What's good in UFO 50?

[Bongo]

Seven years after its announcement, the indietronic retro anthology game UFO 50 is at last out. And there really are 50 games in this thing!

I figured chronological order is as good a way as any to explore the history of this console I've never heard of. I'm gonna post my super-brief impressions as I go, and put stars around the ones I think are particularly neato.

Barbuta is authentically inscrutable. Makes me wish they had written some manuals too. I fell into a hole in the bottom left and couldn't find a way out. Never managed to encounter the dot that's moving randomly on the map. I'm gonna come back and try to figure what the heck this is later.

Bug Hunter is my favorite so far (a mere 10% of the way through my initial sampling of the anthology). The rules are easy to understand and well-communicated, the interface is anachronistically good, and the tactics are light yet deep.

Ninpek: Shmups aren't really my genre. Sorry. Having a double-jump available from the beginning is a bold move for a game from 1983.

Paint Chase feels good to play, since you can be so aggressive. My naïve, non-strategy-having gameplay style wasn't sufficient to get me past level 4, but I feel like I'll be coming back to this one.

Magic Garden satisfies me on a primal level that I find difficult to put into words. A real game of its vintage would be much more stiff in its controls, and ramp up the danger much more quickly, but this is just a very chill experience.

 

[Bongo]

Mortol has an incredibly cool concept for a puzzle-platformer, and I am really looking forward to coming back to it when I'm in the mood for the kind of optimization it asks for.

Velgress is smooth and high-skill, but I think I keep taking it too fast. Just because you can climb really fast, and the floor breaks, doesn't mean you have to rush. Cooler heads will prevail.

Planet Zoldath seems based on accumulating knowledge across successive runs. What are all these items good for? When will these wonderfully hideous aliens' behavior start to matter?

Attactics has some nuance that isn't really sinking in at the moment. It feels like it'll really shine in multiplayer.

Devilition made me feel like a genius the first time I full-cleared a level.

 

[MJG]

The only one I've played so far is Barbuta. It involved 15 minutes of wandering around aimlessly while accomplishing nothing, then finally stumbling into something by interacting with everything that stood out in every possible way I could come up with, then 45 minutes of continual progress until I died. I'd love to continue with it but I don't think there was any sort of saving going on, and moving around the map is so slow that I'm not super keen on redoing everything I did to get back to where I was. Though given how the rest of the game has been, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some trick to carrying over progress or regaining lives that I just didn't find.

 

[FelixSH]

I fell into a hole in the bottom left and couldn't find a way out.

Drawing inspiration from that ET game, I see.

Lame jokes aside, this sounds pretty cool. If I hadn't forbidden myself to buy new games (I have more than enough unplayed/-beaten ones), I'd get it.

Keep up the reviews, they are nice to read.

 

[Bongo]

After subsequent reflection, I realized how to describe Magic Garden: it's a hybrid of Snake and Pac-Man, where your tactics and situation determine whether you need to be thinking more about avoiding collisions or clearing the screen. Very fluid.

 

[Behemoth]

My parents were anti-video game console for the first ten years of my life (until they inexplicably bought us an SNES for Christmas of '91, but that's a different story), so I never owned an NES. However, one summer (in like '88 or '89, and under circumstances I can't recall) someone lent us an NES with a bunch of games. My brother and I passed many an evening plugging in these random games to see which ones we liked best (I particularly remember a top-down tank shmup and some sort of side-scrolling fruit shmup).

I've only played ten of the games so far, but UFO 50 almost perfectly captures that same feeling-in a way that I never expected to experience again-of being dropped into a bunch of games with zero context and being asked to just start pulling levers to see what happens. Even if some of the individual games are less fun than others, it's been an absolute blast so far.

 

[Aurelia]

My parents were anti-video game console for the first ten years of my life (until they inexplicably bought us an SNES for Christmas of '91, but that's a different story), so I never owned an NES. However, one summer (in like '88 or '89, and under circumstances I can't recall) someone lent us an NES with a bunch of games. My brother and I passed many an evening plugging in these random games to see which ones we liked best (I particularly remember a top-down tank shmup and some sort of side-scrolling fruit shmup).

I've only played ten of the games so far, but UFO 50 almost perfectly captures that same feeling-in a way that I never expected to experience again-of being dropped into a bunch of games with zero context and being asked to just start pulling levers to see what happens. Even if some of the individual games are less fun than others, it's been an absolute blast so far.

This sounds exactly like why I’d like to play this game. I grew up with a Famiclone which had a cart with a bunch of different Famicom/NES (primarily Namco) games on it, and being thrown into random games without context is like a large portion of my NES experience lol.

I also asked a friend and was told by him that it seems like a lot of these games don’t have any screen shaking or flashing, which is really promising for me to be able to comfortably play this when I’ve fully recovered from carpal tunnel surgery.

 

[RT-55J]

I only played 5 games last night, but I feel like the anthology format really works well for the individual games. Since none of the games have to worry about selling themselves individually, they're free to be as weird, abrasive, inscrutable, unpolished, and idiosyncratic as they want (rather than homogeneously polished/designed), with the "release year" providing a metatextual excuse for any formal shortcomings. Like, I can't really say I enjoyed my 5 minutes with Diving ("1986"), per se, but it's such an odd and atmospheric thing that I appreciate it's inclusion (and, who knows, maybe I'll give it a fairer shake later).

 

[madhair60]

Every game in UFO 50 is good, to my amazement. It is the Game of the Year, and likely the decade.

 

[Tomm Guycot]

I'll meet you guys in the switch version.

I watched Jeff Gerstmann play Barbuta for a while and I for one am psyched for slow off-brand Castle Quest.

 

[Patrick]

i’ll get this on Switch too… eventually. But it looks really neat, glad folks are enjoying it.

 

[Bongo]

Kick Club has very satisfying thumbfeel that makes you want to try for stylish shots.

Avianos is an interesting strategy game, but my first foray into the Adult difficulty kicked my ass. I expect I'll have more fun with it once I've internalized the unit matchups a bit better.

Mooncat purports to be a successor to Barbuta, and you can tell from the beginning, with the unorthodox controls, that it's a weirdie. I think, uh, I'm gonna try this one later.

Bushido Ball seems like one I won't be coming back to too often. I don't feel motivated to get good at this sport.

Koala Block is some manner of Sokoban. It took me a few levels to understand the restriction on when you can push multiple blocks, but having an undo button (an unhead-of luxury in authentic games from 1985) keeps things moving breezily. I'm into it. But I want to keep sampling, so I'll return later.

 

[Bongo]

Camouflage instantly felt fun to me. I love this. Figuring out where you can acquire the color you need, the added challenge of optional collectibles, and it even gives you an undo button if you fail!

Campanella didn't leave any strong feelings on me, but I feel like there's more to it than my initial impression.

Golfaria rubbed me the wrong way at the start by giving you finite strokes even in the starting village. I get that the challenge is figuring out how to reach your goal, but I chickened out from even sticking with it long enough to try to figure out what my goal should be. At the very least, I'm not feeling it today.

The Big Bell Race is multiplayer Campanella. Cool concept. I bet that playing this a lot will really push you to master the movement tech and bring it back to its predecessor.

Warptank has an extremely cool core mechanic, and it makes good use of non-period design elements like context-sensitive movement directions on walls and ceilings, checkpoints, and unlimited lives, in order to keep the focus on the puzzling.

 

[Behemoth]

Kick Club has very satisfying thumbfeel that makes you want to try for stylish shots.

Avianos is an interesting strategy game, but my first foray into the Adult difficulty kicked my ass. I expect I'll have more fun with it once I've internalized the unit matchups a bit better.

Mooncat purports to be a successor to Barbuta, and you can tell from the beginning, with the unorthodox controls, that it's a weirdie. I think, uh, I'm gonna try this one later.

Bushido Ball seems like one I won't be coming back to too often. I don't feel motivated to get good at this sport.

Koala Block is some manner of Sokoban. It took me a few levels to understand the restriction on when you can push multiple blocks, but having an undo button (an unhead-of luxury in authentic games from 1985) keeps things moving breezily. I'm into it. But I want to keep sampling, so I'll return later.

Different strokes, etc., but Bushido Blade is the only one I’ve beaten so far.

 

[Bongo]

Waldorf's Journey is immediately unique in terms of its premise, controls, and aesthetics. Feels like the games are really starting to sound good, too. The skill ceiling is very high.

Porgy is far from the first "full-sized" game in the collection, but it's the first one that really feels huge from the outset, an exploration game with a satisfying loop of searching for upgrades and bringing them back to base before you can use them. However, I played 20 minutes without finding anything but fuel tanks, so I got antsy to move on.

Onion Delivery isn't for me. I don't care for the steering controls.

Snack Planet somehow feels like I should suck at it less than I do at the likes of Gradius or R-Type, but it turns out I somehow manage to suck even more.

Party House is an interesting little… deck-builder? I guess would be the way to characterize it? I need more practice in order to understand the effective strategies. Pro tip: watch to the end of the credits.

 

[Bongo]

Hot Foot seems designed for co-op. I'll come back with a friend.

Divers is intriguingly enigmatic, and it's hinting at a Porgy-like game flow, even though it's a turn-based RPG. No idea what's effective here, but I'm looking forward to figuring it out.

Rail Heist has depth and panache. Tactical espionage action! I kinda think that I don't give a damn about the timer, but maybe I will later.

Vainger keeps killing me with instant death spikes. Nothing else in the entire game has ever killed me. I guess that’s probably my own fault. Sending you to Norfair immediately after the first save point also seems pretty mean; I got through it but I couldn’t find the second one. Looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one more later.

Rock On! Island is tower defense! I know those. I appreciate that it has a practice stage.

 

[Lakupo]

Different strokes, etc., but Bushido Blade is the only one I’ve beaten so far.

Bushido Ball is the first one I beat as well. I felt compelled to keep playing it for two hours the first day. It's also the one that made me realize how much deeper each game can be compared to how they may look at first.

...also, the AI gets nuts and evil, which is so on-brand for a retro fighting game.

Vainger keeps killing me with instant death spikes. Nothing else in the entire game has ever killed me. I guess that’s probably my own fault. Sending you to Norfair immediately after the first save point also seems pretty mean; I got through it but I couldn’t find the second one. Looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one more later.

It's interesting to see different people's approaches, as I tried to play through Vainger as straightforward as possible on my first time through to get a sense of the intended order, so if there was a heat zone, I turned around until I had the heat protection. I didn't feel comfortable trying to cross them without shielding until I had a lot of health upgrades later.

 

[Bongo]

If there was a path other than through the heat area, I failed to find it. The starting gun doesn't seem to work on explosives. Maybe I should turn around after all.

 

[Bongo]

So the Terminal feature seems to have an incredible amount of stuff cleverly hidden in it. I haven't been spoiling myself on it, but I have been seeing incredible volumes of redacted text elsewhere, so there must be something deep and fascinating going on. At least one game has already revealed a cheat code to me, but I haven't tried it yet.

 

[ShakeWell]

I've only played a little of this so far, but I think my favorite game of what I've played is maybe FIST HELL. But as it stands, I haven't even played 20% of the titles. But this rules so hard.

 

[Bongo]

Pingolf is perverse, like all golf games, insofar as the game is about preventing a number from going up rather than causing it to go up. However, I enjoy it better than every other golf game I've ever played in my life, despite my abysmal score. Last place by a goddamn mile. I was beyond even the most remote hope of victory, so why did I keep playing?

Mortol II got off to a haunting start, but it's even meaner than the first one, and I think I want to try to finish that one first.

Fist Hell is a beat-'em-up. I don't know how to assess those.

Overbold is certainly addicting, but the more I played it, the worse I did. I think that’s a sign to move on.

Campanella 2 completes the puzzle of what I wasn't getting about Campanella 1, by giving you hit points instead of just having you die every time you bump into a wall. But I didn't realize just how fast you can run out of fuel, and while I like that you can theoretically recover from mistakes, I haven't quite played enough of it to figure out how. The miniature on-foot graphics are cute. I'll come back to it.

 

[RT-55J]

If you haven't played it yet, I recommend starting Pilot Quest (44) now and playing it in 10-15 minutes at a time between other games for a while. It takes a while to get started, but the meat of the game is one of my favorites in the collection.

 

[Bongo]

Hyper Contender is a dark horse entry into the field of simple platform fighters. I tried each contender, and I liked Elka and Sephy, and to a lesser extent Reck, Vultana, and Donkus.

Valbrace ’s description says it came with a hint book. I kind of think that would come in handy! I want to play this one with a notebook. It seems really satisfying. The mini-map is just enough map to keep me from getting completely disoriented, while still benefiting from making a paper one.

Rakshasa is an impressive amalgam of classic hardcore platformers, and I like the resurrection mechanic, but the collision detection is really strict, isn’t it?

Star Waspir seems like it’s for people who already know how to shmup. I can’t even get far enough for the background music to get to the first verse. It seems like the need to match-three the drops in order to get a powerup would theoretically be fun for people who can do things like dodge, or shoot accurately, or both at the same time.

Grimstone starts me off picking a party. For no particular reason, I picked Maria, Bull, Doc, and Anne. Explored far enough to get my first plot hook and get a sense for the basic lore. I’m all about this. I’m not sure the timed hits add much, but I’m very excited to see this through.

 

[Lakupo]

I love the delightful weirdness of Mooncat. Got the Gold, but there's plenty more secrets to find.

 

[Bongo]

If there was a path other than through the heat area, I failed to find it. The starting gun doesn't seem to work on explosives. Maybe I should turn around after all.

So there was a whole entire door that I didn't even notice.

 

[JBear]

GOTY:

 

[RT-55J]

Vainger (29) is a really good metal-storm-troid. According to the game's stats, I beat it in a single sitting in 4:19:59.734 (if only I were a couple hundred milliseconds slower v_v; ). Nice action, neat gimmicks, serviceable map design, and a really mean final boss.

Only being able to look at the map and respec your character at save points is an interesting way of circumventing the fact that the fantasy console here doesn't have start or select buttons.

Star Waspir seems like it’s for people who already know how to shmup. I can’t even get far enough for the background music to get to the first verse. It seems like the need to match-three the drops in order to get a powerup would theoretically be fun for people who can do things like dodge, or shoot accurately, or both at the same time.

It took me about 30 minutes of attempts, but I was able to make it to Wave 3 once. It's a very hard game. Managing the different firing modes and the power up chaining and dodging everything the game throws at you is quite the balancing act. It almost reminds me of Recca with how frenetic it is, though it's not quite as maximalist in its presentation or design.

The main thing to keep in mind is that the enemy drops always cycle through the letters E G G in the order you kill them. As far as I can tell, the valid strings are G G G (extra gun), E E E (temp firepower boost), E G G (score multiplier (stacks arbitrarily high)), and G E E (something like a bomb? (might vary per character)).

Something (besides death) can happen that can kill your score multiplier, but I'm not sure what. I think it's either collecting an invalid string of powerups, or possibly a time-out thing (the game is a bit too fast-paced for me to parse every happening while playing skillfully). Regardless, you will want that score multiplier to be high if you ever want to get those sweet sweet extends.

Anyhow, I think Campanella 3 (49) is the easiest shmup in the collection (that I've played so far (caveat: I'm not a shmup-head)). Despite being an 8-bit faux-super-scaler thing, it's quite smooth and the z-axis is very coherent. It has a gimmick where enemies that reach your plane on the z-axis can stay there, necessitating you to use your alt-fire mode to get rid of them.

 

[Bongo]

Started messing around with the Terminal feature, and I found the beginning of what I assume is a long thread hidden inside of the game Barbuta. It somehow makes perfect sense that UFO 50 includes its own creepypasta. I found a prototype game. I'm taking notes, but not really ready to share anything yet.

 

[Behemoth]

Party House is an interesting little… deck-builder? I guess would be the way to characterize it? I need more practice in order to understand the effective strategies. Pro tip: watch to the end of the credits.

I got to Party House this morning, and once I understood the mechanics, win conditions, etc., I basically had the Brooklyn 99 “oh no” reaction. I could really see this one getting its hooks in me. (Although, much like the “undo” option in some of the previous games, this is where some of the anachronisms in UFO 50’s design creep through: while a deck-builder would have been technically possible using 80’s hardware, as a matter of game design that concept didn’t emerge until much later).

 

[Lokii]

Maybe not in this dimension, but the one next door that the LX fell out of? Anything's possible!