Mighty News Thread Number 9: No Silksong in Mudville

[Felix]

intrusive thought: Sheryl Crow belting out “if it makes you flappy”

[doolittle]

LA day drinking anthem “all i wanna do” came on in the car yesterday. thought about you having a great time with your move and then “sheryl had some travis morrison flow”

[Felix]

Sheryl Crow is a really underrated artist

[ellaguro]

Judero’s out today

Judero | Release Date Trailer

[Felix]

sound design in this is just fantastic

[Broco]

UFO 50 review - a rangy, confounding and audacious proposition

There’s a really good cowboy game in here. It’s called Rail Heist. It’s the first game in the collection I truly adored, my first foothold. More than that, it’s the game that made me understand what the collection is: 50 chances to fall in love. Rail Heist was the game that made me stop searching and think: ahh! Forget everything else, I’ll stay here for a while.

Anyway: it’s a cowboy game about robbing trains. You drop in to a carriage and work your rattling way along to the target, and to do this you have to stealth around enemies and bash through walls without being seen. If you blow your cover, the whole thing switches to a turn-based affair. It’s goofy and knockabout and a quietly bizarre mix of modern and old ideas, and it feels like nothing else. It’s an absolute treat and I just love that it exists.

Another game I love is Party House. It’s an idea so simple and yet, again, I’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s almost a deck-builder. You’re having a house party and you have to invite people along to it, and ensure that the people you bring along contribute enough popularity and cash to make it worthwhile. You also need to ensure you don’t get people who are going to fight and call the cops and get the whole thing busted up, even though some of those people will have really tempting reserves of popularity and cash as well. Decisions!

There are targets to hit and you use your earnings in between rounds to add new potential house guests or expand your home for bigger parties. This game feels like it came right out of the 1980s, from the John Hughes theme down to the character models, who all look like they walked in from Maniac Mansion. (It’s also a perfect example of what UFO 50 is willing to do with the genre heading “strategy”. This is where they put the strange, luminous games that couldn’t go anywhere else. If I had one tip for this collection, it’s to look for games marked “strategy.”)

One more. And it’s a bit like Maniac Mansion, actually. Night Manor is a point-and-click adventure about trying to escape from a hideous house. You’re being stalked by a monster. You don’t know how you got trapped here in the first place. You need to collect items and combine them and use them in interesting ways, and you need to create a working map of the house in your own mind.

[smbhax]

^ UFO 50 is out in a couple days on Steam, definitely been on my list for…a while = o

A lot of the games look to have flash FX or guns, which I’m not into, but some don’t, so looking forward to checking them out.

[winterk]

UFO 50 looks so good.

[ellaguro]

another pub bites the dust

TouchArcade is Shutting Down – TouchArcade

[Mikey]

Wow damn

[muaad]

To our own detriment we’ve resisted things like obnoxious in-your-face advertising, egregious clickbait headlines, or ethically questionable sponsorships, which sadly are the types of things that actually still make money in the internet of today.

just curious about what the previous business model of this game website was. Donations?

[Mikey]

Very restrained advertising, banner images IIRC but like, super tame and unobtrusive compared to so many sites

[a_new_duck]

I really thought UFO 50 was gonna turn into vaporware, so I’m real excited to play it tomorrow, though I wish I could pick it up on Switch right away

I’m curious to see how much I feel like I can see Ojiro Fumoto’s fingerprints on it

[captainlove]

I’m similarly torn since this has Switch (or Steam deck) written all over it

[Broco]

It turns out to be faster to make 50 UFOSoft games than one Hollow Knight game

[shnozlak]

I really love the idea of packing up little games like this.

If I could get an itch.io pack that did one install for a curated XX games with a front end Id be in heaven.

[a_new_duck]

my dream as a maker of small games is to actually be able to be a part of putting a collection of small little games like this together on a single-launcher multicart sort of deal, but that is too complicated for me to organize/produce and probably too logistically complicated for anyone to want to organize

[Broco]

I think it’s deceptively hard yeah. One of the advantages of Itch for developers is that there’s no rules about input/video/title banners/installation flow/anything. You can just focus on your game design instead of wasting weeks on QoL tweaks that most players won’t even give you credit for

That implies with an itch.io curated pack, players wouldn’t be able to quickly channel-surf the collection like in UFO50, they’d have to fiddle with window and gamepad settings every time

[a_new_duck]

yeah, at one point i was going to try to give a small handful of my games a unified front end, but even using the same dev tools and a lot of the same architecture, that was a huge pain and proved basically impossible without rewriting everything

[thecatamites]

i figure you both know abt stuff like the glorious trainwrecks pirate karts which honestly i feel work better than you’d expect, even with the switches of resolution and controls implied… the thing i always wished was just that html5 games could be run locally, so that you could just embed ones of whatever size into their own little pages and then string those together as a little downloadable web site, maybe with embedded text and images and instructions and such.
unfortunately i guess this is technically disallowed for security concerns. but gamers don’t deserve security! they deserve fear!!!