I think I might have a very good idea on what to do for a stream on Saturday. UFO 50 by Mossmouth (Derek Yu’s software house, best known for Spelunky) came out recently, and hoo-whee, is it ever a good time.
Let me correct myself: I have spent approximately five hours this evening playing one of the 50 games in UFO 50. The first one. I have an idea brewing for a video and/or article series covering each and every game in the mix, so I’ll save the specifics for when I kick that off, but suffice it to say for now that when they say this isn’t a collection of microgames or minigames, they really mean it.
Let’s back up a moment for those unfamiliar with UFO 50. It’s a project that has been on the cards for quite some time — and was delayed by the development and release of Spelunky 2 — but now it’s finally hit Steam. (Other platforms are apparently “TBC”, so it’s Steam or nothing for now.)
The concept behind it is that a hitherto-unknown game system from the ’80s has been discovered, and you’re taking a look at its library. Laid out in front of you are 50 disks for the system, each containing a game. It’s your job to play them, as much or as little as you want.
Each of the games is designed in part as if it was running on technology of the ’80s. That means low resolution pixel art, limited sound capabilities and a palette consisting of a whopping 32 possible colours. However, as a nod to modern accessibility, all of these games run in widescreen, which is something that wouldn’t have been possible on the CRTs of yore, and annoying limitations from real systems like sprite limits causing flickering and suchlike are omitted. Essentially what we have here is a collection of “enhanced retro” games — games like you want to remember the ’80s as being like, as opposed to what they actually were.
That said, the first game in the collection, Barbuta, which I’ve spent a lot of time on this evening, has very little in the way of sounds and is resolutely old-school in its punishing difficulty and deliberate obtuseness. I absolutely loved it because it feels like something you’d play on an ’80s 8-bit micro, but I would completely understand if anyone bounced off this one hard. In UFO 50 “lore”, this game dates back to 1982 and, outside of the deliberate enhancements mentioned above, it could absolutely pass for something from the period.
And no, there are no save states. If you want to beat one of these games, you have to do it as if you were using the real machine. That said, there is a mysterious “Terminal” function built in to UFO 50, which looks as if it might be the sort of thing you put Game Genie or Action Replay-style codes into, but I haven’t figured anything out about that as yet. I’m not sure anyone has, but I’m sure some turbonerd on the Steam forums will have datamined it and spoiled it for everyone by the weekend.
Anyway, from my experience with just one of its 50 games, I can highly recommend UFO 50 so far. It’s a fascinating way of looking at gaming history and the evolution of game design over time, plus simply a really interesting project. Making 50 worthwhile games and bundling them all together for just shy of 20 quid is quite an achievement, and the indie all-stars team behind it should be very pleased with what they have seemingly accomplished.
I’m looking forward to investigating further. I actually beat Barbuta after that five hours of playing and retrying this evening, so tomorrow I can move on to some of the other games! Looking forward to it a lot. And, as I said at the start, I think this seems like a great game to do some streaming with. So I will pencil it in for Saturday while my wife is out, and see how things go from there!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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