xeneth.design

The spiraling wreckage of a drone clipped the helicopter's rear rotor, causing it to list directly into the stream of hot plasma. It dipped out of sight for a moment before slamming into the cliff below. Sunshine was beating down into the open convertible, so hot and bright that the explosions barely registered. Ocean air mixed with a distinct ozone tang that the gun emitted whenever it started to lose its charge. Three more drones popped as they made contact with the energy projectiles; even half-strength shots tore through matter and air alike. The arc of the road ahead graciously offered yet another opportunity to feed the beast of a weapon. It was hard to break the habit of using the hand-brake to drift into the turn, but the gun itself was wired into that part of the console in lieu of a handle. Friction and kinetic energy were converted directly into death-dealing plasma. As if giving the driver an excuse to unleash it, even larger swarms of aircraft converged above the speed...

  [Well, it's happened again. You've gotten lost so deeply in a single game that you ran out of time to properly research and write about any of the others...     Fortunately , you left behind some notes about your time with Mooncat  before creating that extremely detailed map of the castle in Barbuta . Unfortunately, they haven't really been edited or fleshed out into anything resembling a formal blog post.] Good Lord Mooncat (March, 1985, 1-2P, Platform) "Jump and dash through forests, caves, and mountains, in search of the egg." "Conceived as a spiritual sequel to Barbuta, Thorson Petter spent nearly two years perfecting it." That's the most tantalizing and eye-opening history blurb yet! In the LX Terminal, Mooncat has the system name " BAR2.UFO " just in case you needed even more evidence that it's the sequel to Barbuta than the History tab note. Interestingly, the system name for Barbuta is " TRAP.UFO " as opposed to...

     I had a Bushido Ball  dream last night about how I'd never actually witnessed what happens when a fighter racks up enough red cards in a match. Whatever the referee said in the dream when it happened was formatted like an LX Terminal code, something like " FOUL-BALL " or " FOUL-PLAY "... INVALID CODE! [You're going to start soliciting secret-finding advice from dreams now? This is going nowhere, but by all means... randomly trying binary sets of four letter words that make sense is ultimately going to be way less satisfying than discovering them organically.] I turns out three infractions merely gives your opponent a free point. Kind of surprising I'd never happened to string together more than three in a match. My half-asleep brain also pointed out that there's a lot of bird-themed stuff in UFO 50  like Avianos , so I should also try " FOWL-PLAY "... Alright, enough speculation... wait. Now I'm not sure whether the little pink sec...

At just under one fifth of the total blogging project length, I've finally managed to lay hands on half of the games in UFO 50. At this rate, I'll have played some of every game before the halfway mark! This seems like a decent point to do a little check-in; a little round-up of how I'm feeling about the games thus far.      Before I try something goofy like stack ranking my first 25 games, it's worth pointing out that the screenshot above is probably just as informative as anything I'm about to write below: The list of icons is filtered and sorted by the games I've spent the most time in. (though it should be noted that I'm often hanging out inside a game while writing, editing, eating, etc.) The gold cartridges represent games that have been beaten. (finished by some internal metric like "got past the final level") The cherry cartridges represent games that have been completed. (finished the hard way, by some challenging criteria like "witho...

It's probably a good thing that Bushido Ball  doesn't have online multiplayer with rollback netcode yet. I never had to get through a salty, overly competitive Windjammers  phase of life, but I could absolutely see something like that happening and halting even more progress on this project than it already has. Even though the two face button design restriction massively limits complexity, this athletics fighting game sports a really enviable level of depth that's been a lot of fun to dig into. I'm currently trying to break myself of the habit of slashing after almost every lunge, given it cuts your traversal range really short; in many cases using your body to stop the ball is the only way to deny a really good shot. [A reminder; you're not primarily here to talk about your dreams of one day being good at the games you admire.] "It's the annual bushido ball tournament, Choose from 6 fighters and compete to win!" Without really meaning to, I've app...

The only reason this project is still going; the only reason I'm still blogging about UFO 50  days later is just how impressive and unique it is as an aggregate body of work. Larger collections of smaller games like Wario Ware or Mario Party  only get to feel as strong as their weakest minigame links, given the meta-structure will routinely force you play them. Here, you're free to play the hell out of the games that speak to you and ignore the rest. The comparative freedom of this structure risks allowing the player to be daunted or overwhelmed by freedom of choice and difficulty, but gains so many introspective elements in the process that I'm still struggling to make myself stop trying to master Barbuta  or  Bushido Ball  and open up other games. [One of the reasons you're doing this is to create a sense of obligation that pushes you to actually FOCUS on something for once.] Finding a "North Star" to guide me into a session of exploration instead of yet an...

Whew... I did it! Escaping from Night Manor  was a really good, creepy little time! Granted, I didn't get the BEST ending, but for the purposes of the fifty day project, let's just call it progress enough to keep things rolling. Interestingly, I was right about the individual game credits being used as a metanarrative tool. The actual developer credits for the whole collection play up front over the posterized pixel photos of Derek Yu and friends finding the LX console in a storage unit when you open the game. I have no doubt that meticulously keeping track of the fictional names and roles in these internal game credits would reveal a whole timeline of the UFO Soft company, complete with new hires, promotions, and potentially even departures. [In your current state, were you fabricating a similar history, you wouldn't pretend that ANYONE moved on to bigger and better things prior to the dissolution of the team, would you? Even now, you hope that the end of UFO Soft as a fic...

[You're not even ten percent of the way through this blogging project, and there you are, narratively trapped inside of a point-and-click haunted house, being chased around by some sort of fungus man with a meat cleaver...] Night Manor (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Trapped in a nightmare where you must use your wits to survive and escape!" [Thankfully, prior to that fictional car accident and waking up in a terrifying, pixelated escape room, you fell into a bit of a WarpTank  hole, so we've got access to the following un-edited notes to tide us over.] OMG WarpTank (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Use your tank to regain control of the station and sever all ties to capsule world!" -much ado about how this is the first game to get a little "favorite" heart applied to it (I hope there isn't a Steam achievement for hitting "like" on 10 games or something like that) " Master Blaster  driving meets Solar Jetman  platforming inside the guts of ...

Last night at the weekly ETNO hangout, [That's his "local" extended family of gamers and mentors...] UFO 50  was sampled on the discord stream, with my first taste of a few games: Attactics  (June, 1984) "The release was delayed because our team spent too long challenging each other to battle!" I'm overwhelmed by tactical density before I manage to figure out the movement restrictions, or that I should be swapping units with each other Magic Garden  (February, 1984) "An early game to take advantage of the LX-II, which allowed for more colors per sprite." This Pac-Man / Snake  hybrid seems like an hors d'oeuvre, but hides surprising depth behind the volition to spawn enemies and trade score for safety Fist Hell  (August, 1987) "Our first game to depict blood." River City Ransom  with modern mobility and movesets; I predict this is one of the games I'll never manage to beat Bushido Ball  (April, 1985) "To promote the game's...

This little piggy lives in a secret garden tucked into the filter menus. The porcine mascot seems very sleepy most of the time, but that's probably my fault; their pixellated dollhouse is bereft of furnishings that resemble a bed, and I have yet to figure out which game I need to excel at in order to gift them a place to sleep. Having finally explored enough rooms in a certain trap-filled castle to meet the game-specific goal, I've unlocked an attic trap door, though! Achievement systems haven't really held sway over my play patterns since the hoary old XBox Live Gamerscore days, but I suppose we'll see whether a dash of Tamagotchi -like cuteness is enough to get me sampling a few more of these titles... [Look at you, gamer. You're physically restraining yourself from writing more about Barbuta , of all things. Get it out of your system then, so we can explore other confections.] Keeping up a blow-by-blow account of how things are going in this incredibly stripped-d...

  [Typing the number two felt a little different there, didn't it? Just wait; that number is a pretty far cry from fifty, isn't it?] The first outing with Mossmouth's UFO 50 was a rather slim day of contrasts; breakneck shooting and dodging giving way to stodgy movement and fragile precision. Two drops in a pretty big bucket, and I revisit each of them briefly just to make sure those impressions were accurate. One of these days I'm going to have to try the red or gray Star Waspir  ships/pilots, [and also get much better at shmups in general, jeez.] I'm also going to have to pry myself away from Barbuta  and its mysteries to make broader progress today, but here's a bulleted recap: Six eggs, only six mistakes permitted makes me think this is a knowledge challenge as much as it is one of execution Certain enemies relenting when they take one of your lives is an interesting design detail I don't think I've seen before. While thematically odd, I like the tr...