Since UFO 50’s release, I’ve had a few Thoughts. Firstly, UFO 50 is one of the most noteworthy interactive creative projects ever put together. Secondly, there are a lot of (obviously) young people who really Do Not Get It and, in that inimitably entitled way 21st century gamers do, they think it should change entirely to accommodate how they think it “should” be.
Aside: I’m covering UFO 50 both on MoeGamer and on YouTube. Check out here for the written articles, and here for the video versions of the articles. You can also enjoy the whole playlist embedded below.
A significant portion of the “unrest”, if you want to call it that, comes from Barbuta being the first game in the collection. Barbuta is, as you’ll know if you’ve read or watched my piece on it, a game that is ostensibly from 1982, and which follows the mould of the “arcade adventure”, a genre of game that doesn’t really exist any more, but which was a major part of the ’80s home computer scene.
In the “lore” of UFO 50, which, if you’re unfamiliar, concerns a completely fictional games console known as the LX System, Barbuta was the first game to be developed — and by an individual who had never made a game before, no less. Consequently, it’s janky, slow and unrefined — deliberately so. The nature of how it is janky, slow and unrefined makes it very clear that Derek Yu and the various other developers who put UFO 50 together are intimately familiar with ’80s home computer games — but it also sets expectations for the rest of UFO 50 accordingly.
One of the most significant things about UFO 50 is that it is, in part, a demonstration of how game design can be inherently intuitive. None of the games feature full instructions beyond their basic controls and sometimes a little bit of in-game information text, and yet they’re all designed in such a way that you can figure things out without too much difficulty. In Barbuta’s case, the main challenge comes from determining what all the items you can collect actually do — because the game certainly doesn’t tell you.
But here’s the key thing: it all makes sense. It’s easy to determine what all the items do, either by logical deduction or simply observing what happens on-screen. And this is true not just for Barbuta, but also for pretty much all of the other games in the collection, too. You just have to use your brain a bit.
This isn’t enough for some “gamers” though. There’s a guy on UFO 50’s Steam forums spamming pretty much every thread he can find about how he believes the games are a “joke”, that it’s “not funny” and that the package as a whole is a “scam”. There are others complaining about Barbuta as if it’s the only game in the collection, refusing to even contemplate trying any of the other 49 that are available. And there are those who simply do not get it.
UFO 50 is a work of art with something to say. It’s an acknowledgement both of how rapidly game design evolved over the course of the 1980s, and how modern ideas can be applied to these classic formulae to give them a fresh new twist. Demanding that it change to better fit the needs of attention-deficit zoomers is entirely missing the point. These are games that are supposed to be tricky and perhaps not immediately clear, because that’s what games from the ’80s were actually like — but dig into things just a little deeper and you’ll discover that every single game is inherently fair in a way that only 40 years of evolving game design can manage.
What you have to remember is that when real ’80s games came out, they had nothing to refer to on how to do it “right” — and some of them got things what we could consider “wrong” by modern standards. What UFO 50 does is take the conventions of these ’80s games, eliminate the things that just flat-out don’t work, and gives you a collection of titles that feel authentically retro, but also completely fair and modern in their execution. There’s no moon logic, no inconsistent behaviour, no technical shortcomings making things harder through no fault of the player.
In short, it’s a work of genius. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that some people don’t get it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be frustrated that there are people who want to deface it with mods. Perhaps I should just enjoy it myself, and screw the people who don’t understand.
Yes. That sounds like a good approach. I’ll keep doing that. Please enjoy my series of articles and videos on each and every game!
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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