UFO 50 highlight reviews
These are only some highlights - there are many games I don’t have much to say about but are tremendous. In the end, I cherried 20 games, and didn't gold a single game more than that. Final time: 147 hours.
Barbuta - What a funny start to the collection. Straight up IWBtG troll. I love an obstinate, cryptic, slow thing. Every time another game in the collection referenced Barbuta I did a youtube thumbnail face.
Devilition - My first Cherry cartridge (the “extra mile” clear condition) of the collection, a classic tile-based board game experience. This really brought me back to my Queen’s Blood obsession from earlier this year (the card game inside Final Fantasy VII Rebirth). God i wish that game were real
Mooncat - fucking genius. After one Mooncat session, I booted up Ninpek and instinctively tried to control it like Mooncat, and I felt absolutely struck as the fragile, odd, persistent meat computer I am.
Golfaria - Combining a short looping timer RPG with the volatile movement mechanism of golfing, Golfaria taps into my memories of the more open levels in Kirby's Dream Course, where you are are actually expected to achieve a level of precision and efficiency with this nonstandard motivity inside a common-yet-suddenly-alien level geometry. The map, like many of the UFO 50 games, feels like it's best if you're taking notes yourself of where you have and haven't visited yet, in a way that mostly just affirms my modern sense that a map with a fog-of-war-type exploration overlay is a good affordance that just helps more people enjoy the game - but that's not a request for UFO 50 to have included it; it would feel strange in the 'setting' of the games and it is not wrong to remind someone of how the common practice has improved.
Onion Delivery - my most played game (at the time i wrote this), which is primarily due to its volatility and haphazardly arranged map (speaking of maps...). But I kept coming back because when you get into the Onion Delivery flow, the feeling is just tremendous. At times the steering system feels like a prank, but the 8-directional idea that underlies that system is really cool. Even with my gripes about all the bullshit-creating daily scenarios and especially how the map is laid out, there are certainly enough 90 degree corners within that map that you’ll get the opportunity to love the steering, which is perfect for whipping around intersections and alleys like a zealot of centrifugal force.
Caramel Caramel - Intensely punishing, but maybe it's table stakes for the genre. Cool signature mechanic that really emphasizes spacing with some complex variables. Fun to find the way to the secret boss, but maybe the life economy & player health could have been improved a little. And the music is great as always - on this one particularly there’s a lovely seamless transition when you reach the boss on level 3.
I was struck as well by how much this reflects a utilitarian approach to graphics resources - there are so many enemy sprites in this that don't quite match the levels they're in, but in the fiction-reality of UFO Soft, there's the idea that they've got material on the cutting room floor that they might as well put in any next game. And it's not unique to Caramel Caramel - it happens across the majority of games in the collection, and it rings true.
Divers - I spent 4 hours waiting for this to become more than a game jam premise with perfunctory rpg combat. It did not. Easily the weakest game in the collection thus far.
Mortol II - So, Mortol I is awesome. The platforming felt almost immersion-breakingly good (at least after the simplicity of Barbuta and Ninpek), and the golf-like macro-aspiration of life scoring was compelling, especially within its two handfuls of discrete levels. I was really curious how Mortol II was going to evolve it, and the instant you gain control it’s clear that they blew the first game up and went with a totally new goal. It floored me!
Even though it was ultimately shorter than the first game (I think), and I wish there were more of it, it was such an invigorating sequel treatment that I went and checked out Campanella 2 and 3 despite not liking 1 very much, and was similarly surprised at how wildly different and evolved they are! … not enough to like them either, but it’s beautiful to see creators engage with their own material like this and understand where they can laterally shift the design.
Grimstone - And then I was REALLY not expecting this. A full 20-hour+ retro RPG set in Texas dealing with religion and legitimately paying it off? Coupled with an amazing soundtrack (big surprise) and a really engaging combat system, this was so good I legitimately want to play it again with a different party. Or learn to mod it to make Lily O'Mule a playable character. Nearly single-handedly worth the price of the whole collection.
Lords of Diskonia - It’s funny how much this felt like Avianos to me (not in a bad way), despite moving its complexity into the Carrom-like battle system. I’m not sure how I didn’t end up feeling like the AI’s stupidly good ability to shoot discs was too much - a few times it really fucked up some shots, which helped, and just generally it did feel like being a human able to see the Big Picture gave enough advantage to be ‘balanced’. Also, it’s just funny to see it hit god shots, bouncing 5 of your disks against each other for collateral damage. The opposition can teach you.
In conclusion: this game's awesome. Lots of cool stuff that speaks for itself. Excellent music with cool microtones. Mooncat forever.