UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games for a fictional games company named UFO Soft. I’m told it’s a period piece of oldschool NES-era games, though I’m not exactly what a period piece is exactly. Just finished playing 25 of the 50 games in UFO 50! As expected, I didn’t really like most of them but I did appreciate certain elements of certain games.
While streaming, I also ranked the games with a UFO 50 template on tiermaker.com:
| Rank | Games |
|---|---|
| S | - |
| A | Avianos (#12), Seaside Drive (#48), The Big Bell Race (#19), Velgress (#7) |
| B | Pingolf (#31), Night Manor (#42), Mini & Max (#45), Camouflage (#16), Attactics (#9), Block Koala (#15), Valbrace (#37) |
| C | Magic Garden (#5), Cyber Owls (#50), Rail Heist (#28), Star Waspir (#39), Party House (#25) |
| D | Mortol (#6), Warptank (#20), Bushido Ball (#14), Mooncat (#13) |
| F | Mortol II (#32), Campanella 3 (#49), Porgy (#22), Barbuta (#1), Onion Delivery (#23) |
Some of the games I disliked the most also had controls that I found frustrating to use. For example, Onion Delivery had wildly swingy and bouncy driving, Warptank used absolute movement controls instead of relative controls which I found extremely confusing, and Mooncat had bizarre movement controls.
In general, I found many of the games to be outside of my difficulty tolerances, which prevented me from finding enjoyment in the game. For example, Porgy involved a lot of backtracking through dangerous environments which I often died in without making progress (which reminded me of Hollow Knight), Barbuta had you walk around really slowly without really giving many clues as to how to progress, and games like Cyber Owls, Star Waspir, and Mortol were simply too difficult for me. Generally, platformers were quite difficult for me to play.
The games I liked tended to be non-platforming games:
- Avianos reminds me of engine-building board games that I enjoy playing. However, it feels like most of the strategy is chalked up to rushing your opponent as quickly as possible.
- Seaside Drive reminds of LUFTRAUSER which, while difficult, I find quite entertaining because it’s just fun to blow shit up.
- The Big Bell Race has physics which makes finding the optimal racing line interesting.
- Velgress is really hard, but it reminds me of Downwell in its snappy and rewarding gameplay.
Some notable things in other games include:
- Night Manor: I thought the shaking of the cursor when the antagonistic monster was on screen, was a great way to communicate the character’s terror to the player.
- Magic Garden: I really liked the cute art in this one.