UFO 50

King of Posters
385

Ufo 50 is so good… I’ve been thinking about it constantly for 3 weeks now…

I’m really liking how almost every game in the collection feels small after finishing them. Also every game having a flat difficulty curve over a short run time. They start fairly difficult but end before getting too cruel.

I won’t comment on every game but I’ve played all of them

Seaside Drive

Everybody on this forum should play Seaside Drive frankly… It’s my new Outrun…

I really enjoy the stage-to-stage enemy progression : Military in Stage 1-> Shapes in Stage 2 → Ghosts in Stage 3 → Fish in Stage 4. Then you you get a pie at the end !

Night Manor

I played this one with my wife over two nights, itw as a great time. It does one very appreciated revolutionary thing over Deja Vu / Uninvited : not having any failed state (If you « die » you get sent back to the first room with every item in the inventory)

Block Koala

Somehow I’ve been playing Block Koala as a palette cleanser between other games and have started to like it. The eighth puzzle is very difficult, but I could just ignore it and continue exploring. After finishing the game with 40 puzzles solved, I went back to Puzzle 8 with my newfound knowledge and apprecation of the game and : I still couldn’t beat it

Lords of Diskonia

I think the reason for this game to exist is they imagined an hypothetical 80s kid that would see the cool box art for this game and bring it back home and get immediately disappointed because it’s actually a weird strategy game about discs. I accept all of its small flaws for this reason

Grimstone, Porgy, Mortol 1

These games lag on Switch so I’m waiting for the patch :frowning:

Golfaria

This game also suffers from severe lag on the Switch and I didn’t even notice it until the end where I was thrown into a new zone where everything was suddendly super fast (=actual normal speed)

Divers

I miss resource management in JRPG, games like DQ11 or SMT5 have eliminated the threat of exploration and all random enemies are XP pinatas wandering around the map as preparation for the real deal : boss fights. Divers brings all the clunky NES JRPG stuff back (weapon durability, low hit rates, no attack redirect after an enemy’s been killed, low visibility, etc) and it’s only about the threat of exploration and it feels like a small miracle honestly

Fist Hell

This game made me realize how all the best games in the beat’em all genre rely on panache (which Fist Hell is sorely missing, despite feeling very competent mechanically)

Onion Delivery

I still can’t deal with that one. It has my fav track in the game though so I will perservere

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I still load up Bug Hunter nearly a year later.
After I blew a stage 4 bug hunt I loaded up Minny and Max and fell into a groove.
UFO50 Forever

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played through Campanella 3 because i’m guesting on my last Eggplant UFO 50 podcast recording tomorrow and managed to cherry it on my first completion. did take me almost 7 hours in total, and several attempts where i died right at the end. but the flipside is i probably wouldn’t have cherried it on my other attempts where i died at the end, so i’ll take it.

it is nice to have something that plays like a console port of Space Harrier/After Burner style rail shooters that i actually like! and it’s a shooter i can actually get through, which made me happy. i do also really like the UI of the game. i think it was a reasonable amount of generous, even though maybe the last stage and the bosses were surprisingly mostly easy outside of the second one and maybe the final Queen.

but yeah, it’s weirdly more slight than Campanella 1 and definitely 2, but i also enjoyed the process of playing through it more than either of those. also 1989 weirdly feels almost too late for one of those rail shooter games to be made vs. so many other games in the collection that would have obviously been extremely ahead of their time. but anyway - it was a good one! i’m happy to have finished a shooter in the collection because i didn’t really have much interest in trying to go through Caramel Caramel or Star Waspir. probably ranks solidly in the middle of the games i’ve completed so far.

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Campanella 3 almost feels like an entire different genre than Space Harrier because of the claustrophobic invisible walls. They felt like a betrayal at first but are ultimately what makes it work. It enjoyed it a lot, it’s no Campanella 1 though

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Campanella 3 reminded me of Tetrastar and Cosmic Epsilon. The one time I talked to Derek Yu at the GDC I mentioned this and he hadn’t heard of em. That was the one thing I wished UFO 50 had, someone getting hopped up on goofballs making a raster graphics game

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preshow live here: https://www.twitch.tv/UFO50cherryrush

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Did anyone do the deep secrets to this or did everyone just a watch a video on it?

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I mean, I posted the first one right here, and after another five you can notice the pattern that each of them occurs in the first 2 minutes of each game, so you can start to find them just by guessing. So I’d say this is pretty much given to you on a plate.

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The Lords of Diskonia blue queen is a powerful enemy-only final boss disk that only appears in the final scenario of the main campaign.

I had a rat push her into a lake on the first turn, instantly drowning her. Great moment

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I gave this game a 6-month-ish break, but I felt like playing “videogames in general” this weekend and what better way than more UFO 50.

My progress as of today

207016~1
207016~11920×1080 345 KB

Since I had at least dipped briefly into all 50 already, this time I was “forced” to revisit games I had bounced off of for various reasons and give them another chance to charm me. Most of the time, they did!

Games I had given up earlier because they seemed boring:

  • Avianos: At bottom this is a really simple and dry 4X, that like many of them, boils down to manipulating the bad AI. But it’s really elevated by the “cycle of apocalyptic war” theme. The game has one of the funniest intro cutscenes, and then I found myself enacting its theme by obliterating castles with spells and ordering my defenders to raze my own buildings. As in Dr. Strangelove, war is hell and it’s also a grand joke.

  • Night Manor: This game has fantastic art and atmosphere, but there’s a lot of clicking on every object on every screen, and the escape-the-murderer minigame gets old already after the 2nd time it happens. I figured out I could make it more fun by A) "look"ing at every object to search for hints instead of trying actions at random, B) just take a stretch-break and let the murderer kill me.

  • Quibble Race: Yeah, this one’s kinda just bad, but it can be beat within 20 minutes so I got the gold disk and moved on.

Games that I had given up earlier because they appeared too hard:

  • Pingolf: When I gave this a first run, I scored like +40 and it felt like the amount of precision required in the midst of chaos was insurmountable. But I realized playing more that the “dunk ball” mechanic can fix a lot of poor shots, and knowing when to “waste” a shot backing up and when to take an alternate path (like bouncing off a diagonal tile on the ceiling) can fix many of the rest. And unlike most of UFO 50, this game lets you practice as much as you need to with no game over.

  • Vainger: This one is kind of embarrassing: when I first played this, I missed a door near the beginning and thought I was required to go through the “hot zone” with no upgrades. Whoops.

    • The gravity flipping in this game is kind of meh whatever, but I love the system where you can load-out your upgrades into different slots. The betrayal-themed backstory from the terminal logs was more fun than logs usually are, because it stuck to the point and didn’t overwhelm me with piles of tedious lore.

  • Kick Club: This one’s central joke of being a videogame about “all the sports” which plays 100% like a videogame and 0% like any sport never got old. But it being so long and mercilessly punishing of the smallest mistake did get old.

    • The actual nature of the difficulty in this game was for some time a bit of a mystery to me, because the enemy patterns are so predictable and the player character is so agile. And yet I died so, so much.
    • I eventually figured out the game is designed to turn you into your own worst enemy, because your soccer-ball sometimes flies somewhere inconvenient and now you need to do some tricky precision platforming to reach it again. Unless you use some braincells when this happens and come up with a clever route that requires less precision (for example, utilizing the screen wraparound or the slide-dash).

  • Mortol: This game forces you to master some very specific and weird mechanics, like exactly what causes the camera to advance. It wasn’t too bad after I figured them out. Weirder than Mortol II but ultimately less twitchy/chaotic.

  • Rakshasa (this one I played a lot of but still haven’t beat): I really want to like this because of all the cool Buddhism-inspired artwork and mechanics, but boy. There’s so much randomness, and the skill-based reincarnation feels more punishing than a normal lives system.

    • There are so many fun surprises in this, like the rare enemy drops that summon bizarre demigods, and what happens when you fall into a pit. This game feels like one of the ones they poured the most love into, and it’s also so hard that I wonder how many players will see more than a fraction of it.
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granted anything is fun with friends but this one is very much meant for multiplayer imo

ideally drunken multiplayer with a lot of yelling

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I haven’t beaten Rakshasa yet but my one tip for going far is ignoring your body’s natural desire for Homing and go for the fireball instead. You can kill toads in one charged fireball hit. There’s a lot less randomness when everything dies so quickly.

Woah

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the reincarnation mini game is all about abusing the invincibility frames you get after picking up a collectable. it got much more manageable when i discovered this mechanic.

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Also this was a funny bit

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Mortol 2 : the Confederacy of Nilpis is a dream game for me. 99 lives to infiltrate a castle and kill what’s inside. Grimdark oozing from every pore. I like how unforgiving the hit boxes are, the 99 guys feel very expendable. Each class gets its own overly somber music theme that can / will get cut short 10 seconds in because they’ve died to a bee. One class does nothing but explode, and I fail at it half the time. Great game

I saved up Valbrace (dungeon crawling punch out) for last, and unfortunately it’s one of the worst games of the collection. Dungeon crawling with infinite healing and no town or real dangers is just a slog, and enemies are only a threat if I’m bored enough to make mistakes.
Great physical comedy with the main character’s shocked expression though

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Mortol II is definitely one of the best in the collection. It’s so satisfying to blaze a path through the weird castle, and so embittering when I not only wasted a life but actually made things much worse for myself by accidentally luring a monster to an awful spot.

Mortol II feels so fresh it’s like UFOSoft invented a whole new genre here instead of riffing on real-life ones. Although I wonder if there was an actual game like this in the 80s/90s that I’m just not aware of. (Most likely on PC, because preserving all that world state requires a lot of RAM.)

As for Valbrace, I managed to miss the Lesser Heal spell, therefore(?) I had a good time with it

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This did convince me to restart Valbrace without using the healing spell (sounds very intimidating!)

I’ve finished couch co-op Seaside Drive with my 5 y old kid. Great tome. It took about 6 tries. One player controls the car and the other controls the gun. The car sprite has two little identical sunglasses guys inside, instead of one. They even get two 1ups instead of one by finishing the bonus stage. The ending unfortunately doesn’t change!

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Never really got into Mini and Max before but its rapidly becoming a favorite.
The world of bugs and microbes is so compelling. Just complete the Lampian pilgrimage and helped a rat rid itself of a parasitic ghost.

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Frankly Mini and Max alone is worth the price of the whole collection. I love how it gradually reveals iself as, somehow, a Morrowindesque / Euro PC RPG with (among other things) its focus on solving sidequests with no hand holding. And with Mini’s on-demand size change, the game solves all issues the genre has always had with fast travel, somehow. As just this one game in a 50 games collection.

I also love how (early spoiler) hostile and alien the world becomes at microbe size (the music becomes wonderfully creepy) and how you can grow back to small/normal size to get a little breather, the familiar sight of a ladybug making you feel at home, before you get to shrink again. All through this, Mini stays totally unfazed

And all the races, including the little lamp-looking people living inside the lamp and how silly they look VS how seriously the game treats their worldview

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