Starflight used to scare me. Every time I fire it up again, I realize it still does. For two reasons. Two reasons that can both make me jump out of my chair/kill the window.
Some background...saving is roguelike-ish. You CAN back up a save, because 'one save at a time' is more of a technical issue since you usually ran it off a floppy disk, but it's not easy or quick to fuss with backups.
Okay. So your ship has a navigator, with navigation skill. The higher your navigator's skill, the more likely you are to see dimensional fluxes while traveling through space. Now, these fluxes are always in the same place every game...but are they glowing flashing things? No. The area of the screen that you can SEE around your ship is, oh, two, three inches across and high, so it's pretty small. As you fly around, the starmap scrolls past...but if there's a flux, then you have a quarter-sized region where the stars are flickering randomly instead of scrolling by. It's hard to spot, and that's your only warning. And you only even see THAT, if your navigator makes his check.
Stumble into a flux...and SUDDENLY YOU GET A RUSHING THROUGH STARS ANIMATION AND WHOOSHING STATIC IN YOUR SPEAKERS OH GOD
...and now you're SOMEWHERE ELSE. Your location on the starmap shows up as ?? x ?? or just jumps around randomly until you fly around enough for your navigator to get his bearings. And the whole time, you probably wound up in hostile territory, but you don't KNOW where you are, and your proximity detector is saying MOTION DETECTED AT +3,-2... MOTION DETECTED AT +2,-1... And you're trying to figure out where you are or how to get back and you see a flux and let's GO BACK WHOOSH and then you start seeing other proximity warnings and realize that the place you came from in the first place didn't have any other ships and then your navigator gets his readings and you're WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GALAXY because your first jump put you right in the middle of The Staff which is a huge bunch of fluxes and once you go through one OH GOD you have no way of knowing WHICH ONE GOES HOME and you jump back and then suddenly the ENCOUNTER BELL GOES OFF
Getting lost in fluxes always made my heart rate go waaay up, but the encounter bell tended to give me a heart attack at age 9. See, it's just three long low monotone PC speaker beeps, but suddenly there's these other ships--and if you're lucky you can hail them, and if you're lucky you might make sense of what they're saying--
But you turned out to be in Uhlek space and by the time you hit the "Hail" button, you're getting blasted by Class 6 plasma bolts and going "WHAT THE HELL, the highest shields you can buy at Starport only go up to Class Fi--" And then you're sucking vacuum and it's game over. And then you say okay, let me reload my game, and you fire it up and it says "Game in progress was not saved. Exiting..."