Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 10

    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 secrets mascot is supposed to be a pig or a dog. PigDog? Never mind.

I haven't really been watching other people play UFO 50 or consuming much content about it outside of the gaming podcasters I listen to. They've been relating some of their early experiences, so there are certain titles they rave about tumbling head-over-heels into which I've been avoiding. It's hard to articulate the kind of "fear of rabbit holes" I experience in moments like these. I can't easily bring myself to approach long narratively interconnected series I don't have a cognitive foothold in, like the Trails RPGs, Game of Thrones, or Like a Dragon. This should be very different though; I'm obviously all-in on Mossmouth's grand experimental collection, so what's the hesitation?

    I guess there's a certain comforting safety to incrementally mastering the games I've already put a little pixel heart next to the title of. To that end, I've started a more detailed map of the castle in Barbuta than is probably necessary for me to uncover its secrets. I promised this wouldn't become some sort of "BarbutaBlog" so I won't belabor it, but that's the sort of thing my time has been going into, as opposed to finally starting something like the wild-west-themed NaPa RPG Grimstone.

[You're going to have to explore these fears in more detail before this project is complete; the way that not understanding how something works changes your relationship to it is... atypical.]


    The excellent game design deep dive podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games thinks a lot like I do with regard to UFO 50, only they're friendly with the developers behind the magic and are highly likely to have the likes of Derek Yu and Eirik Suhrke on at some point as guests! They're undertaking an even longer and more challenging project than this one; A Year of UFO 50, devoting one week to each game in fictional chronological release order, and the first episode on Barbuta is out, but I really need to explore it a bit more deeply on my own before giving it a listen.

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