Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 1
Welp...
I knew it would be somewhat overwhelming to stare down this huge array of 50 titles, but the pixelated cobwebs covering each of the little diskette icons are reminding me why this is even happening; maybe I'm trying to clean some spider webs out of my cognitive attic by "posting through" some sort of game design midlife crisis...
As I type this, UFO 50 has been cycling through a "demo" attract mode, giving me glimpses of wildly disparate genres; throwbacks upon throwbacks that invite me to wax poetic about the utility of preventing cathode ray tube burn-in and showing off for prospective players at the same time.
Time to pick something to dive into. I'm seeing multiple shmups play themselves, and I was just writing about R-Type; I wonder how easy it's going to be to determine a game's genre(s) before trying them...
[Real talk; are you secretly terrified of old-school bullet hell shmups?
You'd think all that formative gazing at the likes of Gradius and Life Force would have calibrated you to devour them from an early age, but much like fighting games, you're on the outside looking in, telling yourself that it would be the height of skillful coolness to excel at them, while opting to hunker in your platformer and adventure safe houses.
There's a small part of your brain that will probably be forever stuck thinking about how the purple bendy beam in Raiden works, (without the ability to re-task them, those brain cells are essentially lost to you) and for a single, abortive grade of high school you saw how far a single credit could take you on a 19XX: The War Against Destiny cabinet before taking the bus home each day, but you never beat it.
The devil in your breast pocket tells me that if you only played more ZeroRanger, it would fix you.]
I select the central of three pilots/ships that's highlighted by default. That's right; this was just how games were. Press start - no tutorialization, just hit the ground running. Sink or swim. Learn by doing. One of the things that made me feel like I was made for this medium was my inherent ability to do what I'm doing right now:
- Keep moving, don't run into enemies or their bullets, obviously
- Quickly press every button; there seems to be only one "shoot" function
- multiple buttons shoot, same output though
- eliminate the possibility of separate "turbo" modifiers by tapping/holding
- HOLY SHIT - put a pin in this because that's brilliant!
- Lots of powerups dropping, in two apparent flavours
- collecting three of the same type in a row upgrades something
- collecting a mixture of types seems to add score multipliers
- Some messaging about scoring that's probably tied to lives...
I apparently take one too many hits at the beginning of level 2, and "Game Over."
In no time at all I've already encountered an innovative, surprising piece of game design; tapping the fire button rapidly spreads shots out widely and holding the button focuses them into a tighter, more damaging beam.
Games in this genre have been leaning on held inputs for some time, because the stress of frantically tapping for extended periods to increase your damage output in some older titles really started hurting people's hands. This is a fascinating twist on a VERY old problem, but the frenzied learning experience makes me want to take a step back to the game selection menu.
Now that I'm back into my hyper-focused attention-to-detail mode, things like the games being sorted by their fictional publication date and the ability to pull up more details are obvious. This sort of makes me want to start at the beginning, so it's time to investigate "Barbuta"...
"August, 1982 - The game that started it all! Developed secretly on company time, it almost got Thorson Petter fired."
[What you're actually worried about is that you've dedicated your life to a medium that will never live up to its near-infinite potential. The look and feel of these games cradles you in comfortable nostalgia, but jostles loose uncomfortable questions about what originally convinced you that this was the truest, most important form of art. Visually and aurally, games have evolved faster than any other medium, (we're highly audiovisual animals, it makes sense) but it often feels like with regard to every other sense or sensibility, games advance at a glacial pace.
Only now that Team Asobi has access to the DualSense controller are touch and texture moving beyond "force feedback." We're still struggling to square the concept of real maturity with simple violence. It may be many years before a game contains a sex scene that is actually hot in addition to being awkward.]
Years of experience tells me that grid in the lower-left is a map, I'm in the room that's a small dot, and the pink square is a goal. As 2D platformers evolved past single-screen affairs and scrolling, multi-screen games became the norm, most of them had the player progress from left-to-right, (probably because most cultures read and write in that direction, and various creative languages like film already adopted left-to-right as a shorthand for progression; the symbolism of journeying forth.)
If I'm right about the map, there's only one room to the left, and despite this game fictionally being designed almost four years before Metroid famously blew our minds by opening on this same bi-directional choice-cum-exploration-tutorial, we're all fans. Designers reference the games that made us without even trying; on some level, we're all attempting to engineer our way back to feelings that games gave us before we fully understood how to make them.
[Would a "real gamer" be spending 90% of their time writing instead of playing? Get on with it!]
I try going left; checking the "wrong" path first as a declaration of maturity...
I was mostly wrong about the minimap, and am currently re-evaluating it as some sort of compass. Going left was certainly a valid start, and if I could get all the way back up there after falling god-knows-how-many-screens to wherever the hell I am now, I'd wager the righthand path might've been blocked. Maybe. Clinging to metroidvania design principles feels silly in the face of these incredibly limiting, Spelunker-ass fixed jump arcs; this stubby, 8-Eyes-like sword attack.
Great pains have been taken to make Barbuta feel old, so the fact that playing it is making me feel young is surreal.
[It's possible that you only feel old in the sense that your temporal scorekeeping and sense of accomplishment are all out of whack. Pride isn't something you've ever genuinely felt, if other people's descriptions and examples are any indication. In an alternate universe where you'd contributed to this impressive stack of 50 games, it's easy to imagine celebrating the ones you had the least influence over and listing all the flaws and missed opportunities in the entries you designed.
You can say you feel "behind" in the game of life, but I doubt it'd be hard to find someone half your age with astounding accomplishments that feels the same way.]
Out of curiosity, I jumped and climbed my way back up to the castle's entrance to try that right-hand path, only to be struck by the weight of my Metroid-inspired decision-making...
No, there's literally a hidden switch there that causes three blocks to fall from the ceiling, instantly killing the player! I assume this is the intended way to find out that the six eggs on the right represent the number of hits one can take before running out of chances to respawn, (re-hatch?) near where you died. The sheer kaizo-fuckery of it was so out-of-place and combined so violently with my unwitting avoidance of the trap that I had to put the controller down and just laugh for a good long while.
Looking forward to playing more.
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