Block Koala in UFO 50 shoulda been pitched as a Big Bell Race sequel because of how often the solution is to make the star block do a full circuit around the whole level
Watching the very first fully verified Mooncat (from UFO 50) two-player speedrun, and its quality is beyond what I could have possibly imagined https://youtu.be/uoseNb5gWkA
Hey, I have some very large questions to ask about the "level sharing codes" system for Block Koala, in UFO 50… questions like "could someone please explain run-length encoding to them at the very LEAST"
I'd just shunned Magic Garden for almost a week and then smacked the icon and got the 20K win achievement first try… Silver bells and cockle shells have got nothing on me.
Elsewhere in UFO 50, Party House just decided to hand me the five-wins achievement on a platter by dealing out Social Climber, Grillmaster AND Athlete in the same seed. A lot of phone numbers got jacked in prestige at those shindigs, let me tell you.
Having encountered a few of UFO 50's secret messages, I started to notice a pattern (mainly, that they seemingly always appear in the first 10 mins of the game) and now I'm trying arbitrary stuff to summon them out-of-order. I just found Block Koala's message by doing this (lol)
Biggest bugbear I have with the game is that I strongly think it should have been the "ant game", or at least another ant game - the whole sacrifice theme to me makes way more sense (and is significantly less on-the-nose) with ants than humans.
To me Mortol 1 is the most "what Action 52's games were supposed to look like" game in UFO 50, in terms of colour scheme, theming and overall composition.
I think the big reason Magic Garden is so well regarded is because of how it loosely resembles shmup scoring: the potions being "bombs", having to manage the tension between "score bombs" and using them for safety, and carefully managing enemies to maximise score bombs.
Goddamnit
By the way, I didn't look up any of the game's rules, so I only vaguely recognise the different potion colours have different mult and timers, and that collecting one potion while under the effects of another potion *seemingly* increases mult…
Magic Garden is pretty finicky and difficult…… still, maybe not a terrible score for my first 1h30m.
The UFO 50 soundtrack was released, so now you can enjoy my personal late-night talk show guest entrance theme https://phlogiston.bandcamp.com/track/mini-max-book
For the record, Miracle Ropit's Adventure in 2100 (Micronics, 1987) would absolutely definitely be a UFO 50 game, if it ran at 60FPS instead of 10, and if most of the reasons for losing a life were good instead of highly dubious
Not sure how to describe this, but Planet Zoldath in UFO 50 has "Micronics energy"
Barbuta should have been worse. It should have gone full Mario Maker troll level. Fake floor over spikes. Ladder that grows upward when you climb so you can't get off. Shop that exits to a fake copy of the room you were in. Invisible teleporter to the same fake floor over spikes.
Remembering the feuding title screens in the Short Order + Eggsplode multi-cart… real Famicom Disk System start screen vibes. Imagine this with all fifty UFO 50 title screens
I know it doesn't /really/ matter since the team is all Derek's pals, but it still feels like his reputation benefits from this in noted disproportion to the rest.
This is also rather ironic for me because the ones Derek verifiably directed are mostly my least favourite (lol)
My latest UFO 50 opinion is that the framing-story developer pseudonyms in each game's credits are bad because of how effectively they muddy which people on the team actually designed each game, resulting in uncurious gamers assuming or acting like Derek Yu did most of it.
Just realised you can savescum UFO 50 arcade games' streak achievements fully in-game by simply copying your entire UFO 50 profile to a different slot and then copying it back afterwards, but have decided to virtuously not do this out of the goodness and sugariness of my heart.
Me a few days ago: "UFO 50 is reawakening my game making spirit… The zeitgeist is turning… I need to return to webgame coding immediately…"
Me, today, after spending 4 hours debugging non-axis-aligned hitbox separation code: "Ahhhh, just like oooooooooold times."
If you think UFO 50 having fifty games is hot, wait until System Erasure releases their own anthology which, in reference to their favourite number, contains zero games
One game I'm especially being reminded of is Xoo: Xeno Xafari, from the Megallenium cart (https://willyelektrix.itch.io/1999megallennium, made in OHRRPGCE).
UFO 50 is reminding me of a lot of retro games for the first time in years… not just NES games like Magical Doropie or Xexyz or Over Horizon, but freeware like Princess Remedy or Poyo… Games with that same "faintly alien" theming, and simple-but-characteristic game mechanics…
The funniest part of only loving two games in UFO 50 is that when I tune into a stream of it, there's only a 4% chance they'll actually be playing something I want to watch
In addition, the only real-world developer that comes to mind that vaguely resembles this kind of output is Compile… though even then, you have to check the early 90s to see their broadest genre spread.
(Though, they did make the most UFO 50-ish NES game, The Guardian Legend…)
I think it's funny when people say UFO 50 embodies "the spirit of the NES", when to me the only real-world "console" that vaguely lines up with this eclectic mix of genres is the MSX.
Like, the menu icons are floppy disks and not cartridges for a reason.
I think in retrospect the one thing that makes UFO 50 "work" isn't actually anything to do with how the games are designed, but just the graphical/audio unification across all of them - the "fantasy console" conceit.
That, by itself, lends a certain credibility to all the games. Making all the games look and sound like they belong together makes you more open-hearted to giving them all a chance.
It's like how the PICO-8 is so beloved, even though its limitations are practically hellish.
THIS IS THE PLOT OF ZERORANGER
Everyone is celebrating the hard-to-control "Moon Cat", from UFO 50… and yet, NO ONE is celebrating the hard-to-control "Slug Cat", from Rain World…………………… I see how it is…………
Gonna post game footage and label it "Wow UFO 50 is going bananas right now" and see how long it takes people to realise it's actually the card game from the Shovel Knight DLC
Any%
Troubling how so many are rushing to play "UFO 50"… when they could simply play Undefined Fantastic Object fifty times…
When Mario taunts in Super Smash Bros.
The games do seem good, but… I think the framing story, fake 1980s creation dates, and so on, is kind of misrepresenting them. This is really not trying to rival the Game Center CX games's fidelity to the era's design trends or play experience.
I actually did try UFO 50, and it's making an above-expectations impression so far. I've played one game that on face value looks just like Little Nemo: The Dream Master but which is actually Uurnog Uurnlimited.