Nothing has particularly grabbed me thus far. I find the graphics really charming and the mechanics a little less so. This makes me want to make some pixelart games though - i had a setup in love2d to make pixel accurate games I just gotta dust off.
One other thing I’m a little miffed by: no raster graphics. The UFO can’t draw line segments? No room for a little scaler racing game? Some of these people shoulda played Tetrastar: The Fighter. If I were on this team I would have made a rudimentary music tracker at least, maybe a painting program in there too.
With a lot of these you have to figure out the rules on your own, and the games are either pretty good at teaching you or restart quick enough for you to trial-and-error your way through.
Eager to find the first game with the UFO Soft logo, might dive into the little metagame they have IDK.
Sunset Drive
I like this game a lot
Onion Delivery
as a vehicle designer I can’t help but be annoyed at how hard it is to drive
Magic Garden
Figuring out the rules to this was kind of fun.
Mooncat
When it’s good, it’s good. When your brain thinks about pressing buttons … it’s bad
I really enjoy setting the organization to “Most Played” and then trying to spend half an hour with whatever I’ve seen the least.
Tonight, I just spent a good chunk of time with Fist Hell. I think this is one of the weaker games since it’s one of the few straight entries in the collection. I got all the way to the final boss and died. There aren’t any saves, but you can seemingly continue indefinitely. I really don’t want to walk through that level again. I did enjoy getting better at a genre I don’t have much of a taste for. Maybe I’ll trophy this one day with a buddy.
I have apparently been playing all reflex games on accident. had a good time with the explosion chain reaction game and the camouflage lizard game. these could be Ti83 games
If you have rapid fire it trivializes Ninpek, highly recommend giving that a shot if you can. Like it has built in rapid fire but if you can go more rapid with your controller…it’s good. Also I think it’s much easier if you aren’t concerned about score but for me…scoring is as important as life
I haven’t finished Onion Delivery yet but I adore it, the controls are a big reason why, I get why others are frustrated by it though.
i really like how everyone on Planet Zoldath kinda hates you - it’s kind of like if some of those jank Micronics-style NES games were more self aware. def an underrated game in the collection. also managed to get a gold without that much trouble.
finally tried Valbrace and i like it, but i was really starting to get confused navigating around the halls. i’m someone who has played lots of Wolfenstein 3D but i totally lost my sense of direction and ended up fighting the same enemies over and over. i’m going to have to come back to it and figure out how to get a better sense of direction.
i really want to like Golfaria because the idea is neat but it’s still not really clicking with me after spending more time with it. i kinda wish it was easier to wander around to start and kind of built up to being more difficult. it’s a lot of trial and error just kind of wandering around.
i beat Camouflage on cherry awhile back. i don’t have much to say about it - i think i initially thought it was harder than it ended up being with more time spent. great music though. i also cherried Velgress awhile back through sheer force of will. it took me way too long. still not sure if i like it or hate it.
holy shit Star Waspir moves so fast… too fast for me, it was making me feel dizzy.
and there’s a Rail Heist area in Mini & Max! it’s truly the game that keeps on giving
also i managed to weasel my way into the Eggplant podcast’s UFO 50 game schedule so i’ll be on their episodes about Warptank and Waldorf’s Journey next month.
yeah i think a lot of the more “open” games in the collection have this problem, actually. sort of a reverse difficulty curve. the start is the most resource constrained AND you’re still trying to the learn the game – feels very punishing.
not exactly the same, but gives me the same feeling as a triple-a game withholding basic quality of life functionality so they can reward you with it later via some progression system.
finally got gold on Campanella 1. i’ve seen others say it was one of the easier games for them and that was absolutely not the case for me at all - it’s my third most played and the other two i cherried. it was sort of a war of attrition of grinding and slowly getting further each time. i’m not sure what you have to do to find the coffees - they only appeared very occasionally for me and i’m not sure what triggered them, but i won’t be trying to cherry it any time soon.
the controls of the UFO were initially hard for me to figure out but it’s not too bad when you get the hang of them. and there are def nice moments in the game. but it’s also not one of my favorites of the ones i’ve played - i guess it’s kind of squarely in the middle for me. it’s competent and solid and feels the most NES-like of anything i’ve played and period-accurate but doesn’t really stand out. Magic Garden and Velgress were both also very hard and required huge grinds for me but at least had much quicker loops and it felt like less of an ordeal to play few sessions of them at a time. i do appreciate how many of Eirik Suhrke’s games feel like slightly more esoteric and souped-up takes on games that could have existed in the 80’s though.
I haven’t beaten Campanella but it’s automatically one of my favorites for being a Gravitar-like. You get coffees by flying over secret pixels on
each stage, like a crevice or narrow passage. There’s not a marker for them, you just learn where they are as you replay.
I always build up a stockpile of lives and lose most of them trying to win at basketball.
I booted this up again today and cherried Magic Garden, one of the first games I had beat
When I figured out I can drink a potion, let go of the oppies I was “rescuing” in the middle of nowhere, then turn around and murder them all for score… who’s the evil witch now, kekekekeke
It just went ahead and showed the secret 51st game as one of the demo reels… it doesn’t even look out of place unless you’ve tried all of them already and go “wait a minute…” (EDIT: never mind, I spoiled myself and that’s not the 51st game, it’s a secret bonus level in Elfazar’s Hat apparently)
Also I just noticed the main menu music changes if you set the background theme to “infinity”
managed to gold Golfaria. it def gets easier to play as you get further along. i ended up liking a lot about it - the idea of a golf based metroidvania is pretty fun and there was a lot of cool stuff in the game. i still think it took awhile to get anywhere and navigation was a bit frustrating. i’m not sure the kind of map the game has is really ideal for an open-ended exploration game for a lot of reasons. would have preferred to give one power early on or something similar at the very least - tho maybe they wanted that kind of open-ended frustration initially. it’s definitely in the “i’m not sure if this concept fully works as well as you’d hope but the ambition carried it over the finish line” category for me.
also just cherried Big Bell Race and Waldorf’s Journey. Big Bell Race is surprisingly easy once you figure out the controls okay. there is almost not much to say about it because of that. might be more fun in 2 player though! Waldorf’s Journey is still the shit - my favorite of the short games. i would honestly play to a score beyond the cherry requirements because i had so much fun with it. it’s one of the games in the collection where everything comes together for me, and i love that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
games i’ve gotten a gold or cherry on ranked from favorite to least favorite so far:
Waldorf’s Journey
Barbuta
Warptank
Planet Zoldath
Mooncat
Magic Garden
Golfaria
Pingolf
Camouflage
Velgress
Campanella 1
Big Bell Race
still have yet to beat Rail Heist and Mini and Max but those are probably my overall favorites in the collection from what i have played.
It was so funny that he could cast a regular heal spell to revive himself from his own coffin. I assumed it was intended at this point, maybe as a sort of joke about old JRPG mechanics being glitchy
