UFO 50

[one-armed dwarf]

I thought there might be a thread for this, but there isn't. So I'll be the one to make one for the weird indie game

 

Premise is you've got 50 games which are emulative of the style of 8bit to early 16bit era, all released by this fake company called 'Ufosoft' which shut down in the 90s. Games which are dungeon explorers, side scrolling beat em ups, weird puzzlers where you're a chameleon blending into tiles, a kinda horse betting game. Game where you hop around platforms kicking soccerballs at things. A platformer all about suiciding yourself. Apparently there's a full 20 hour classic FF style turn based RPG in there, and an Ultima style first person dungeon crawler. Lots of weird shit

 

The games are hard. You have to actually learn them, it ain't Warioware. Naturally, as an impatient person, I'm full of salt and rage at some of it. But it is interesting, the games get more sophisticated and better to control over the 'years'. Eg, pick up the final game they released, Cyber Owls, which is a beat-em-up that 'released' in 1989, and compare it to Fist Hell from 1987. Similar mechanics but more intuitive movement and faster gameplay. Also some of the games have couch multiplayer. 

 

 

Some of the games are good, some seem crap though like the weird egg dungeon crawler at the beginning where they kill you for walking right. I don't have much history with this era of gaming but it's been talked up a whole lot this year so after enjoying Balatro so much that it's potential GOTY for me I thought I'd try to expand my horizons on here. So maybe I bump this later way more keen on it, or someone else might find it interesting. I did find this one potentially interesting title, Bug Hunter (1984), which is this strategic kinda turn based bomberman game you see below where you have to kill bugs. I think the idea is to find your niche and get comfortable with a few familiar games first before branching out into the more scary ones (which for me, are platformers. Fuck man, great way to get me tilted 😠)

 

 

Very original idea for a game, but fuck I bet it took a shitload of work to get 50 of them. Some are a bit more throaway like the camoflague gecko game though so maybe there's some sensible overlap that they achieve when implementing them

 

This seems to just be Windows currently, but you could probably play it on any old machine. Definitely expect to see it on Switch eventually

[spatular]

This looks interesting, think I will get it at some point, apparently one of the games plays a bit like into the breach so I might like that one, sort of think I won’t like most of the games though as I’m not so into games this “old”

[one-armed dwarf]

I think it plays a little loosey-goosey with the period specificness of it, it's more like a lot of indie games which sort of fetishize this era while giving a bit of a spin on it but it won't be like playing an actual 8bit or 16bit game. Particularly cause it's all wide aspect ratio, but I think the rate at which the screen visuals get updated is also a bit generous

 

I think though the dungeon crawler at the start is specifically designed to be annoying and to make you want to fuck it off, like there's an element of "eat your vegetables, you impatient child" about some of it where you're like "no, fuck off, I'll play the cool beat em up instead". Maybe later I'll eat the veggies though. 

 

It's a shame there doesn't seem to be an online co-op thing with it cause I could use the help clobbering people in some of the games, but I guess that fucks with the purity of what they're doing here. 

 

Forgot to mention that each game also has a little bit of history attached to it, so there's a background story to discern to the game's creation. There's also a terminal in each game to input codes, but I've no idea what that does yet. I guess its discovery is going to be a big deal. 

 

On Bug Hunt, I got past the first job once but exited out and went back in and lost my progress. Tried again and got to the final 'day' of job 1 but the bugs got me. Shit's fucking hard man, wonder how many jobs there are and how much harder it is. Fist Hell is also brutally difficult and I can't get past the first stage. Gotta learn some tech I guess, grabbing an enemy on low health and piledriving them seems to knock enemies back, or you can throw them across the screen. It's kinda crazy that this is just one game of many, and it demands such careful studying of animations, recovery, movement (double tap to side step and sprint) and commitment. It's why you probably don't wan to burn out and spread yourself too thin on too many games cause they require a deep look and not just a quick glance. But I also just wonder if it's built to be played by two players. Again, online play would be neat. Perhaps there's a way with a mod on PC, who knows.

 

In the meantime I'm also plugging away at Camouflage (1985), which is actually a bit more than I expected. Enemies have patrols, you have to do your MGS4 Solid Snake thing and acquire the right pattern but also know when to do 'pure' stealth, it's a pretty interesting puzzler when Fist Hell has me feeling like hell has punched me with.. its fist, or something. I guess that's the idea with all the genres, if you hit a wall with one you can switch it up

[one-armed dwarf]

I "beat" my first game in this, Bushido Ball (1985). I'll say again, these games are hard and you really have to develop the patience and skill with it and not treat them as throwaway minigames, even if some of them are very short. As far as I know, each game also has an additional completion component, like winning without continues. I think that's beyond me but maybe over the long term I knock a few off

 

You can do cool things in this game, if you hit the edge of the ball while rolling you can put a spin on it. You have a meter for trickshots, special abilities to put different properties on the ball. My guy forces a QTE on the opponent, this asshole just cheats basically and has the ball move perpendicular. You can throw shurikens at your opponent which can be parried back and forth, which is something they should introduce to real tennis, then I might watch it.

 

I think next I'm going to try and find a slower paced turn-based kinda game, or puzzler. These action games are v. stressful 😓

 

I took this with the steam recording feature but it seems very buggy, skipping frames and missing sound effects (I turned the BGM off cause it was getting repetitive). It runs at 60fps so it's much smoother than this

 

 

Next I will play an RPG or something turn based

[one-armed dwarf]

Valbrace (1988) is very frustrating. Moments before disaster

 

 

But I rebounded from this and got to floor 2, now I have a longsword and have levelled my STR up by 2 and WIS up by 1, tho I'm finding myself stamina starved as a result. Thankfully the game is merciful in giving you in between checkpoints for each floor, but you can spend hours 'figuring it out'. Valbrace is a 'figuring it out' game. Echoes of Daggerfall and Dark Souls, well those are my reference points anyway. Others might say Ultima but I don't know for sure

 

I'm worried about giving too much away about these games, so I'm calling these 'soft' spoilers. 

 

Spoiler

It's a first person dungeon crawler RPG with motion controls, stamina system like Dark Souls. Real time combat. You strafe left and right, can do quarter circle motions to dodge left/right and punish, you input sort of 'runes' like in Ark Fatalis where you find the design of the rune in dungeons and memorise it in real life to heal, do pierce damage, read maps, open hidden doors, some other stuff. Every floor has a checkpoint but they are long and every movement is a 'turn', which counts towards enemies respawning and finding you.

 

There's other oddities in there. I notice in the info it says it came with a big book of hints, that you of course don't get here. This is clearly the game having a sense of humour with its punishing way of teaching you how you're supposed to approach certain things. It takes a while to accumulate all its little details and secrets. I notice a pattern with these games where they're borderline hostile to get into but if you can push through the impatience and 🧂then you will find that the rules of the game settle on each other in pleasing ways.

 

It's simple on the surface but punishing with how the time/turn system works, dickhead stuff like making healing fountains poisonous and the ways in which different enemy compositions can stack and pressure you and demand careful enemy prioritisation. Git gud, it says 🧂

 

Can't tell if UFO 50 is amazing or not. Sometimes I want to uninstall it, other times I'm wondering if it gets a VGA nom

[one-armed dwarf]

Valbrace is kicking my ass way too fucking hard, so it's time for an 'ultimate' 4 dinosaur party to cool off 🦖🦖🦖🦖🥳

 

 

Valbrace will be a long term thing in between the other games. Pure bento box variety, this game is

[one-armed dwarf]

I got the gold in that party game, the deck builder one above in the screenshot, Party House. It's no Balatro but I got way into it and it's one of many ideas on the collection that could spin off into a full fledged title. Valbrace will be on ice for a bit, it's pretty unforgiving and I think I need to tackle it with a clean save and do some grinding on floor 1 to be more quickly ready for floor 2. So before I do that I've putzed around in different genres, tried schmups out. There's one on there called Caramel Caramel which is just unforgiving. It's the most skill driven thing I've tried on the collection. I don't play these types of games, my eyes get very dry and blink a lot so trying to take it all in is hell but I do feel slightly micro improvements and mental stack accumulation on each little try I do, so I think I can overcome it. Mechanics spoilers

Spoiler

You're a little plane guy and you have a camera that freeze frames enemies and gives you points, and you recharge your camera as you shoot and collect things. There's secrets in the level you can photo for bonuses, as well as moving obstacles which can also be frozen. Anyway, this little game for babies is kicking the shit out of me

 

Between that, I've been plugging away at Pilot Quest, which is this sorta Zelda game but with a yoyo instead of a sword and

Spoiler

with an interesting idle mechanic where NPCs gather resources for you. It's meant to be interwoven with other games, the idea being the system's internal clock calculates the rate of accumulation for you and you upgrade your things and buy meat to venture forth out into the world, where your health is represented by a ticking clock

It's really clever, tho not a huge fan of the game itself, moreso just cool how it integrates with the thing as a whole. 

 

I'm getting way better at Bug Hunter. The strategies are locking in and I can get to job 3 reliably and stomp on bugs and push them into holes. Job 3 gets you the gold (which means just 'beating' the game) and I think 7 gets you the 'cherry', which is UFO's sort of take on a game's "Platinum". Bug Hunter might be my favorite game on the system. I've an eye on some of the other strategy games on the collection to see how they 'evolve' over time. I feel like the idea here is you slowly develop skills with each type of game improve you on a holistic level that carries across titles. Not every title is a winner though. There's a turn based RPG called Grimrock. It's NES style, which is an era of RPG I find kinda hateful. So it's more of a curio than something I think I can really sink into. I also think Fist Hell maybe sucks, I've seen that sentiment elsewhere. The way your character moves and recovers, I dunno it's not great feeling. There's something about the input acceptance in some games which feels a bit off to me, but this might be a problem with my controller as well. I usually just go with keyboard but not for this

 

There's another odd one on there called Night Manor which is a sorta point and click thing set in the REVII house. In a vaccuum, it's not an amazing game, but it's such an effective palette cleanser from the more intense arcade games on the collection. Which is kinda the idea here, it oddly reminds me of FFVII Rebirth in how there's all these different attractions to check out. Some long, some quick, some requiring reflexes and some are more thinky. New strategies to theorycraft, muscle memory to develop. Some stuff might have you take out a pen and graph paper to write down floor plans for a dungeon crawler, or directional inputs for spells. Some you will click with, others you certainly will not and knowing when to put something down is a crucial skill in itself. Though even then there's the possibility of some stuff opening your mind to things you would otherwise not consider trying, just by its inclusion here. The discovery of things like that is what might make you want to stick around

 

Until Fist Hell makes you fuck the whole thing off altogether. It's definitely a very bounce-offable game cause of its difficulty as well

 

I'm going to zero in on Barbuta and try to figure that shit out. It's a game that's so mean it's perverted, and I want to get into the nerdiness of drawing the map out on graph paper and taking notes on what order to do stuff in 🤓