The Flipside of Gaming
For this supersized indie showcase, I took a look at all 50 games from UFO 50.
Editor’s note: This was filed last month, but I didn’t notice it! Please enjoy, presuming you haven’t heard too much UFO 50 yet.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
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….
UFO 50 (Steam, $25)
The thing about Spelunky 64, a reimplementation of Spelunky on the Commodore 64, that gets me is how smooth the scrolling is. Smooth multi-directional scrolling isn’t easy to do on the C64 without hardware assistance, but here it handles it without apparent problem. Here is a 7-minute demonstration from Just Jamie:
It’s not the only obstacle Paul Koller (PaulKo64) had in making this surprisingly faithful recreation. It contents itself with the basic Atari-style joystick, with a single overloaded button. So up is used for jumping, tapping the button attacks, holding the button uses an item, down+button takes out a bomb, and up+button places a rope. It’s not perfect, and you have to be really careful in shops, but it doesn’t work badly.
BastichB 64K has an interview with its developer on Youtube (7 1/2 minutes):
Here is a complete playthrough (28 minutes):
Spelunky 64 is on itch.io for $3. To play it, you’ll need a Commodore 64 emulator, or a physical C64 and a way to get the game image onto a disk.
