A new game… compilation… thingy came out recently. I’m not sure when it launched on Steam, but it got shadow-dropped onto Switch last week. (Some) people were in quite a furor about it -apparently the game is quite good- so I dropped some fraction of a Benjamin and decided to see about it myself.
UFO 50 is a compilation of 50 very retro-styled games. Many are early 80s arcade quality, or not unlike more rudimentary NES games. That’s not to say that they’re all simple score-chasers! Oh my goodness, no! There are some like that, however, the game’s whole framing device is that these were lost games for a lost console that’s been retrieved and refurbished. And so you can play through the history of this console and watch as the games grow in quality and complexity. And that’s what caught my attention: it sounded very much like another Retro Game Challenge, which was a Nintendo DS game with a very similar premise that I remember very fondly. I quite wish I hadn’t sold it.
Anyway! UFO 50 is what I’m playing now, and today I want to tell you a little bit about the first ten games in the collection. Provided you’re looking at them in chronological order. Which is the default. So you should be. Enough preamble!
Barbuta
Barbuta is slow, and opaque, and honestly the first time I loaded it up I was worried that I’d made a terrible financial decision. I played for five minutes, then was so bored that I intentionally lost all my lives just to see what would happen.
I was taken back to the title screen.
I took a break, played some other games, and then eventually came back ’round to Barbuta. I was pretty sure I knew what kind of game it is, and I knew I’d need to be in the right headspace for it. So once I had a clear afternoon with nothing else grabbing my attention, I armed myself with a notepad and pen, and I started mapping my way through Barbuta.
It’s been a rough journey, but it’s been a lot of fun. For one, I needed a slightly bigger notepad. My map blocks are very tiny and difficult to draw/read. For two, even with a map and notes coming together, it’s been slow. The character moves slow, and it’s very much unclear what you need to do to progress at any point that I’ve been to so far. But this is the kind of game where unraveling it all is the fun; the anxiety of reaching a new screen, the excitement of figuring out what a new items does, that kind of stuff. So despite my first impression, I’m going to say I actually like this one.
Bug Hunter
Bug Hunter isn’t much better off the hop than Barbuta, but for the exact opposite reason: it bombards you with all of these gameplay elements right away, and explains absolutely nothing about what you’re supposed to do with them. I was incredibly overwhelmed and forced myself to try as best I could, but as soon as I died, I went back to the collection screen and haven’t looked back.
I guess you’d call Bug Hunter a puzzle game? There’s a board, with obstacles and enemies, and you have to move your character around the board and shoot the enemies. Okay, just like every other video game ever made. But in this one, you can only attack and move with, for the sake of simplicity, a deck of cards. Each card has either a move command or attack command that you will execute when you play it. And then you can expend some stamina to draw more cards, but I think that also makes more bugs appear?
I don’t really know, man. Game is ass and I never want to see it again.
Ninpek
Ninpek is an auto-scrolling platform action game. It’s kind of like if you took Adventure Island and gave it a Mystical Ninja makeover. Your little ninja dude is ever running to the right, whilst double-jumping over obstacles and chucking ninja stars at baddies. Pick up a power-up to throw more ninja stars at once! Whee! Sometimes a sandwich spawns randomly. I think they’re just worth a lot of points.
I haven’t managed to bet this one yet, because it is hard. The main gameplay isn’t too difficult to get into a groove with, but once you’re a few minutes in, the enemies come at you fast, in great numbers, and sometimes even with homing abilities. Your three lives simply aren’t going to cut the mustard.
That said, it’s still a hoot to play, and I feel like I can beat it if I just stop sucking so hard. I think it goes without saying that Ninpek was the first game I liked in UFO 50. And honestly, after Barbuta and Bug Hunter, the bar was getting pretty low. I not-so-secretly hope there’s a sequel somewhere later down the line. There’s really not much else for me to say about this one.
Paint Chase
Paint Chase, at its core, is basically a very primitive Splatoon. Your goal on each stage is to cover a specific percentage of the play area with your colour paint, while enemies do the opposite. Only here, instead of a squid-kid, you play as a racing car. Because why not.
So you race around these little Pac-Man mazes, spreading your paint, whilst enemies are constantly spawning in to thwart you. What shocked me early on is that you don’t really have to compete with the enemies per se – you can run them all down to stop them undoing your hard work. Of course, they don’t stop until the round is over, so you really have to learn to manage covering territory while crushing foes.
There are also a few items that can help you out, like a paint gun that covers tiles straight ahead of you, a drone that flies around and paints independently, and a clock that stops both the game timer and enemy movement for a few seconds. And of course, the farther you get, the more difficult enemies become as well, with some learning to shoot back our crush you if you approach from the wrong direction. It’s a fun enough game and there are only 25 levels, but if you lose all your lives, you get to start from the very beginning each time. And when you lose on stage 24… it hurts real bad.
Magic Garden
Currently sitting at my #4 most played game at this time, Magic Garden is this first simple score-chaser in the UFO 50 collection. It’s a very simple game that has you moving around a checkerboard, collecting friendly slimes and dropping them off on star-marked tiles in exchange for points.
Simple, no? Perhaps a little too simple? Well, there are also less-friendly slimes spawning on the board at all times, and these must be avoided at all costs, as they will end your game. Fortunately, for every six friendlies you turn in, an item appears on the board that lets you go all Pac-Man on the enemies, and this is how you turn in the really high scores. Sometimes enemy mushrooms appear as well, and only sometimes does the item make them vulnerable. I’m not sure why. yet.
This was the first game in the collection that I managed to beat, which turns the cartridge gold on the game-select screen. It was a bit of a pain though, for one simple reason: if you run into a wall, you die. This is particularly harsh because the controls don’t feel the most precise, and I have lost a lot of attempts to crashing headlong into a stupid wall. If that wasn’t a thing, I’d definitely be playing Magic Garden feverishly until I beat the high score and earned the cherry (an “above and beyond” award). As it is… ehhh, I might give it a shot here and there. It is still pretty fun.
Mortol
Mortol is a puzzle-platformer with a twist: you have to sacrifice your lives so that later iterations of you can get past obstacles. I swear I’ve seen at least two modern games like this on Steam, no idea what they’re called. It’s actually really fun, and makes you think juuuuust enough, but I’ve only played a couple levels so far.
The gimmick here is that your adventure man has 20 lives and three moves: fling himself forward like an arrow, turn into a stone and crush anything below him, or just straight-up explode. Each one of these moves will kill your dude, but in turn, (hopefully) create a path forward for your next life. Which spawns instantly from the little helicopter that’s always present in the top-left corner of the screen. There are little power-ups that you can collect that give you more lives, and you get to bring however many lives you have left at the end of a stage into the next one. Simple, but complex enough to be engaging.
I’ve kind of been powering through most of these games just to get a taste of each before I drop UFO 50 and move on to the next shiny thing, but I’ve had a nagging feeling that I need to go back to spend more time with Mortol. It has a very interesting gameplay gimmick, and I can’t help but want to find a way to clear each stage with more lives than I started with. I’m sure it can be done, but I might need to be twice as clever to pull it off. We may see!
Velgress
As of this writing, my number one most played game in UFO 50. And that’s likely because Velgress is a lot like Kid Icarus. At least to the untrained eye. There’s actually quite a lot of difference between them, like how Velgress always starts you at the very beginning of the game when you die. Even Kid Icarus ain’t that brutal.
Velgress gets a bit of a pass here, though, because it’s only three stages long. The main idea is to continually be jumping up a shaft, avoiding enemies and collecting coins. Oh and also the gound crumbles beneath your feet. Any ground. All ground. You literally can’t stand anywhere for more than a couple seconds before it’s gone, forcing you higher and higher or, conversely, into the giant rolling pin of spikes that’s constantly following you.
If you make it to the end of a level, you get the opportunity to trade your coins for items that may or may not help, like one that make platforms crumble slower, or one that gives you a triple jump (because double-jumping is default here). In each stage, you can also find a “hidden” key, and if you’re able to collect three of them, you’ll get to play a super-secret fourth stage that has a boss!
Velgress is by far the most fun and most addictive game in UFO 50, and I’ve played a few others that I’ve quite enjoyed. I think I’ll probably keep coming back to this one every once in a while, even after I’ve managed to beat it (without the super-power cheat code), because it’s just that much darn fun.
Planet Zoldath
Oh Jesus it’s Barbuta again, but this time with a top-down view. Like, I’m typing this with a sarcastic tone in my head, but I’m actually being serious. Planet Zoldath is a second game where you’re plopped into a world and then have to wander around finding items to make progress. Only this time there’s an added strategic element of only being able to carry two items at a time. Do you bring two important kajiggers and just avoid enemies? Or do you always stay strapped but limited to an inventory of one?
I’m sure I’d have some sort of opinion on how best to play the game if I’d spent more than… 15 minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to figure out what I was supposed to do. I shot a lot of aliens. I found a lot of collectible substances. But I did not find anything that allowed me to do more than shoot aliens and cram things in my pockets. There’s supposedly a treasure map to find? Yeah, I ain’t finding it.
There’s a chance that I might go back to Planet Zoldath at some point, but it’s pretty slim. Not the most slim, but I don’t fancy its odds. This isn’t a bad game as far as I care, but it’s just not a style that I’m interested in. You can tell because I’ve never once had any interest in so much as booting up a Star Tropics game.
Attactics
I think the first screenshot I ever saw of UFO 50 was of Attactics, and that’s largely why I didn’t take interest in it right away. Now that’s not to say that Attactics is bad or anything, but I definitely don’t think it looks appealing. There’s a field with characters of red and blue more or less populating each side. It kind of looks like a blocky, weirdo sports game. So you can see why I was repelled.
But in reality, Attactics is a fast-paced strategy game, where you need to place your units on the correct tracks to counter the enemy’s forces. First player to get three guys to the opposite wall wins. Is this what League of Legends is? While I likened it to sports before, this is actually a sort of low-tech war game, where you’re commanding knights and archers and… ninjas? Each is strong and weak against another unit type, and it’s your job to figure those relationships out.
I played what I guess was the main mode? I played a round, my rank increased, then I played another round, etc etc. I think I claimed about six victories before I lost, and at that point I decided that I’d had enough. Forever? Maybe, but not likely. I could go back and give Attactics another hour or so of effort, see if that gets me to the end. If not, then this one will probably get lost by the wayside. It’s engaging enough, but not as much as, say, any of the platformers.
Devilition
Devilition makes me think of Bug Hunter, but executed in a clearer and more enjoyable way. The game is a big grid filled with monsters that you need to kill, and you accomplish that by drawing random cards to play on the board. I guess that’s kind of where the similarities end.
Here, you’re actually banishing demons instead of squishing bugs. And rather than moving your own character around, you’re placing your own demons (I guess?) that will attack certain tiles around them, and you have to get them to chain react whilst removing all the hostile demons from the board. There are also a number of humans on the board, and your true goal is just to get the number of demons to less than humans. Though if you do kill all the demons, you get an additional human to (potentially) make the next stage easier.
Devilition is a very clever kind of puzzle game, and I have gotten into it a bit, but I don’t know if I like it enough to actually finish it. There are (at least) ten stages, and if you fail one it’s back to the beginning for you. It takes a lot of time and thought to get through any one stage, so having to successfully do ten in a row is honestly a little exhausting. I’d be 100% on board for getting to the end if there were at least a midway checkpoint.
And there you go: my initial impressions of the first ten games in the UFO 50 collection. They’re all over the place in terms of quality, but the good ones are very good, and even most of the bad ones aren’t that bad. Except for Bug Hunter. That game alone is going to be the reason I don’t get all the gold cartridges. But I’m still very much looking forward to seeing what all the rest of the games are like!
Will I be covering the rest of the games? Who knows!? Now that I’m at the end of this, it honestly required a lot more effort than I wanted to put in when I started. Getting screenshots is always a pain in the butt, even in the modern day when it’s easier than it’s ever been. And hey, if I never review the other 40 games, that’s just more reason for you to go out and support Mossmouth and buy UFO 50 yourself!