with "an insta-kill you have but one shot of stopping which easily misses cause you never have to use it normally", or Sonic Adventure 2 and its "beat every level with the highest score possible for an A AND without dying/using checkpoints to get emblems" and suddenly those games aren't so easy anymore.

If I had to compare the games I've completed when I was younger to the games I've completed now, the difference is suddenly startling.

I'm sorry, this was a bit of a tirade and rather off topic. I just felt like I needed to get this off my chest after seeing that snide remark about a person's age simply cause they found a certain game difficulty. :/

I think I was 7 or 8 when I first played it (my first game) and I was moving through it quite nicely. Sure, precision is cruicial, but I didn't find it as nightmare at all.