We’re on UFO 50 kick here, there’s so many nice games in there, and of such a wide variety. And that starts right off with the first game in the set, Barbuta, a simple but mysterious platformer.
I suggest walking one tile to the right, then immediately restarting the game. You’ll see why.
Barbuta is made in an old school style, and it’s rough, although short. You get seven lives, instead of the one a really old game might give you, but there are no continues. The very first screen contains a death trap. It’s the kind that you won’t fall for more than once, but it teaches an important lesson: pay attention to the terrain. Anything that looks unusual, different from its surroundings, could be important, or deadly.
Rather than tell you of my findings, which might not be too useful since, while I’ve gotten some ways in, I haven’t finished it yet, I present a Youtube walkthrough from sylvie (32 minues). If you just need a nudge you could just watch a few minutes, until you find something that gets you unstuck. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
As previously reported, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 solid games made by Spelunky creator Derek Yu and a number of collaborators over eight years. It costs $25 and is very much worth it. It invents a fictional game console maker and studio called UFO Soft, and also an elaborate backstory around the games’ construction. It contains a Little Computer People-like garden animation that expands as you play, and even a cheat terminal that no doubt hides many secrets to be found. Half the games even have local multiplayer.
Pilot Quest’s title screen
Many of the games in UFO 50 are deep enough that they could have been released on their own. One of them is Game #44, Pilot Quest, which is a nice little mixture of action-adventure exploration and idle game mechanics.
It stars Pilot, a character who appears in several other games in UFO 50. Pilot’s first game in the company’s fictional sequence is Planet Zoldath, where he must survive a weird and randomly-generated world. Pilot helms the Campanella, a cute little red spaceship that has a problem with crashing, and that also appears in several games. Pilot’s sister, Isabelle, is another recurring presence in UFO 50. Pilot’s the head of his own little invented franchise, UFO Soft’s version of Mario.
UFO 50’s title screen makes evident that Pilot and Isabell are a big deal (names here added by me)
There aren’t many easy games in UFO 50, and Pilot Quest is challenging, but because it’s partly an idle game, you can make progress even when you’re not playing. If you have trouble with the Wild Area, you can close the game for a while and come back when your garden and alien friends have generated more resources for you. (Sometimes. I’ve found that sometimes the feature’s a bit buggy. But if you leave UFO 50 running you seem to earn resources at the right speed, even if you’re playing a different game in the collection.)
But how does all that work out? Well, I’ve prepared a bit of a guide here, to help get you started playing this, one of UFO 50’s deeper games….
This is the game we’re talking about here. The others will have to wait until later. About 12 hours later, which is how long a standard first play of Pilot Quest requires.
Getting Underway
After a cutscene that shows the Campanella getting struck by an asteroid, you’ll be left on the surface of the plane in an area we’ll call Camp. Talk to the characters to learn a bit more about what’s happening, but the most important thing here is the big spinning diamond. That’s called the Moon Crystal. It’s an inexhaustible supply of Moon Drops, the first of the game’s several resources. Moon Drops aren’t very valuable in general, but they can get you on your way to collecting the most important resource, Moon Ingots.
The Moon Crystal. You will come to hate it.
Every strike of the Moon Crystal with your basic combat Yo-Yo will generate one Moon Drop. (Did Pilot get his yo-yo from Mikey from The Goonies II, Mike from Startropics, or Ness from Earthbound?) Moon Drops don’t automatically go to your inventory: you must step close enough to collect them, so if you don’t move around once in a while you’ll miss out on some of them.
1,000 (yes, with three zeroes!) can be converted into one Moon Ingot. But once in a while the Moon Crystal will drop a Moon Ingot at random. This is pretty nice when it happens at the start of the game! More likely though you’ll have to grind Drops for a bit. If you talk to the tree in the upper-left of the camp area, you can pay an increasing number of Moon Drops to grow plants that will automatically generate Drops for you. At first though their rate is very slow. It’s best to buy the first two upgrades when you can, but save the third for after you’ve got your first Moon Ingot. You can’t have a whole lot of most resources, including Moon Drops, until you’ve expanded your storage a bit, which needs Ingots.
Your Moon Drop Garden
But the first upgrade you can buy, the Hunter’s Shack, only costs one Ingot. It’s an important upgrade, because it gives you a free Meat, and after a bit of time generates more Meat that you can buy for 500 Drops. In Camp, really the only things you can do with Drops is buy Drop-making plants, convert them into Ingots, and buy Meat with them, so there’s not a lot of reason to focus on Drops unless you’re desperate for Meat.
With Meat, you’ll be able to explore the Wild Area, which is the main focus of your efforts. In order to win, you’ll need three Ship Parts that are hidden in dungeons in the Wild Area. But you won’t be able to get them for a while, because each hunk of Meat only gives you 120 seconds to explore it! You can use more Meat at once for more time, and in fact you’re forced to use all the Meat you have whenever you enter the Wild Area, but at the start you only have one Meat, and can only carry up to five anyway.
Part of the Wild Area
The Wild Area is a much better place to collect many resources than Camp. In Camp, you have to save up 1,000 Drops to get an Ingot or rely on a rare event; in the Wild Area, they’re common drops from enemies! You’ll want to explore the Wild Area as much as you can, meaning you’ll want lots of Meat, and fortunately Meat also appears fairly often there.
Like most of the games in UFO 50, there is no supplied manual, and little in the way of instructions, so the rules of the Wild Area aren’t clearly communicated. Here they are:
To keep anything you find in the Wild Area, you must exit it before time runs out. If you don’t, then all your effort is wasted. It’s always better to leave with something than nothing.
The timer is your health. When you take damage from enemies, shots or hazards, it comes out of your time. Most enemies drain the clock of 30 seconds when they hit you. Ouch!
Hit enemies with your Yo-Yo to damage them. Most enemies take from three to ten hits to kill.
Enemies drop random resources when killed. There are also jars and skulls you can find that give you resources when broken. Treasure chests drop a whole lot!
This isn’t so important on your first playthrough, but will become evident if you try to load a video walkthrough: while the map is the generally the same each game, some routes are randomly blocked, forcing you to explore by different means each game. The contents of the caves you find in the Wild Area are also shuffled on each playthrough.
This game randomization only happens at the start of play: each exploration of the Wild Area doesn’t reshuffle the maze, so if you find a useful nearby cave on one expedition, you can rely upon it until you win the game; if you choose to start over then (Pilot Quest has a New Game+ mode), then you’ll have to learn new routes, and rediscover what’s in the caves.
Another part of the Wild Area
The map isn’t the only way Pilot Quest wields randomness against you. The tricky thing about the Wild Area is that most of the enemies have of a lot of randomness in their movement and attacks. Your Yo-Yo only has a short range, so you have to get close to the monsters to hit them, and it’s easy for one to suddenly decide to bump into you or shoot. You can mitigate this somewhat by trying to attack them kind of on a diagonal, but there’s really no way to completely avoid damage. You should always be aware of how much time you’ll need to get back to Camp.
This will risk becoming a full walkthrough if I don’t stop myself here, so I’ll leave you with a few tips:
Whenever possible, you want to use Meat found in the Wild Area to fund your next trip into its depths. Meat drops randomly, but treasure chests and strong enemies generate it fairly frequently.
Once you have more Ingots, you can build housing for friendly aliens, who will help out if you build them workbenches. All of this costs Ingots, but they can generate more Ingots for you over time.
When exploring the Wild Zone, there is a tendency to try to push your timer as far as you can. Resist this urge, especially if it involves fighting monsters. Every monster type has enough randomness in its movement and attacks that it could ding you at nearly any time, and the less time you have left, the more a 30 second penalty will hurt. Remember: run out of time, and you lose everything you collected, and all the Zoldnarks you had whether you collected them that trip or not.
Pilot’s Quest really isn’t that hard once you’ve built up your Camp a bit. Eventually you can carry up to 25 chunks of Meat, enough for 50 minutes of exploration, more than enough time to clear out the whole map in one run if you don’t take much damage.
It’s possible to gain more time while in the Wild.
The dungeons have more than just your ship parts. There are secret passages you can walk through to find lots of resources.
By completing a subquest in the Wild Area (check the caves), you can get a gun! It takes Moon Drops to fire it, but it makes enemies a lot easier to deal with.
There’s a miniboss in the area north of the entrance that can tear you up if you’re unprepared, but there’s a trick to beating it.
The dungeon layouts also change with each play, but not much.
Somewhere in the Wild Area (different each game) is a Gear that’s essential to bring back to Camp, in order to start generating Science.
There’s a spider miniboss that you should defeat once you start building up substantial amounts of Meat, that unlocks a new resource when you beat it.
A new and dangerous monster appears in the Wild Area when you get two ship pieces. You don’t have to pursue it to win the game, and since it’ll probably involve exploring the whole place several times in one Wild Area run and fighting it several times you’ll want a full tank of Meat to even try. Beating it is involved in the extra “Cherry” goal for Pilot Quest.
One of the game’s three dungeons
To win the game, you’ll need to collect all three Ship Parts, and to build the Ship Fuel. Fuel costs 1,000 Ingots and 1,000 Science. That is literally all you need to win, but it can help accelerate your progress to build other items too.
Once you win the game, in short order Pilot will crash again, starting you over from scratch. However, on subsequent playthroughs, there will be a trio of statues by the tree in the upper-left of Camp. You can buy one upgrade there per trip through the game, that can make playing through again easier, or faster, in different ways. Try them out, if you want to risk another trip through the wilds of Planet Zoldath.
Everything’s day-glo on Planet Zoldath
If you want to watch someone’s first-time, unspoiled playthrough of Pilot Quest (which itself eventually spoils the whole game), here’s Val1407’s 12 hour playthrough, full of drama and suffering:
Ghosttown Pumpkin Festival, a free itch.io game that we reported on last year, has returned! Install it, apply the easy-to-use tools to carve a randomly-generated pumpkin, then upload it to the servers for everyone to look at and vote on! The servers stay up until mid-November, so you have lots of time to construct and show your work. While it’s free, you can spend $2 for a version that will let your ghost avatar wear a hat of their choice.
While you can upload pumpkins whenever, if the festival display fills up you might end up having your pumpkin shunted into an alternate town shard, so if you want more people to behold your work (and despair?), you’ll want to complete your Jack-O-Project soon.
To place your pumps, enter the festival, press Escape to choose the “dimension” you want for it, then explore for a bit with the WASD keys. When you’ve found a good spot for it press Escape again and click the pumpkin icon to select which of your saved creations to place. The spots where your orange gourdfriends can reside show up as gray dots.
Create something cool, and tell us about it here, if you feel like it!
Recently I’ve been working on a getting-started guide on what I think is one of the most interesting games in UFO 50, Pilot Quest. (Other games I’ve really enjoyed, though I’ve by no means tried every game in the collection yet: Magic Garden, Waldorf’s Journey, Planet Zoldath, Attactics, Kick Club, Onion Delivery, Porgy, Valbrace, Grimstone and Mini & Max.)
Guides take time, so in the meantime here’s an hour-long talk by Ed Logg on the creation of Gauntlet, from GDC 2012!
While there were games with aspects of Rogue before it conquered university Unix systems, like Beneath Apple Manor, Rogue still deserves its status as the namesake of the roguelikes. Its great popularity on campuses inspired a slew of expansions and variations.
The world of early roguelikes wavers in its documentation and preservation. There’s several early roguelikes that are nearly unplayable today: the Roguelike Restoration Project (their site appears to have returned to the internet in 2022) has tried to preserve them but its manager has time constraints. I know that Herb Chong, who created a variant called UltraRogue, is still around, and has expressed interest in getting the code running again, but it’s a difficult project, not the least reason for being that the original game saved games by creating and reloading raw chunks of memory. (Roguelike Restoration Project put the original source up here if anyone wants to take a crack at it.)
Several versions of UltraRogue, as well as many versions of Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super Rogue, XRogue, and others, can be found on The Rogue Archive. Playing some of them might be difficult, but the code is there, sometimes in object form, sometimes as source. It preserves the code for Rog-O-Matic, the computer program that, itself, plays Rogue. You can even find more obscure variations of Rogue there, like HexRogue (which has become unplayable on its home site since Java support for browsers was abandoned), zRogue (an implementation for the Infocom zMachine), PalmOS versions, something called Advanced SuperTurbo Rogue Plus, and more.
I’ve always maintained my affection for Rogue, even if in the eyes of many it’s deficient in features these days. But that means it’s short, it won’t consume weeks of your free time to finish it, while it’s also complex enough to maintain interest, and challenging enough that it’ll take a while to master. If, in this Year of our Frog 2024, you haven’t tried Rogue yet, well, why not? You’ll probably die, but in the end, that’s better odds than real life!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Prepare to get the Balatro music stuck in your head all over again, but with the Mother 3 “soundfont,” a word that I’m not thrilled with. I don’t hate it, it’s just that there’s already good ways to refer to that concept, like “instrument set.” Ah. Oh well. Anyway. Here it is. (4 minutes – wait, the Balatro music is only four minutes long?)
I had a car accident last night, and while it could have been much worse in retrospect, I’m still pretty shaken. So for today, let’s just relax and watch Twinbeard, who had been playing through every level and finding every goal, finally reach the end of Super Mario World. (18 minutes) Whew.
Nicole Express is so knowledgable. How many blog posts have you seen about an obscure hardware issue, itself with obscure hardware, and the Japanese version of one specific cult game? Which the writer tested herself with her own unit and cartridge? Then went in to investigate herself with a freaking multimeter? Whaaa?
Nicole’s two Twin Famicoms
I won’t keep you waiting for the link: here it is. And here is my grossly simplified summary, intended to inspire you to go to the original article, if you have the time, and get all the deets.
Guardic Gaiden, known in the US as The Guardian Legend, uses a weird trick to put its status bar at the bottom of the screen, instead of, as usually seen in an UNROM game, at the top. To create a fixed status window requires stopping whatever the processor is doing at a very precise time while the display is being drawn to the TV, and then changing some PPU registers to display the status.
Guardic Gaiden’s title screen
More complex and versatile mappers, like the MMC family, have the ability to trigger interrupts at specific screen lines, but Guardic Gaiden/Guardian Legend doesn’t use an MMC. It doesn’t even have a raster line counter, so the game simply doesn’t know where on screen the raster beam is drawing.
There are still lots of games on the system that have status windows, even with MMC chips. The PPU has a built-in feature called Sprite 0 Hit, where the chip can signal when Sprite 0 (of the system’s 64 sprites) is being drawn on top of non-transparent background data. So what older games commonly do is put Sprite 0 in an unobtrusive place at the bottom of the status window at the top of the screen. When the Sprite 0 Hit register indicates a collision, the code knows it’s time to set up the PPU to display the main portion of the game screen.
There is a really big problem with this setup, though. Sprite 0 Hit doesn’t trigger an interrupt. It doesn’t stop the code to let it switch the graphics. It’s not even proper to say it “sends a signal.” It’s up to the code to check if Sprite 0 Hit has been triggered. If it has, then it’s time to set the scroll register to the right place, and maybe switch to the proper background tileset, and do whatever else needs to happen, and the code can then be off to run essential game logic, the actual game part of the game.
If it hasn’t… then, the code has to check again, and immediately. And if it hasn’t triggered then, to do it again. It has to literally check as quickly as it can, because if it delays in its check, the game screen might not get set up at the right moment, which will be perceptible as the bar straying down one extra line that one frame. Not the end of the world, but it looks glitchy. And this code will be running every frame, so if it strays down once, it might do it again, which is a more perceptible glitchiness.
Sprite 0 is set to trigger its hit at the top of the screen, because the code won’t have to spin its wheels checking the hit over and over. It wastes time, but not that much. This is why UNROM games put their status lines, with the score, timer, health bar and life counters, at the top of the screen.
Well, The Guardian Legend is an UNROM game, and maybe because creators Compile wanted to show off, they decided they’d put the bar at the bottom of the screen. And yet, their game doesn’t waste most of each frame just in maintaining the status bar.
How? And what does that have to do with the Twin Famicom? For that I’m going to direct you to Nicole Express’ blog post. May you find it as fascinating as I did!
In case you haven’t heard of it (is that possible?)–you, playing the part of the Prince of all the Cosmos, have a sticky ball, called a katamari, which means “clump,” on a series levels that are laid out as kind of surreal versions of normal Earth environments. Typical places might include a Japanese living room, a modestly-sized town, and a larger city. The idea is to roll the ball so that it comes into contact with various objects. If they’re at most a certain size relative to that of the ball, they stick to it, and in so doing make its aggregate size a little larger. The more things that stick to the ball, the bigger it gets, and so the larger the size of things that will stick. If you reach a certain target size within the time limit you complete the stage. If you fail then the Prince’s father, the King of All Cosmos, expresses his disappointment in you in a ludicrously extreme manner. While not all of the levels are about achieving raw size, the most entertaining ones do, and they’re all about fulfilling certain goals with the katamari. This should give you a sense of how the game plays, if needed:
Since Katamari Damacy, designer Keita Takahashi hasn’t been idle. They also made the downloadable game Noby Noby Boy for PS3, worked on the Flash MMORPG Glitch, and made the weirdly wonderful Wattam. I’ve mentioned previously in these pages that I’m looking forward to his next project, To A T, presuming it survives the travails of publisher Annapurna Interactive.
Back to the Paste Magazine article, it mentions that the game happened due to a fortuitous set of events that involved a bunch of student artists looking for a project, and a number of programmers who worked on it so as not to be seen as idle in a time of layoffs. I personally remember that a substantial part of its legend, perhaps even the tipping point, was due to a particular review on Insert Credit by Tim Rogers. While it’s possible to see his review as a tad self-indulgent, I really don’t have any standing to criticize, seeing as how I created pixel art aliens to be our site’s voice. Hah.
Japanese cover
It did the trick of making people consider the game though, which may have been how this very Japanese game got an English localization, rainbow-and-cow festooned cover intact. I was in college at the time, and for a few months they had PS2s to play in the student union. I found a certain delight in taking in my copy of Katamari Damacy (it had been released in the US by this point) and just playing through Make The Moon. It was the kind of game that would arrest other people in the room and cause them to just watch for a couple of minutes. Another time, I played it on the TV at my cousin’s house when there was a certain teenager, at the age where they sometimes get into a mood to dismiss everything. They scoffed at the game when I put it in; eight minutes later, they were calling out “get the giraffe!”
That Katamari Damacy could happened was a miracle; that it had, and continues to have, this effect on people, seems like magic. It isn’t perfect, because it doesn’t ever make sense to say a created work is “perfect,” there are always tradeoffs, but it is a care where it’s difficult to say it could be improved. Sure, it could be a little easier, but it still never takes more than a few attempts to pass a level. It could be a little harder, but that would make it much less accessible. Suffice to say that it’s at a local maxima of quality, and that can’t be an accident, it’s there because strong effort put it there.
It was inevitable that it would get sequels. Critical consensus is that the best of them was the first one, We Love Katamari, stylized on its logo with a heart in place of Love. It’s the only one with creator Keita Takahashi still at the helm. It’s a little less thematically together than the original; the premise is that the King of All Cosmos from the first game fulfills requests made by fans, much like how the game itself was made due to fan requests. Later sequels were made without Takahashi’s efforts. They feel increasingly fan-servicey, in the sense that they were trying harder and harder to give fans what they wanted, without being sure of what that was.
With each sequel, the luster dulled a bit. There was a furor over the third game in the main series, Beautiful Katamari on Xbox 360, for having paid DLC that was actually just unlock codes for levels that shipped on the disk. There were mobile sequels that were mostly terrible. The last of the series until recently was Katamari Forever, a name that proved inaccurate. More recently, remakes of the first two games have sold fairly well, so maybe it still has a chance to redeem itself with a proper successor.
Anyway, happy 20th birthday to Katamari Damacy. May it spend 25 more years of showing Playstation kids that gaming can be something more than Call of Duty and Fortnite.
This one isn’t really obscure I think, but it’s amazing, and if I can do my part to help spread the word I’m happy to do so. UFO 50 ($25 on Steam, with other platforms on the way) is a collection of 50 8-bit styled games from Mossmouth, the creator and publisher of Spelunky, although they’re made by all kinds of people.
When you hear “50 games,” you might come to think of it as, 50 little games, but that’s not the case. UFO 50 contains 50 full games, including one in the JRPG genre that could take many hours to finish. It seeks to emulate the experience of putting a pirate multicart into a game console, except none of these games are pirated. It’s a super-abundant collection of fun, and what’s more, the word is that there’s not a single dud in the group, there really is something here for everyone.
Like with Baldur’s Gate III, there’s so much here that it feels like they might be stretching out what’s expected from a relatively small amount of money. My suggestion is, get it, but don’t feel like everyone has to give you 50 full-sized games for $25 in the future. It’s a one-off, wonderful for what it is, but an anomaly.
With 50 games included, it can be difficult to tell where to start! If you let itt sit on the game selection screen, it’ll play demos of the games, which might give some direction to your exploration. By default, the games are listed according to release date in the collection’s fictional chronology, so generally they’ll get more complex later on in the list. Xanagear reviewed every game in UFO 50, in 50 minutes natch:
I haven’t had the chance to get into any of this yet, but a particular game I want to point to is Valbrace, which is a first-person dungeon exploration game, with Crossed Swords-like action combat!
The promised JRPG is Grimstone, which has a western theme, and one of your potential characters (you pick your party at the start) is a dog!
UFO 50 deserves a lot more words than I can give it right now. There may be more to come on it later….
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s another of those games that’s remade in Pico8, and in the process becomes subtly different, not necessarily better, but not worse either. It’s Make-Ten, and it’s free on itch.io.
This time it’s not an arcade game. The remake is of a mobile and web game called Fruit Box. I’ve only tried the web version and, in this case, I think the Pico8 version is better. The UI is a lot easier to use for its only action, drawing boxes around numbers. The original uses a generic rectangular box, while the Pico8 version snaps the lines to the number grid, which works much better for me. Also the numbers are colored according to value, which helps readability a lot.
I’m sorry, I should explain what I’m talking about!
It’s one of those simple yet addicting games. You’re given a random field of digits from 1 to 9. You’re given a couple of minutes to draw rectangles around sets of numbers that up to 10. When you do, you get one point per digit you remove (which is a difference from the original), and those digits disappear from the board.
Obviously, pairs of numbers that add up to 10 are relatively easy to find. Any pair of 5s, for instance, can be immediately cleared. Each game usually starts with clearing away any quick pairs. Removed pairs make space to connect further digits. Empty spaces have no number value, and make it easier to clear more than two numbers at once. Some examples of common larger sets to surround (of course they can be in any order): 4-3-3, 1-2-3-4, 7-1-2, 5-3-2, 6-2-2 and 4-4-2. The tricky part is connecting two numbers in the corners of a box, when other digits get in the way, adding unwanted values to the sum.
The most valuable digit is 1, since they fit into the most possible combinations.
While Make-Ten is not a game for perfectionists, as it’s probable that most fields cannot be fully cleared, the game does let you keep playing after time concludes, which is an advantage it has over Fruit Box. It doesn’t count points after the time bar runs out, but it can be interesting to see how much of the board you can complete.
Make-Ten is really simple and has very little fuss about it. It plays quickly, and then it’s over. It’s a nice game for quick sessions. It was written in 500 characters of code, and doesn’t offer any progression or metagame. After two minutes, which begin the moment the game starts, there isn’t even a prompt to play again. To have another go, press Enter and choose to Reset Cart, or just close the window if you’re done.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It isn’t always easy finding things for this weekly feature. Sometimes it’s backed up a month, sometimes though something gets scheduled just a couple of days after it premieres, and I have to scrape the barrel a bit. But not this time. Oh no.
Back in 2021, developer House House considered making an animated series about the Goose and its village. Nothing came of it, but they did make a four-minute proof-of-concept animation, and it’s wonderful. Please allow your day to be brightened, and moistened, once again, by the Goose:
