Oh, I already bought in from GoG some time ago. I plan on playing it, as soon as my computer gets back from the shop next month. 
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One day I’m going to play it again. It took me ages and lots of written notes to finish it, but it was a wonderful experience.
Anyway, I don’t like the FM-Towns version. Zak’s face just isn’t Zak’s face to me, I’ll only play the PC EGA version.
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It’s too bad that the “dumb smiles” are not in the fm-towns version. I am not sure which one I’ll play. I think I’ll go with the fm-towns though.
I recommend Zak from the Amiga (in german).
The Amiga was fast enough, offered mouse input, decent graphics, nice sound, all on two disks. The FM-Towns version didn’t utalise its possibilities properly. Zak introduced many people into point&click adventures.
@ZakPhoenixMcKracken @Nor_Treblig
Maybe you have a suggestion? Here’s what’s really keeping me from playing zak: since the money in the creditcard is limited, I first want to travel to a place, see if it’s useful, and if it’s not useful, I want to load a savegame (which refills the creditcard balance), and travel to another place. But the problem is: in order to know if a place is useful, I first need to solve a huge maze. If, after the maze, I find the place is not useful, and I load a savegame, then I will have to redo the maze!
This will not happen. Trust me.
And the most difficult maze allows you to keep track of where you´ve been. So you can go back when ever you feel like. But you really should have picked up the item you need to get what you want in the maze long ago.
There is only a difficult maze on earth and a very easy one. The rest is nothing you need to spend money flying to on.
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Nope, this approach is not as useful as it could seem.
Every location is useful.
I suggest you to travel everywhere, and take note of what you find. Because this way, you will understand which elements do you need to solve the puzzles.
Don’t worry if the cashcard runs out of money, there are ways to charge it, from selling things to… other ways 
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I never had any trouble with running out of money ** ! You can visit (or re-visit) places in any order you want. Just not 10 times, perhaps.
And as stated above, when you do run low on money- that’s another puzzle right there, with multiple solutions (at least 2 by design and one cold exploit. Save/restore not being one of them).
**: My original copy had a disk load error when entering certain areas in Cairo, so I did restart the game from scratch quite a lot back then, just to experiment. Perhaps that made me more proficient at traveling around in the most efficient order to acquire items and their destinies. It took me a few years before getting hold of another (pirated) copy to be able to finish the game at last. But my Karma is still clean as I had purchased the game earlier.
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I drew a map with all flight and connections and what was there.
So if I wanted to talk to someone, and that someone was in Kinshasa, I knew which flights I had to take. If you don’t run around aimlessly from airport to airport, it should be enough.
I can’t remember, however, if I had used the “trick” I knew to obtain quite an amount of money.
Somebody here has finished the game without a walkthrough ??.
It’s a great game, but almost impossible to finish without walkthrough ( And that I consider myself a graphic adventure player with a lot of experience.)
It’s the only Lucasarts game that I could not finish 
Yes. But not around the time when I first got it, only later when I was older and wiser.
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I did. It was the very first game I bought, so I also had the newspaper, which had some hints in it.
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Me.
I was 13 years old, it took me three months, but I finished it, without any external help.
It was 1989, with no internet, and the walkthrough had not been published yet.
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Also did I mention I like drawing maps?
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But you know how this ends?
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Try Labyrinth…
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Why should Zak take the blue crystal? “Because it’s there”?
Because he saw it in his dream.
edit: also, did you watch TV before leaving Zak´s apartment? There you would have gotten another reason.
Well, then it seems that I have big issues at both remembering things and finding reasons to do stuff.
We told you, to write down all things you have seen. 
To be serious: What have you done already? Are you still at Mr. Rainier?
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