I understand the feeling. However you can play some puzzle games that are much more difficult than the assembly of MARS. Furthermore any simple machine language traslates pretty well into a basic version of C: add, sub, pointer operations, bitwise operations, compare a value with zero and possibly move the program counter to a memory location, copy memory from RAM to a register (think of it as a predefined veritable). Everything is an int, maybe a float. All very low level.